Do you know how many people are searching for the search engine optimized keywords that you’re using? How will you know if your SEO keywords will actually improve web site traffic?

I’ll show you how to determine the search volume for your keywords and gauge that against your keyword competition to get an idea of how quickly you can increase your site traffic – For Free!

You don’t want to waste your time and money optimizing your website for the search engines with keywords that are not going to improve your web site traffic, so the first step you must do is determine the amount of traffic each of your potential keyword phrases is getting.

To do this you can either use the Google Adwords Keyword tool or Traffic-Travis. (Note that Traffic-Travis counts search volume per day, while Google Adwords Keyword tool shows you searches per month.)

I prefer Traffic-Travis over the Google keyword tool because it’s much easier to read and gives you search volumes for MSN and Yahoo, as well as Google. But it’s worth noting that you should compare results once in a while. (and yes, you should check these numbers on a regular basis) No program is perfect, and this includes paid services. Results will surely vary from one keyword search volume tool to the next.

As a side note you should be aware that the traffic volumes for keywords do fluctuate. And if you start to see a downward trend you may want to reevaluate your efforts of optimization for that particular keyword phrase.

Traffic-Travis is very easy, and it comes with many other helpful features, but for this article we’re just going to use the Keyword Finder. Once you download it click ‘Keyword Finder’ and type in your first keyword. Keep track of the results in a spreadsheet and repeat for all of your keywords.

Hopefully you have also done some keyword competition research and have the number of times each keyword is found (for the exact phrase match) in a Google search. To determine if the search volume is going to be enough for each keyword you have to know how much competition you’re up against as well.

Sort your keyword list by lowest to highest competition and then compare to the amount of the search results. As a rule of thumb you want to have at least 1000 searches per month for the keyword phrase (approximately 33 per day) and in order to rank quickly you will want the number of exact phrase match search results to be under 10,000 (with 50,000 being your absolute limit in most cases).

If the keyword competition is low enough (under 10,000 pages) you can be on the first page of the search results in as little as a week. Once you’re on the first page you can expect to see at least 10% of the traffic. The higher you get ranked the more traffic you will bring in. If you’re in the top 5 spots you’ll see 30% of the traffic; top 3 – 50%; etc. So if the keyword phrase gets 2000 searches per month, you will improve web site traffic by 1000 visitors per month once you reach the top three spots.