Keyword Research for Brand New Websites in 2015

Page 3 right towards the bottom poses an interesting question... "is your time best spent figuring out what your competitors are ranking for, or creating in-depth content that is best matched to what your customers and clients are actually looking for?"

I get what they guy is saying... But to say in the beginning of the article, that 2 or 3 years ago this article would be a list of tools and tricks, to return to a comment like this.. well how do you know what customers and clients are looking for? that's what all the tools and tricks answer.

I will be the first to admit that the tools don't even really answer that type of question very well. Regardless of the name on the tool or the specifics they report to us the fact is the base data ( Google data ) is skewed and or missing by 50% or greater. Makes it rather difficult to make decisions when things are so out of whack.

I think it comes down to a better understanding of the market space you are going to be targeting. reaching for data outside of search engine data and looking for indicators of traffic. Like number of downloads or trending topics and how and when the area you are researching falls in that. Start looking at Social data look at hashtags and get into twitter to see who and how people are talking about the subject.

SEO, I would say has grown out of the realm of tool dominance, and is more and more getting into the arena of demographic data and market analysis unlike ever before. The data needed to succeed in SEO is out there... I would say that it may not be within whatwe consider standard SEO tools anymore.