Keyword selection and search counts

[bcarp88]

I am a new pro member and have noticed that a lot of my keywords are very similar.

i.e. "piano movers Atlanta" vs. "Atlanta piano movers" vs. "piano movers in Atlanta"

Is there an accurate way to see search counts for each of these terms do determine which one I should target? Does anyone have any recommended tools or strategies?

[Mcarle]

http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty

This tool can be used to compare up to 5 keywords

It will tell you what keyword phrase people use most & all sorts of good stuff.

[bcarp88]

I've tried this a few times but I often get a "not enough data" response under the search volume headings.

[AWCthreads]

Hi Bryan,

When keywords look similar as you indicate, use phrase and exact match with specific attention given to exact match.

I use broad match when I'm having trouble drumming up keywords.

Once I get a semblance of keywords as you've indicated, I resort to exact match to tell me what specific phrases generate the traffic.

A quick look at local exact matches tells me [piano movers atlanta] generates the most at 140 searches, followed by [atlanta piano movers] at 58 and [piano movers in atlanta] generating 0. However, [piano movers atlanta ga] brings back 22 results.

[EGOL]

Wow.  That must be one of the lowest keyword diversity industries that I have seen!

If I had a site like that I would put my big effort into getting into the local search results.

Then I would start working on the organic.

I would hit adwords heavily and get some catchy ads above the SERPs.   I would be looking for smart, strong, experienced, gentle with thousands of successful moves who is going to take good care of my precious instrument!

[bcarp88]

Thanks for the info guys. It will definitely come in handy!

[bcarp88]

Thanks for the input Oracle. I used these piano terms as examples but I am still in a small local niche market. We provide pool table services to the Atlanta and Metro-Atlanta areas such as pool table moving, recovering, etc.

We've got some really good organic ranking and good bit of authority but it has been difficult to gauge which terms to use (i.e. pool table recovering vs. pool table refelting).