The more closed off a data source is the greater potential value you can exploit from understanding it.

General Keyword Research Tools:

Many people use the Google AdWords tool and Overture Selector Tool, thus if you are in a competitive marketplace the odds of you finding high value under-priced keywords is going to be lower than if you track data from less used sources.

Paid Keyword Research Tools:

Tools such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery may help you find a few more valuable rare keyword phrases. Since accessing them costs money, less people will use them.

Follow Clever Competitors:

If you come across high ranking spammy sites you can let them do your keyword research for you. If you find one smart competitor that keeps showing up for keyword phrases that few other people are bidding on you can see what types of keywords they are buying by using tools like KeyCompete or SpyFu.

Both of those techniques were covered in Using Profitable Spam & Thin Content Sites for Keyword Research.

Your Own Website Research Data:

The highest value market research data you can collect is collecting how the market is already reacting to your site. If you listen to your site you are not only going to find unique keyword phrases that do not show up on other tools, but you also know that

• real people are already searching for them

• those phrases convert (if you track conversions)
• you are already trusted in some search engines for those phrases

It is typically easier to bump a number 6 ranking up to number 3 than it is to go from nowhere to top 10.

Use some keyword phrases to help you think of related topics and use rankings in one engine to help you find content ideas for others. If you use your own logs and tools like HitTail you can uncover entire categories and keyword baskets where there is little to no competition. Write semantically sound legitimate content targeted at those keywords and those articles should be able to rank for keywords related to other phrases you are already ranking for.

Also giving your visitors a site level search box will give you another source of data for related terms that you should be covering but may not be.

If a market is saturated and you operate in nearby markets with limited competition you can keep growing your revenue base until you have enough brand and authority to take on the established competition.

Apply This to Anything:

And while it is easy to use keywords as an example, you can apply this to anything. The more unique data you can collect the broader you can make your sales funnel and more efficient you can make your sales copy. And if you write timely news dong things like being opinionated, tracking a few persistent searches, or using Google news alerts can be the difference between having a complete story and getting all the links or just being one of 1,000 people writing about the same thing, watching Techcrunch get all the links.

In the information age unique data sources = profit.