How do you know which keyword or keyphrase to optimize for? It's a common question, although one that is often not asked enough due to site owners thinking they already know the answer based on solid experience and rational logic - sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong, today my goal is to point you in the right direction to be able to compare the potential value of keywords.

So let's take niche markets, what's better to optimize for "condos" or "Condominiums" or "Apartment style condos" or "townhouse condos" or "downtown condos" or any variations of the above, wouldn't it be nice to see which one is search more frequently?

There is a simple and accurate way to ask Google to compare these terms, the tool is called Google Insights for Search, and it's free and easy to get the basic idea of which terms will yield the highest return on investment.

So whether you are bidding on Adwords, or Optimizing for Natural or Organic Search return this tool is invaluable in providing A-B comparisons of search volume, since it allows the use of up to five terms it's more like an A-B-C-D-E-F comparison, while this is only one of many keyword analysis tools we use, and while it doesn't state actual search volumes rather provides comparisons on a scale it provides a simple clear and concise picture of where to invest your money.

Here's some example screenshots:

The first of these shots illustrates the terms suggested above, followed by a number of different revisions testing different terms and directions, one thing that is important to note and is our reason for using Los Angeles as our test example is that names and acronyms will sometimes have alternate meanings, in this case the search term "la" is also common in searches for Louisiana real estate as well as Los Angeles, in fact in some searches we had to limit them to traffic from California in order to avoid the ratios from being skewed by alternate regions.

This information should leave you at the least able to decide if you are better optimizing for one term or another, ideally you want to optimize for all the terms that will yield any significant amount of traffic, but by investing in the terms most searched you strengthen your ability to rank for the less competitive, in fact if your site is planned properly, regular new content through new sections, pages or blog posts should draw those terms in without much additional effort.