What is Keyword research? Well plainly put it is searching for popular keywords for whatever it is you want to appear in the Search Engine Results Page. Let me explain…. Finding keywords is a 2 step process 1) First we will use a Keyword Tool to discover how many Searches there are for a particular Keyword 2) Secondly we will find out how much Competition there is for this Keyword Very Important Rule!!! We want Keywords with High amount of Searches but Low amount of Competition Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Type into area where it says “Enter one keyword or phrase per line†the word or phrase you want to use. It will throw out quite a lot of words. Have a look in the Local Search Volume Column. The search has to have more than 2000 people searching for that particular word every month to make it worth it. Now go to Google and type the phrase that you have been searching for into the search engine. Remember to put the phrase in quotation marks. That will make the search more accurate. When the result comes through you have to make sure that the search result is less than 60 000, otherwise you might struggle to get onto the first few pages. It is okay if it goes to 80 000, but try to keep the search results low. The lower the better your change to appear on the first page. If the search result threw out a huge number like 1 million, then you have to go back to the keyword tool and keep on searching for the perfect keyword. Something to keep in mind… Long and Short tail keywords Example: When you search for let say “Accommodation in London†– this is known as Short Tail keywords – the problem is that we will get lots of competition. But… If we search for “Cheap accommodation for students in London†– this is known as Long Tail Keyword – the competition will be lower because we are now using more actual words. I know a lot of you will know this already but there is also a lot of you that don't know what keyword research is or how to do it. Hope this helps a lot of you!!!
I totally agree with you about finding how many searches have a keyword, but to analyze the competition there's place to improve. Not only the volume of concurrence is important, but every single sites that appears on the first page must be individually analyzed. You should check the number & relevancy of backlinks, the age of domain name, the site's content, the number of pages indexed and much more things. Analyze first the site placed on 10 place on the page to see if you can be stronger than it, and the first in SERP to see if you have any chance to get the first place.
One tips from me, to find the best monetized keywords, do a google search from it and look at how many ads are appearing from the search result page. If there is no ads appeared on the page, than that keyword has no adsense value.
Thumbs up to OP. Great Concise explanation of the research which so many people don't do. Couple of suggestions. 1. Make sure your keyword is relevant to your site. 2. If you want to make money try and get ones with CPC value. 3. As muskoida mentions Take a look at the top ten for your keyword. If it is full of sites all the same as yours find another keyword.