how to measure your keyword's traffic / competition

BarberShop,
There is actually quite a bit of debate on this topic.

The key word in your question is "good"...as in good traffic.

You always want to match up your keywords with your offer, so that you turn visitors into buyers.

That can be easier or harder than it sounds.

For a moment, you'll need to reject the assumption that More Traffic = More Sales = More Money.

That's very often NOT the case.

Consider a keyword that only brings 100 visitors to your website every month...but brings 25 buyers in those 100 vs. a keyword that brings you 5000 visitors every month, with only 2 buyers.

Which keyword would you want to have working for you.

You also have to consider how you plan on "harnesing" the traffic behind a keyword.

Are you going to be using SEO or PPC or PPV, or all of the above.

Time can become an important factor if you are only going to be using SEO. (For instance, you may be able to rank for a long tail keyword this week, but a more competitive term may take 6 months for you...)

My best suggestion to you would be to start with PPC and just use a few keywords that your "gut" tells you are highly relevant to your offer.

Set a small, but workable budget that you won't worry over losing while you "test".

Write your ads and get them running.

You're going to quickly find out two things:

1. The number of impressions per keyword per day
2. The relevance of the keyword to your offer ...or...the "buyer to tire kicker ratio"

Once you find a good keyword or two, try to make improvements to your ad and think of other ways you can get a greater % of those visitors from that keyword to your offer.

Hope this helps,
Jack Duncan

A great resource is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Look into it - it is free, and may answer a lot of your questions about your proposed keywords.

Demo version of Market Samurai is free and never expires. It shows good data on traffic and competition. Combined with Google keyword tool, it should give you reliable data.

google keyword tool is all you need. don't be fooled into paying 500 bux a month for any keyword spy software.

I only use Google Adword Key Tool for researching my key words.

From there you will get all important data require for analyzing key words.

It is absolutely free and also dependable.

BarberShop,
Right on buddy...I totally hear you loud and clear.

However, I'm not talking about hundreds of dollars...I'm talking maybe 20-50 bucks.

I realize that may not seem like much, but I'd encourage you to select those keywords that you are nearly "positive" are representative of the type of people who desire the product or service.

Ideally, pick just a couple of long tail keywords, and only bid on Exact Match in Adwords and set your budget to $20 for the month. Even in hyper competitive markets like "bankruptcy", you can still find cheap clicks on highly targeted keywords. (I currently get clicks for 0.05 for bankruptcy related terms in Adwords.)

Also, you can save some money using Bing/Yahoo PPC.

I realize this still may "go against the grain" for you.

However, the data you'll get back from this $20 spent will shave hours of your time (and frustration) and the mindset learned will shave years off your learning curve in IM.

Hope this helps,
Jack Duncan