Some people believe you need to use expensive tools to do good keyword research. Here's a way you can do it for free and has worked for me. 1)Download SEOQuake Plugin for Google Chrome – this tool will allow you to see page Pagerank and no. of backlinks for search terms. 2)Get a free Majestic account. Majestic is great for analysing backlinks and you can do quite a lot with the free account. 3)Choose a three term seed keyword for your related niche – e.g. best dog food. Type into Google search window and see what longtail keywords pop up from the Google auto suggest tool and type them into a notepad doc. I just looked these up as I was writing and came up with this list e.g. best dog food for puppies, best dog food brand, best dog food forLabradors. You can go even longer tail with this if you want and focus in on one, e.g. best dog food brand for puppies, best dog food brand 2013 4)Copy and paste your keywords into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool(assuming you already have an account) 5)If you spot a keyword with adequate search volume etc, you need to check the real competition for this keyword. So go back to Google search box and type one of your chosen keyword. SEOQuake will add PR and backlink information. If there are a few PR0s and PR1s listed, then you have a keyword with very low competition. If it is dominated by PR3/PR4 and upwards it will be much tougher to rank. The number of sites listed when you do a search is irrelevant. You are only really competing with the pages in the top 10 on page 1. You can also check banklinks for any of the pages listed in Majestic if you want more data on your potential competition. Rinse and repeat until you have a group of keywords you are happy with. 6)Once you have your keywords write a post with the keyword in the title, in <h1> or <h2> headings and used a few times throughout the post without overoptimising. 7)Assuming you already have a balanced link profile, build a few good links to your page, see how it ranks over a couple of weeks, and decide if it needs more links. How many links you need is determined by your competition and how well you did your keyword research.
This looks good. So, you can get competition measured for free as well as the search volume calculated? I know most free tools just tell you how many people use that word and not how many sites are competing for it.
Alyssa, this is why you use the SEO Quake plugin - To research the first page rankings. If there are strong pages (not websites! We can beat alot of big websites that are not optimized for that keyword but have "mistake" rankings!) you will prefer to go away. I recommend you to user opensiteexplorer to research the Page Authority also.
Thats great, but PR is just a no. nowdays. Don't conclude just with PR. Analyse the website, check its backlink profile, domain authority, page authority, domain age and many other factors ( assuming you are sEO and know what all to check).