Just wondering about your opinions... Which would you use? Market Samurai, Long Tail Pro, or nothing. Nothing being that you just use Google Keywords Tool and analyze the competition of each keyword one by one? or are there other tools that are better that you use?
My answer is: "closest to your last option" - GKWT + manual work. (Well, actually, I have a bespoke tool to help me).
The thing is, in my view most of the KW tools out there sell themselves like the average dodgy "guru" - it's all about: "Use our tool and in 3 clicks you've got the KW to rock your world". Whereas, in fact, nothing is further from the truth. It's not that simple.
So what I like to do is find my KW using the KWT among other tools - including common sense, Google Trends, Google Sets (now bundled with the Google docs spreadsheet - it's hidden, but it's there) and find your long list of KW. (Remember GKWT hides tons of them - including most of the questions pple ask, and most of the long tail queries).
The only use for Market Samurai is to get search volumes for multiple KW - more than Google lets you do. And you can do that with the free version.
So, you get your list of potential KW. Then what do you do?
Well, a good way to do it is to find which ones you are likely to be able to rank for. So finding those which haven't been hammered by other marketers are favourite, yes?
So, if they've been hammered, then sites will have the exact KW the title and have backlinks containing that url pointing to the page, won't they?
So, if you do two G searches - allintitle and allinanchor and compare the two - then any where the top 10 don't overlap too much is a likely target, isn't it?
If you find a term where only 2-3 in the top ten overlap you are in luck.
And not a paid tool in sight!
Don't get me wrong - I am fine about paying for tools - when they are any good. But most KW tools oversell themselves and are not much use in general.
I've got a vid on my site about this but as this is a new account at BHW I don't want to link to it.
Malc