By now you know how much I love using Market Samurai for conducting keyword research.

You will be doing keyword research prior to:

determining a niche market

buying a domain name

targeting keywords

making a blog post

identifying top keywords

competitive research

You don't HAVE to use Market Samurai, but it will help you to identify the best keywords to target way easier than using the google external keyword tool.

The main difference is that you can identify hidden opportunities in niche markets. You also do not want to target the most competitive keywords as the chances of you ever ranking for those terms is pretty small. It would be a waste of time, energy and resources to target a keyword or keyword phrase you will never be able to rank for. Maybe the top 10 positions are already taken by Amazon, Ebay, or other large and established companies. The chances of beating them out is fairly small.

But there are hundreds of thousands of opportunities to target keywords that might have less traffic, but will be easy to rank for. You can target these related keywords and keyword phrases to bring in the traffic.