One way to build your traffic for your website is to try to get ranked for keywords that have decent volume, but low competition. It is hard to out SEO the big boys and girls, but if you can find enough “long tail keywords” you can increase your traffic and make more money.

I use three keyword tools on a regular basis. Each tool has its strength.

The keyword tools that I use are:

I use the keyword tool that is part of Google’s pay per click program Adsense frequently. It is an important part of my SEO arsenal.

There are two reasons why I like the tool. The first is that it uses Google’s database. This is important, but it isn’t the main reason I use the tool today. (There is now an option with WordTracker to use Google’s data.) The main reason that I use the tool is the fact that it can generate a list that includes synonyms and semantically related words.

You can type “car insurance” into the tool and get back keywords that include “auto insurance” and “truck insurance.” This makes it a lot easier to find the right keyword when you want to add a new page to your website.

What I don’t like about the tool is that although it tells you how many searches there are for a given keyword and competitive a keyword is for pay-per-click it doesn’t give any data to help you determine how competitive the keyword is for organic search.

This is where WordTracker comes in. It does a good job of telling you how competitive a keyword is. You can take the list you generated from the Google keyword tool and get the missing organic data. Just be sure to select the option that uses Google’s database.

You can also type in a keyword and have it generate a list for you that includes the number of monthly searches for each keyword. However, unlike the Google tool it won’t show you any keywords that include any synonyms or semantically related words (unless those keywords also include the seed phrase you typed in). If you type in “auto insurance” you will only get keywords that include “auto insurance.”

Another really cool thing about WordTracker is the information available in their videos and in the “WordTracker Academy.” You can find a ton of tips on Wordtracker’s website that will help you SEO your website whether or not you use their tool.

Spyfu allows you to “spy” on your competition. It can tell you what keywords they rank for organically and what keywords they bid for on PPC. This data can be very valuable. Your competition may be bidding on keywords that you should be as well.

Spyfu is especially useful if you want to do SEO for a niche that you are unfamiliar with. Trying to use a thesaurus can help, but knowing what keywords your competitors are bidding on can help you start at step 5 instead of step 1.

I use these keyword tools to find keywords to target when I create new content for my websites. I create a new blog post, video or page almost every day and will almost invariably use WordTracker or one of the other tools before I write the first word of my content.

I work on several websites and therefore can justify paying for all three tools. If you are starting out in SEO or SEO is a sideline you may want to use the following strategy.

  1. Open a Google Adwords advertiser account with the minimum deposit to get access to their keyword tool
  2. Try Wordtracker’s risk free trial. If you like it, go for the annual subscription.
  3. Try SpyFu‘s free version. You can get a lot from the free version.

If you are serious about increasing your organic traffic, you will need better data than you can get from free keyword tools. The tools I mentioned above aren’t the only good tools, but they are the ones that I use on a regular basis.