Selecting the right keyword

Ok, I'm a bit confused as to which keywords I should be targeting. I've used the Google keyword research tool and found a keyword that gets searched 15-16,000 times a month. Would this be a good keyword to target? Or should I select a keyword with a lower search volume since it should be automatically assumed there wouldn't be as much competition.

I've used both the Google keyword tool and the Wordtracker keyword tool and noticed there was a significant difference in what they both were reporting. Google showed my selected keyword was searched 15,000 times a month while the word tracker tool only showed 2,000 times a month. Which one should I trust?

I searched my keyword in Google and found it returned about 65 million results as well. Is this good? How much competition would be considered too much? Over 100 million?

Thanks

 

The same question ?

 

here is how your do your keyword researches:


1) let say you own a restaurant in new york and you want to find some keywords to target, then you use this

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html


copy all your keywords in a text file and get ready for the next step, but just to make things easy to understand let's say those tool returned 3 main results:

new york restaurants
restaurants in new york
best new york restaurants

the next step is to estimate the traffic that those 3 keywords can send you, to do that, you take for example your first keyword : new york restaurants, and go here:

https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

type your keyword inside the box between [ ], don't use quotes, if you use quotes google will return some broad results, it will count every possible keyword combination that contains "new york restaurants", this is not what you want, so use [new york restaurants]

now you will see how many adwords clicks you can get for this keyword, take that number and multiply it by 20 to have a real idea about the amount of traffic that you will get from natural search (because google estimates that 5% of it's users will click on the adword ads).

now do this again for all your main targeted keywords and you will get an idea about the global traffic that you should get, of course to get that traffic you need to achieve top rankings first.

another useful tool to check the shape of your niche and keywords (if it's a dying, growing or stable or seasonal niche) use your keywords inside quotes in the google trends tool like this :

http://www.google.com/trends?q="new+york+restaurants"

good luck

 

Wow! This is very helpful. Thank you so much . I just had a quick question about the Google tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ...

I just looked up another keyword for a different niche and it showed it had 74,000 searches last month. I then proceeded to go and see how many click I would get using the other google tool for the traffic estimator which estimated 2 clicks per day on the front page. I then multiplied that by 20. So if my site made it to #1 on the SERPS for that keyword that Google said got searched 74,000 times last month, only 1200 people might click through?


For some reason, those stats sound a little off for 74,000 searches. What are your thoughts on that? I really appreciate the help. Thanks.

 

that 74 000 must have been "broad" results, like when you use quotes, it will count every possible long tail keyword combination which has your main combination in it. let's say you saw 74 000 for "new york restaurants", that 74 000 is the traffic that you will get if you rank for every possible "new york restaurants" keyword, for example: best new york restaurants, cheap new york restaurants, Chinese new york restaurants, french new york restaurants, Italian new york restaurants, new york restaurants menus, new york restaurants near airport, and even keywords which has never been searched before (very long tail keywords which accounts for 50% of the traffic according to Google)

do you get it ? there is no point in expecting 74 000 visitors because u are obviously not going to rank for every possible keyword combination.

 

I cannot believe I overlooked this. Thank you all so very much!

 

funkymario, thank you, the information you produced, is very helpful

 

To be successful in getting the right keyword you should know the niche and the type business of your client. Think as if you're the owner and the visitors of the site. In this was you can come up with bright ideas in picking the right keywords for your site.