August 29th, 2010 | 
Author: Should I Pay For A Keyword Research Tool?
On blogs and on webmaster forums all around the planet internet business owners ask about the differences between free keyword research tools and software or webbased tools that they have to pay to use. This question is more than fair too as many keyword tools can be quite costly especially for a “newbie”. Keyword research tools can run 50 to 1000 or more for onetime purchase software and 50 to hundreds of dollars per month for subscriptionbased tools. So are the differences between the paid and free keyword tools worth the price tag?
First of all you need to understand the differences between free keyword research tools and tools that you pay for at least on a general level. At face value it seems that many free keyword tools more or less provide the same types of information that paid tools provide number of competitors estimated daily or monthly searches related keywords and sometimes even the KEI of a particular keyphrase. However even with all of their similarities many forpayment keyword tools exceed the reach of their free counterparts in less obvious ways.
For instance many paid keyword tools include the convenience of offering a number features on one screen or at most oneclick away from the screen you’re viewing. In other words paid keyword tools more often than not are designed to allow you to perform all of your keyword research from the same interface.
In contrast to that if you utilize free keyword tools to perform your research there’s a good chance that you’re going to use several different tools tools on different websites and sometimes even a combination of desktop software and webbased software. Not only can this be inconvenient but it can be time consuming as well.
Also paid keyword tools tend to delve deeper into the keyword market. Not only can you receive more data from paid keyword tools some also help you discover lateral keywords or keyword phrases that are closely related to your primary keyphrase but may or may not contain the primary keyphrase and which are oftentimes ignored by your competition.
As an example let’s say that you run a website devoted to headaches you do your keyword research on headaches and you get all of the commonlyreturned suggestions relating to the key term. However with a lateral keyword suggestion tool you might discover terms like arthritis pain back pain neck pain healthcare health doctor and so forth keywords closely related to headaches but just far enough out of the norm to remain outside of the reach of traditional keyword tools.
Feature differences aside there is another important factor to consider your needs. If you only need occasional keyword research and you only cater to one market subscriptionbased keyword research services might be overkill. However if you are constantly working in new keyword markets or you operate a business that requires ongoing keyword research the paid solution is oftentimes completely justifiable.
Purchasing a keyword research tool or subscribing to a service is highly recommended under certain conditions. If you need indepth research on your keyword market if you prefer an allinone solution instead of using several different tools or if you regularly need to perform research in different markets you might want to consider pursuing the paid route. For the occasional keyword research though free keyword tools can work just fine.
About the writer: If you want to do keyword research yourself here are some great free keyword research tools and keyword research software. Or you can hire the professionals to do keyword research services for you.
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