A keyword research tool can help you find keywords that are easy to rank for and that will drive a lot of traffic.

What are the best keyword research tools available? What can these tools do to help you find new topic ideas?

Ideas generated from your buyer personas can be used to formulate a content strategy that will optimize your website for better search engine visibility, as well as inform your paid advertising campaigns.

Google Trends is a a data visualization tool that shows the relative popularity of a search term over time.

We can see that the term ‘costumes’ is most popular in October.

This is because of Halloween.

But how is this useful for keyword research?

Content calendars can help you plan what kind of content to publish and when. For example, if you sell costumes online, it would make sense to publish or republish a list of the “10 Scariest Halloween Costumes for 20XX” each September/October.

The Trends tool can help you beyond just content calendars, it can also help you avoid targeting the wrong keywords.

Which keyword would you choose to write content for if you could only choose one? The one with the highest search volume, right?

Just because search volumes are averages taken across many months or years, that doesn’t mean they can’t give you an idea of what to expect.

The search for “apple watch series 5” has recently surpassed the search for “apple watch series 3” in Google Trends.

You should prioritize the keyword “apple watch series 5” if you are running an ecommerce store.

The number of searches for the Series 3 will decrease as time goes on.

2. Keyword Generator

Keyword Generator can help you come up with up to 150 different ideas for keywords related to your seed keyword.

If we search for “bitcoin” on the keyword tool, we get a list of 100 related keywords with their estimated monthly search volumes.

We also see a list of 50 question-type queries.

We show the Keyword Difficulty (KD) score for the first ten keywords on each list. KD is a number between 0-100 that estimates ranking difficulty. Generally, a higher KD means you’ll need more backlinks to rank.

Keyword Difficulty (KD) doesn’t take anything else into account besides backlinks. It’s important to take content quality, search intent, and website authority into account when assessing ranking difficulty. Learn more in
 
this post.

The search volume for a keyword is relative to the chosen country, which is the United States by default. The KD score for a keyword is also relative to the chosen country.

If you want to rank your website in another country, just select that country from the 170+ options in the dropdown menu.

There is also a search engine on the page that can be used to find keywords for Bing, YouTube, and Amazon.

Side note
 
Keyword Generator is not the only free SEO tool by Ahrefs. You can find more tools
 
here.

3. Keyword Sheeter

Keyword Sheeter pulls thousands of autocomplete suggestions from Google.

Click “Sheet Keywords” after entering one or more seed keywords.

The tool provides you with a large number of keyword ideas very quickly, and you can export the results without having to pay any money.

While Keyword Sheeter is a great tool, it is quite basic and does not have a lot of features.

The tool doesn’t have the same features as Keyword Planner in terms of search volume or trends data. It also doesn’t group keywords together.

This camera also has the ability to use positive and negative filters.

An example of how this works would be adding “how” to the positive filter.

The search feature has been updated to only include results that contain the word “how”, which are typically keywords that would make for good blog posts.

The negative filter excludes queries containing certain words.

This process can be useful for removing anything that is not relevant. For example, if you operate a tech blog and crawl results for “apple,” then you probably only want to see keywords related to Apple the company, not the fruit.

So you could include keywords like “pie,” “crumble,” “fruit,” and “cider.”

Try the Phrase match report in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

Keywords Explorer > enter seed keyword > Phrase match

The Keywords Explorer tool provides users with keyword ideas as well as SEO metrics like monthly search volume and Keyword Difficulty (KD). This allows users to see not only how many people are searching for a given keyword, but also how difficult it would be to rank for that keyword.

4. Answer The Public

Answer the Public helps you figure out what people are searching for online related to your topic, using questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabeticals, and related searches.

Confused? Let’s tackle each of these one-by-one.

We’ll start by finding a keyword to use as a starting point–in this case, we’ll use “protein powder.”

The first thing you’ll see are questions.

What are search queries containing who, what, why, where, how, which, when, are, and is?

Examples:

  • what protein powder tastes best?
  • how protein powder is made
  • are protein powders fattening?
  • when does protein powder expire?

The default display is a visualization, but you can opt to see a regular list instead.

Next, we have propositions such as “for,” “can,” “is,” “near,” “without,” “with,” and “to.”

These are search queries that are in the [seed] [preposition] [______] format.

Examples:

  • protein powder without carbs
  • protein powder for weight gain
  • protein powder is it safe

We then have comparisons—i.e., versus, vs, and, like, or.

Once again, the format is [seed] [comparison] [______].

Examples:

  • protein powder versus meat
  • protein powder or chicken breast
  • protein powder like quest

And finally, we have alphabeticals and related.

Alphabeticals are Google autocomplete suggestions.

And related, well, who knows?

From my experience, the number of related keywords is typically around 20. I don’t know how it creates those keywords, but occasionally it produces some great results.

But where does ATP get its data from?

To the best of our knowledge, the two most useful tools for this purpose are Google Keyword Planner and Google autosuggest.

Side note
 
All data is exportable to CSV. No need to register or log in. 

Answer the Public came up with 160 different question-types that can be asked about the topic of “cats”.

If we enter the same seed word into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, we get 626,768 keyword results–that’s 3,900 times more keywords than the other tool.

We’re using our big data muscles to find the best keyword suggestions for you. For most people, Answer the Public has more than enough keyword suggestions. But when your site grows bigger, there’s always Keywords Explorer.

5. Keyword Surfer

, as well as related keywords. The Keyword Surfer extension for Google Chrome lets you see estimated global and monthly search volumes for any query you type into the search engine, as well as related keywords.

Side note
 
Keyword Surfer works much the same way as another popular extension called
 
Keywords Everywhere. This tool used to be free but recently switched to a paid model. Keyword Surfer’s developers have promised to keep this tool “100% free, forever.” 

Keyword Surfer provides local search volume estimates for 19 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, France, and Germany.

You can choose to either include or exclude global search volumes in your search.

Although the search volumes aren’t global, they are from a total of 19 countries.

Beyond this, the extension also adds search volume estimates to the autocomplete results:

And shows 10 “similar” keywords in the search results:

The only downside to using this keyword research tool is that there is no way to get search volume data in bulk.

Although this extension is not meant for extensive research, it is useful for evaluating questions as you surf the internet.

6. Serpstat

We believe that Serpstat is the best option for most users. It is not only a keyword research tool, but also an all-in-one SEO software suite with 30+ tools to help with various aspects of your marketing campaigns.

Serpstat has not compromised on its keyword research tool despite having a lot of features – it is still excellent.

To generate a list of related keywords, you can start with a seed keyword and use Serpstat to find out what metrics you need to evaluate your keyword ideas, such as volume, competition, difficulty, and popularity.

The Keyword Trends tool allows you to obtain a list of trending search queries easily. You can select a country to see what is popular in different regions. If you are working with a lot of data, you can also run a batch analysis with up to 100,000 keywords and domains using 18 metrics.

Keyword tool, site auditing, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and other useful features are all accessible through this affordable software.

7. Mangools

Mangools’ KWFinder is the best keyword research tool for beginners. It is affordable, easy to understand, and very effective at finding keywords with low competition and high volumes.

Mangools’ goal is to make SEO easy. Its platform is designed to be as easy to use as possible. The interface lets you search by keyword or domain to generate a list of keyword ideas.

By searching by domain, you can view your competitor’s keywords, average ranking position, search volume, and more.

You can find keywords that are easy to rank for by looking at the difficulty score. The difficulty score is a number from 1 to 100 that shows how competitive the SERPs are. You can also look at other factors like search volume, CPC, etc.

If you want to market your business to a specific location, you can find long-tail keywords that are specific to that area. Look at the local search results for over 50,000 different locations to see what people in those areas are searching for.

8. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is the best tool for keyword research for agencies and large teams. It has built-in collaboration tools, a white-label interface, and flexible pricing plans which are very affordable for a large number of users and projects.

This tool provides a suite of options to assist with all areas of SEO, including keyword research. It has access to one of the largest databases on the market, with 7 billion keywords and data from all countries.

To analyze a keyword, type it into the search box and select your search engine and country. Hit search, and the data will be collected and displayed in an easy-to-read format.

Keywords can be analyzed based on core parameters such as difficulty score, search volume, CPC, and paid competition.

SE Ranking will also generate a list of similar and related keywords. You can sort the results with filters like search volume or difficulty to identify the best opportunities.

SE Ranking’s keyword position checker is integrated with the keyword tool so you can monitor your performance in the search results. You can view data from desktop and mobile devices separately, track your organic position, map results, and view rich snippets.

The ranking tracker lets you see how you stack up against 20 other leading sites in your field. The backlink checker lets you see which websites are linking to your site. The content optimization tool helps you optimize your website’s content. The website auditor helps you audit your website.

More specifically, with the white label feature, you can: – Give your clients access to their own unique domain – Brand the tool with your own logo, color scheme, and favicon – Customize user sub-accounts to set up access privileges for all team members working on the project The white label feature on SE Ranking lets you give your clients their own domain to use the tool, as well as brand the tool with your own logo and color scheme. You can also customize user sub-accounts to set up access privileges for team members working on a project.

9. Semrush

Some users might find Semrush to be too much work for them. The platform has a lot of features that might be too much for some people.

The price might be too high for some people, especially people who are just starting a business and don’t have a lot of money. However, the data is very accurate and there are a lot of extra marketing tools included.

This tool is more expensive than most, but you get more use out of it because it has higher usage allowances.

Semrush has an integrated keyword tool that works differently from some of its competitors. Instead of entering a seed keyword to generate a list of related suggestions, Semrush shows you the keywords that your biggest competitors are ranking for.

Keywords that are difficult to find using other tools are often very valuable.

You can find keywords that a competitor is ranking for by entering their domain in the search box and choosing the location you want to pull suggestions from. You can get suggestions from the worldwide database or from specific countries.

Go to the Organic Research section to see an overview of the website’s total organic traffic and ranked keywords. CPC is an indication of the traffic value.

The “Organic Keywords” data shows the keywords that are bringing the most traffic to a competitor’s domain, as well as that domain’s average ranking position for those keywords and other relevant metrics.

Semrush can also be used to find long-tail keywords related to a seed keyword. The Keyword Magic tool searches Semrush’s database of over 20 billion search queries to find suggestions.

Final Thoughts

The problem is that most of the time, the good keywords are buried under a bunch of duds. You can find some good keywords for free with keyword tools, but most of the time the good keywords are difficult to find because they are buried under a bunch of bad keywords.

This action can take a lot of time and therefore be costly

accessing autocomplete data from Google is a waste of time, as is compiling data from multiple free keyword sources. You should focus your time on more important tasks, such as content creation and link building.

In conclusion, free keyword tools can be helpful when you are first starting out, but as your website expands, you will need to invest in paid tools to maintain your competitiveness.

About the Author Brian Richards

See Brian's Amazon Author Central profile at https://amazon.com/author/brianrichards

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