I use a couple of tools to determine good keywords to go after. What they do not tell me is the amount of traffic for the long tail words.
For example, I know people search Hualalai vacation rentals, but I can not find the amount of traffic for that. Does anyone have any good ideas?
Waikoloa Beach Resort
Rob, have you tried Google's AdWords keyword tool? By traffic are you meaning the number of times that phrase is searched?
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2
I hope that helps.
Mike L
Lake of the Ozarks Condo Rental
Yeah google's external adwords keyword tool is my favorite, too.
There's also Wordtracker (daily search counts):
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
But I feel like Google's gives more accurate results. That being said. Both can oftentimes be WAY off.
The best way would be to pick keywords that the google external tool says have high volume of searches and test it using Adwords.
If you have a Google Adwords account and are willing to go for it:
1. Create a campaign in Adwords targeting that keyphrase
2. Set it on a high budget and really high CPC and ad rotation to display ads as fast as possible. (If you don't want to pay for the clicks, I guess you could write totally irrelevant ads so that no one clicks and you don't get charged, but I've never tried that so don't take my word for it, plus google will probably not like that.)
3. Come back after a day and pause the campaign. See how many impressions you got, and that's the number of times the keyphrase got searched for that day.
For optimal results, run it for a whole week and calculate the average daily impressions.
This might run you some money if you're targeting a high-volume, expensive keyword, so be warned! You can usually just get away with the regular adwords external keyword tool that Mike mentioned.