Should I Buy a Keyword Research Tool or Service?

This is a perennial question - and with the recent changes at Google, with upwards of 87% of incoming search traffic now encrypted - people are starting to ask my opinion on this subject yet again.

Allow me to quickly recap this for you : in the past, we saw incoming data in services like Analytics and StatCounter, as well as Squidoo, Blogger and HubPages stats that let us see where the traffic came from. We got the exact URL (address) which meant that for search engines, we got the actual query.

The aforementioned services needed to do a bit of URL bashing to get them out, but they were (and for Yahoo!, some local Google's and other search engines, they still are) available to turn into business intelligence.

That business intelligence was which keywords brought which visitors to what page. Tracking their paths afterwards through the site allowed us to make logical links between the keywords and eventual sales.

That was the foundation of keyword research for many, many tools. Remove the search terms, and they are left with... nothing.

Almost.

They still get query data from the 20% of searches (in some markets!) that aren't done on Google, but that's little help in many cases.

What's more help is that Google still lets us have some keyword data via AdWords - and in particular the Adwords Keyword Planner - which has now been taken advantage of by many tools.

Which brings us to the answer : Yes. Buy a tool. Invest in a service. Pay for keyword research.

However, be aware that there are no tools that have a special relationship with Google, there are no shortcuts, no silver bullets. You are paying for a tool to perform the same tasks that you could, using freely available tools, but much, much more quickly.

Some have the ability to link certain bits of data together and make recommendations, and allow calculations to be done that draw logical conclusions, but the basic data can be replicated with a bit of hard work.

Personally, I only use one tool (Market Samurai, feel free to do a Google search for it) alongside the free stats services, as well as some techniques that I explain in the Keyword Cracker Inner Circle material, but in the end it all boils down to what you do with them.

So, tools are good, but applied keyword intelligence is better!