Steps to Advanced

Some keyword research is surface-level, fire and forget type stuff. If you just need to see relative volume levels, then a basic keyword research tool is all you need. If, however, you want to really dive deep and get the full skinny on your keywords, I'd recommend having each of these data points.
There are three sources on the web that I've found to work best for comparative numbers research. These are:
Google Adwords: Keyword Tool - enter any term or phrase and get back data about both the average search volume and the volume from the previous month.MSN AdCenter: Research Keywords Tool - you need to be logged in to use this, but the data is solid and shows actual counts.Wordtracker: Keyword Tool - although the numbers Wordtracker shows are frequently less accurate than the two above, they are reasonably decent for estimating comparative search volume. Unfortunately, due to the declining share of Wordtracker's data sources (the Infospace owned search engines - Metacrawler, Dogpile, DoGreatGood, etc.), niche and long tail term volume estimates can be way off.

Here's why I don't use Yahoo!:

From there, rather than build a spreadsheet just showing raw numbers, I like to work in comparative sizes (the real numbers rarely prove accurate anyway). Thus, rather than having a graph of data like this:
I can have one like this:
Note how, in this view, I'm showing the relative volume percentage of the demand for keyword "SEO" made up by "seo services" and "seo tools." This graph tells me that while Google thinks "seo tools" and "seo services" are tiny fractions of the volume that comes in for the broad term, "SEO," Microsoft & Wordtracker both say these phrases make up a more substantive percentage. Since keyword targeting is really about choosing one keyword over another and much less about trying to estimate exact traffic, the latter system makes much more sense to me.
When are your queries in highest demand? Knowing the answer can help you predict when competition may ramp up and additional SEO efforts are needed as well as provide insight into your market overall (if demand has been dropping steadily over the last few years, you might want to target some different terms, or even shift product focus). Two sources of data are solid on this front:
Google Trends for Keywords

MSN AdCenter Labs: Keyword Forecast Tool

In order to get a full understanding of the competitive landscape, it's essential to know who's ranking for the terms you're targeting. A basic query is a great start, but I like to append those with a bit of extra data, as I've visualized below:

Those three are my favorite pieces of link data to append, not because they alone are predictive of rankings, but because the range so perfectly illustrates what's necessary, on both the URL and domain level to be competitive. Nick's been pushing hard to get this functionality automatically included with the SEOmoz Toolbar, so hopefully we can make that happen in the next few months.
The fresh web (aka social media sphere) can help to show how often keywords are appearing in content and conversation in blogs, forums, feeds and more. It's particularly valuable for identifying emerging trends which may not yet have search volume (but will if the conversational content acceleration continues). There's a few tools I like on this front:
Facebook Lexicon

There appears to be some correlation between "party tonight" on Friday and "hangover" on Saturday
Twist: See Trends in Twitter

Blogscape

Google News Trends

I'd love to see some of those 19th century SEO tools!
The real value (and reason for spending time in these sectors) is to:
A) Identify patterns or trends indicating a keyword/product/concept is on the rise/fallB) Find content that in the past has attracted large amounts of attention around these keywords (an excellent starting point for viral content development)C) Locate portals on the web or in social communities where your topic may be hot, and opportunities for promotion or links exist
They're not universally valuable for every part of keyword research, and you shouldn't trust the volumes to predict keyword demand (some things get written about more than they get searched), but a good SEO leaves no opportunity un-investigated.
It's wise to be aware of where and how your keywords can cross over into vertical search results. The best way to do this currently is, unfortunately, manually. You'll want to:
Search for your target terms at the major search enginesIdentify any vertical results that appears in the top 10-20 listingsEmploy strategies to reach into the applicable verticals
The most common and highest value are typically:
LocalProductNewsImagesBlogVideo
What are the goals of the individuals searching for your targeted keywords? What phase of the decision process are they in? Answering these questions can give you an excellent idea of the potential ROI from drawing in traffic on a given term/phrase. Many times the highest volume keywords are not bringing in the best traffic.
Some good resources on this front include:

Your goal should be to narrow down the potential tasks a visitor who has just performed the query wants to accomplish. This can dramatically boost your site's performance when coupled with delivery of those paths upon arrival.
The best way to determine the relevance between a keyword and the content/service/product you offer is to test. Run a PPC campaign or dig into your analytics and choose only those visitors that have come via the search query. Pull out data like browse rate, time spent on site, conversions, etc.

The majority of visits who come into SEOmoz for the keyword "SEO Blog" stick around to read at least a couple of pages
Relevance is highly actionable data because it does such a good job predicting which keywords are going to bring valuable traffic. While branded terms often perform highly (and are typically easy to rank well on), longer tail and more specific queries also have this tendency to be more relevant (and, again, are easier to achieve).
Even if you're not planning on bidding for keywords through paid search campaigns, it's wise to know what the competition is doing and how much value they're getting from it (and what they're willing to pay). A few good resources for this information include:
MSN AdCenter's Keyword Estimate

I really like what AdCenter does with this spiffy graph - showing the cost and estimated clicks in an easy-to-read graphic. Just remember that MSN is the engine with the fewest advertisers, which often means pricing is less aggressive than on Google or Yahoo!
Google AdWords Traffic Estimator
I'm a bit less fond of Google's standard take on the data, but their pricing is the gold standard, as AdWords has the highest number of advertisers and the most traffic by far.

SEMRush
A solid tool with a lot of uses, particularly for competitive keyword analysis, SEMRush shows some decent numbers around the average CPC and competition levels for most keywords at the head of the demand curve.

Take the cost-per-click data and competition levels into account when you're considering things like relevance, potential conversion rates and visitor value. Most companies aren't dumb - if they're bidding high dollar values for potential visits, they're converting those visits into dollars and that means you can both learn from them and find strategies to outperform.
Related queries is an easy metric to understand - you want to know what other terms searchers who used these keywords also employed. It's a no-brainer to then add these to your list of potential keyword targets. Many good sources for this data exist:
Google shows related searches in both their AdWords Tool and through web search (you'll want to click the "show options" link at the top followed by the "related searches" link in the sidebar)Bing, Microsoft's new engine, shows related searches by default in their web search interfaceYahoo! Search has their "also try" list and clicking "more" will give you an interface just below the search box that finds lots of great, relevant keywordsThe aforementioned SEMRush shows great data on this (though you'll need to sift through as there can be a lot of junk) if you're a paying memberCompete.com's Search Analytics has good information by query and website, though you'll need to subscribe to their service to get the full value
Get the related queries, dig into the data about them and target those that have enough volume and relevance to help you get increase valuable traffic from SEO.
Last, and probably least in most cases, it's wise to do some research into the legalities surrounding the keywords you'd like to target. Using trademarked terms and phrases on your site can cause attorney trouble, and no one likes that. The place to start, at least in the United States, is here - USPTO Trademark Electronic Search System.
Whew... That's a lot of work for keyword research - now you can see why some firms charge hundreds of dollars per hour for this type of deep dive. Put these recommendations to good use, though, and you'll have an impressive set of terms to target - and that can be a serious competitive advantage.
I've undoubtedly left out a few metrics and, as always, appreciate any ideas or suggestions you've got on this topic.
VisitsPageviewsAvg. Time on PageDirect TrafficSearch TrafficReferral TrafficYikes, looks like something went wrong. Please try again later.
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Keyword Research Mistakes You Might be Making

Keyword research is an all too often under-appreciated aspect of SEO.
I've written a few keyword research posts here on SEOmoz and that's because I believe it to be the blueprint of any successful SEO campaign.
Here are some of the more common mistakes that I see people make with their keyword research.
#1 – You're being Unrealistic
"It is better to have a bigger slice of a few smaller pies rather than not getting even a slither of a much bigger pie."
Keyword research appears to be a very straightforward task. You fire up your keyword research tool of choice and find the keywords that relate to your industry with the highest search volumes. Sadly, that's not the way to do it if you want to see real results.
To many businesses, high-competition keywords are simply out of reach – at least in the short and medium term. Part of good keyword research is about being realistic and selecting appropriate keywords for targeting that take into account the site's age, current authority and any future optimisation that will take place.
Targeting one word keywords is quite often unrealistic but it may also prove unprofitable – someone searching for 'Toshiba l670 laptop' is likely to be much further along in the purchasing process that someone who searches for 'laptops' – think about which searcher is likely to have their credit card out already.
There's nothing wrong with targeting generic keywords, I'm simply saying that if your campaign has limited budget and you need results in the short to medium term then targeting less trafficked, less competitive keywords is a much better way to utilise resources.
Lower traffic but lower competition keywords might not seem as exciting to target but if your website can dominate these areas fairly quickly then you are going to see far more traffic from the search engines than failing to effectively target a much more competitive term.
#2 – You're looking at broad match instead of exact match
A seemingly simple mistake but one which many people continue to make...
Search volume is of course a very important metric when it comes to keyword research but all too often people make the mistake of looking at broad search volumes rather than the exact match figure when using tools like Google's Keyword Tool.
There can be a huge difference between broad match and exact match search traffic for example:
There are 135,000 broad match searches each month in the UK for 'dog kennels' but only 14,800 exact match searches for the same keyword. Still, this wouldn't prove particularly problematic as this is obviously still a keyword worth targeting – it would knock traffic and ROI projections way off kilter if you do these kinds of things though.
The real problem comes when you choose to target a keyword like 'ladies leather handbags' which has a broad match search volume of 2,400 but an exact match search volume of only 260 – failing to base your research on exact match data might mean you think you are targeting a reasonably well-trafficked keyword when in actual fact, once you've factored in data inaccuracies, you could be looking at a very low search volume keyword indeed.
It is widely accepted that Google's Keyword Tool isn't entirely accurate when it comes to search volumes but using exact match gives you the best data available when assessing how viable a keyword is to target.
#3 – You're targeting plural instead of singular
It is very common to see a website targeting the plural version of a keyword but in most cases, it is the singular version of a keyword that people are searching for.
I see this most often on eCommerce websites where the site owner optimises category pages and because they sell more than one product, they naturally focus on the pluralised keywords for example "tablet PCs" which actually gets 91% less searches than "tablet PC".
I will readily admit that Google is much better at determining that a singular and plural version of a keyword are one and the same, but in many cases there are still differences in the search results. Failing to target the singular keyword can be the difference between your search listing being highlighted in the SERPs (=higher clickthrough) and it can also mean your website appears lower (even slightly) than marginally better targeted pages – that could be the difference between making a sale and not.
#4 – You're ignoring conversion
This one could easily turn into a rant for me because so often I come up against clients who want to rank for [insert trophy keyword] when in actual fact they'd do better (financially) targeting a different keyword or set of keywords. I try to explain that a keyword that brings in traffic is wasted bandwidth if that traffic doesn't convert. You don't hire my company to get traffic for traffic's sake...you presumably hire us to help you ultimately make more sales.
The online world is competitive and it's only going to get more competitive, therefore making the most of every penny being invested is vital.
This makes conversion and language analysis a vital part of keyword research. The human mind is the only software capable of performing a good quality 'conversion audit' of a keyword list because whilst there are programmes out there that can filter and sort keywords to make your life easier, there's no real substitute for industry experience and SEO knowledge.
There are some very basic indicators for example prefixes such as 'buy' might be a clear indicator that the traffic from this keyword is going to convert.
A keyword conversion audit is more complex than that however since each situation and market is individual. I find existing data to be a very useful way to determine which keywords are likely to convert well. If you have goal tracking setup with Google Analytics, you can easily determine the highest converting keywords your site currently gets traffic from, try to identify patterns in your highest converting keywords and then translate and apply this knowledge to other areas of keyword research.
#5 – You're selecting keywords that are out of context
This is yet more rationale to further humanise the keyword research process because most keyword tools struggle to compute words and their meaning in the way a human would.
For example, a searcher looking for 'storage' could be looking for a self-storage centre, boxes and other storage furniture for the home or even professional storage solutions for a warehouse or office.
Opportunities for confused targeting are abundant which is why it is essential the keywords you decide to target are highly-relevant and laser-focused towards what your business offers.
A good way to do this is to search manually for the keywords in Google and see the kinds of results that come up, you will likely be able to get a feel for whether the keyword is applicable to the product or service you intended to target.
#6 – You're failing to conduct keyword reviews
It is accepted that SEO is an on-going process but rarely are target keywords reviewed and audited. If a marketplace is shifting over time then you would also expect customer search behaviour to develop and evolve over time too – this makes regular keyword reviews essential.
In most markets, I find an annual review is perfectly adequate. Any time period shorter than this and there is a risk that targeting becomes a bit chaotic with efforts focused on new keywords before results on old keywords have been achieved or evaluated.
That being said, in some competitive and very fast moving markets a more regular keyword review may be required.
The aim of a keyword review is to:
Weed out poor performing keywordsIdentify opportunities and areas for growthShape your SEO strategy for the future
To do a strategic and actionable keyword review you can use this adapted version of the Boston Matrix that I like to use.
Large brands use the Boston Matrix to assess the health of their product portfolio and to identify where to concentrate their resources.
You can do the same thing for your keyword portfolio.
Sort your keywords into four categories in order to better shape your search strategy for the future.
Question marks – these are keywords in areas where growth is likely but at present you're not getting the performance you'd expect. These are very often untapped keyword opportunities and you should plan how you are going to improve performance on these kinds of keywords.Stars – high-performance keywords and loads of room for growth – find ways to capitalise on growth. My advice is to focus your resources of gaining results in these areas for maximum ROI in a short period of time.Dogs – the poor performing keywords with little or no chance of growth – bin these in favour of other keywords, reallocate any resources to other areas.Cash cows – the high performing keywords that show little opportunity for growth – look for ways to enhance and maintain performance whilst identifying patterns and translating this learning to other areas or verticals.
What mistakes do you see happening in the keyword research process? Please share them in the comments section below...
By James Agate, founder of Skyrocket SEO and a regular SEO contributor to leading blogs and publications across the web.

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