Keyword Research

SEM Rush has been in the SEO game for a long time. They provide a robust solution that is considered "the best" by many SEO professionals. Their software suite compiles and presents vast amounts of data at lightning speed, making it super-easy to spot the low-hanging fruit in your niche. For example, the keyword "dog training" recently returned 103,210 results. A keyword list that large is bound to contain plenty of long-tail keywords that are easy to rank for (keywords that lesser tools may not have found). But that's just the tip of the icerberg in terms of what this tool can do, and we can't possibly cover everything in this short review. Bottom line: If you (a) are ready to take your Google rankings to the next level and/or (b) are involved in a competitive niche and need every advantage you can get when it comes to SEO, SEM Rush will be an invaluable asset to your business.

Like SEM Rush, KWFinder is part of a suite of SEO tools. It does a lot of things right. Like SEM Rush, it provides excellent keyword and competitive analysis data. The drawback to KWFinder is that the limit to the number of returned searches for a given keyword is just 700. That's not a low number, exactly, but you can't help but wonder what keyword opportunities are being left on the table. That said, KWFinder provides a host of very valuable information within a very nice interface. In fact, it provides the same kind of information that SEM Rush does for the most part -- just not as much of it. This can be okay, though, if you're invovled in a small or medium sized niche and don't need to gather every long-tail keyword out there. All in all, KWFinder is a great keyword tool to start out with and it may very well be the one that you stick with for the long haul.