It’s an exciting day in the North-West of England for Search Marketers as today marks the launch of SASCon, a Search, Analytics and Social Media conference in Manchester. The conference will be on the 28th of April 2010 at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall.

Keyword research is a must for those that are keen to be extra efficient in with the potential of their website. For competitive niches, it’s a must.

You can get great visibility without keyword research and competitive analysis, but trust me, it becomes a whole lot easier!!

So, there are a number of keyword research and competitive analysis tools that could help you, but here I’m going to focus on SEM Rush – a tool that tries to visualise the market place beyond a keyword-by-keyword basis.

The inspiration for this post came from a conversation I had earlier this week with someone working in a finance job. He asked me the question “What do you measure in SEO”. When carrying out SEO work, there are two relevant measures: measures of productivity and measuring results...