Article Note: This article “21 Free Keyword Research Tools You Should Use for Content Marketing” was first published on 6th May 2016. We have last updated this article on 13th October 2019 with fresh information.
SEO is one of the most important things to understand if you want your articles and your website to be seen. There’s no better way to get a huge audience and many views. However, SEO is not possible without keywords. And to get all of the right keywords, you need to do keyword research.
You can get a lot of paid and free keywords through the keyword research tools. Fee tools might have limited features, but it can truly contribute to the success of your site and business. With a little skill, you can be able to get valuable keywords from these tools. Later, you can choose the paid option to get more effective results.
For a beginner, it is always suggested to try free keyword research tools to implement proper SEO and to make profits from them. Here are some of the best tools for keyword research that you can use in your company or for your website:
1. Ubersuggest
This is one of the most used SEO tools online when it comes to researching keywords and creating useful optimized posts. This is a free tool and all you have to do is put in a word and then this tool can show you how much that keyword is used online. Ubersuggest will also recommend whether you should do with this keyword or should you try a different one. There are many more great things that this keyword research tool can do and you can use it completely for free.
Ubersuggest is like any other keyword research tool that produces keywords from Google. This research tool is quite old and very popular also. Through this research tool, you can get up to three hundred to four hundred keyword suggestions for each seed keyword. The best part of this research tool is that you can expand those words to get more keyword options under it.
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2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a special keyword and audience research tool that really works better than anything else. Nothing else is a match for this tool because it really works like magic in showing you what you can do and what you should do with your articles and content. You probably already have your website associated with this tool and you are likely already using it for many different things. If not, then you should start as soon as possible. With the assistance of this tool, you can easily see the traffic, visits, keywords, etc. It’s easy to see referrers that are sending you visitors and how those visitors are using your web page. Definitely use this tool as much as possible to help you create better and more optimized content for your site.
3. SEO Quake
SEO Quake can give you a ton of information. This is an extension in Chrome which you can use for the start of your posting and article creation as well as some promoting. This can demonstrate information that matters to any site. You can also get an SEO assessment for free of your site and you don’t even have to move away from Google. This is very valuable for you if you are a site admin and this is a tool you will truly cherish.
4. Keyword Everywhere
Keyword Everywhere is a chrome extension that can help you learn as much information as you need about any potential keyword you need. The best part is that you can see the information related to any keyword and that it can give you, for instance, the search volume, the CPC, and so on. It can also show you how many rivals a keyword can have. Another perk of this is not having to leave Google to actually do this. It’s very simple and really straightforward.
5. MozBar SEO
MozBar SEO is an SEO tool and also a Google expansion which makes it simple for use. It can help demonstrate to you what you need to do and what your keyword is about and what you need to do. It can give you all sorts of information. You can learn about rivals and pages.
6. Ahrefs Backlink Checker
Ahrefs Backlink Checker is one of the free SEO tools to help you understand the backlinks of your website, blog, or page. To have an effective website, it’s not just about keywords in the right places, it’s more about backlinks and keywords at the same time. How can you get good backlinks? This is a hard thing to do in general. But the right backlinks become crazy volumes of traffic to your website and they will give you the credibility every website needs to succeed on Google. You can use this tool to check backlink credibility.
7. Google Trends
This is a free marketing SEO tool that stands out on the market because Google made it really accessible and useful for anyone with a website. This tool is an excellent one to help you with patterns for any specific keywords or inquiries. You can do a lot with it in terms of understanding SEO better and getting to know the patterns behind it. Google Trends is definitely one of the tools you should use for your website and each time you create content. You can also know whether a topic you want to write would interest someone or not.
8. Google Search Console
You will find this Google tool extremely useful. You can use it as a way to get accurate information about all of your pages, the connections it has, and so on. Google Search console will reassure you and it will show you what you can do. It will help you use your keywords properly. If you want to know which keywords will lead you to success, all you actually have to do is use this tool.
9. Long Tail Pro
This is a tool that shows what keywords should rank well in Google. Long Tail Pro is a paid tool, but you can get it for free for 7 days. If you want more, you can get the paid version. But the 7-day trial will show you just how useful this tool can be. It can help you drive the audience to your website through keywords and it can allow you to reach your objective. It can help you find the right amount of long-tail keywords.
10. SEMrush Advanced SEO Tool
SEMrush is one of the best tools for SEO. It holds a lot of valuable SEO data that can help you. There is a paid version but of course, there’s a free version too. You can do an SEO assessment of your blog and realize where you made mistakes and where you can make some changes to make it all work.
11. Answer the Public
This is also one useful keyword suggestion tool. Answer the public is related to Google and produces the keywords from the Google autocomplete. Like the SeoStack, it is able to add the modifiers to the original seed keyword to get more keyword options in the research. It adds the alphabets, query terms, and numbers. Through this process, it can produce more than hundreds of keyword suggestions for each seed keyword.
This is the perfect tool to help you find popular questions that the public may have about your area of expertise. People are now searching using questions instead of specific separate terms. This means that this trend is only going to grow, especially with voice search. But this is great for you because you get to use this tool to better understand what your audience may want to know from you so that you can create content based on that. This will help you appear more in the search results which will make your website have more visitors. The best part is that this tool is free to use.
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12. Keyword Tool Dominator
You can use this Keyword Tool Dominator tool to find all kinds of keywords from Amazon, eBay, and other places like Etsy. This way you can learn about the ways your customers use Amazon and other services so that you can improve the way you write your product descriptions and other elements of your listings. It’s not completely free but you can check it out and make three requests to each of these databases.
13. Google Correlate
This tool can be used to connect unexpected keywords from related niches. You can use Google Correlate to improve your ranking and get all sorts of combinations that can work well and that can turn out great for your SEO. It helps you find a different perspective that can then help you find all sorts of different keywords and elements to help you expand your reach.
14. Keyword Sheeter
While this tool may have a risky title, Keyword Sheeter really does an amazing job of providing help for website owners who need to learn more about their audience and what they have to write about. All you have to do is enter a seed keyword and then watch this tool provide you with so many great choices that will allow you to create amazing posts that drive visitors and attention. It works by mining Google Autocomplete and it’s really simple and easy to work.
15. Wordtracker Scout
Wordtracker Scout is a Chrome extension that can show you any webpage and the most relevant keywords that go with that page. It displays all sorts of data related to that keyword as a word cloud and it can be a fun way for you to learn about all of the relevant keywords. If you use it on any webpage, it will show you this word cloud.
16. Google Keyword Planner
Google keyword planner is a popular free keyword research tool. It helps to find keywords about a seed keyword and offers the information along with that seed keyword. The difficulty with the Google keyword planner is that it gives a very limited number of the options, you can find only eight hundred related keywords in the search when much more are there to come into the notice. To overcome this difficulty, you can use the keyword suggestion tools to offer more keywords. Another thing is that, with this tool, you can generate your keywords and can find the information about it.
17. Free Keyword Tool
After the release of the Suggest APIs by Google in 2010, many keyword research tools started showing results from this tool. And some other websites like Bing and YouTube created their own Suggest APIs. When many of the services started offering services in free in the initial stage, but when they notice the presence of the large users, they started charging for their offered services. During this time, the Free Keyword Tool entered into the market with free Suggest APIs. To make it more committed and faithful, they included the free word in the domain itself. Hence, you can get free Suggest APIs from this keyword research tool.
18. Soolve
Soolve is another free keyword research tool. This is a web-based tool. The good thing about the Soolve is that it supports a lot of engines. It includes Amazon, eBay, Bing, Yahoo, Google, YouTube, and much more. Like others, its keyword suggestion option is also limited. And it does emphasize any modifiers for the seed keyword. As a result, it offers only around eight to ten keyword suggestions about the seed keyword.
19. Bing Webmaster Tool
The next option is the Bing webmaster tool. This tool is similar to the Keyword planner. It generates the suggestion that is related to the seed keyword only. It shows the search volume data like the Keyword planner. And that data comes from the Bing search engine. Hence, it is only available to Bing users.
20. Backlink Watch
Backlink watch works as a spy on your competitor’s activities. It can help you to know which keywords are used by your competitors through the backlinks. The process is very simple. You can just type in the URL of another website; you can also try yours, and then observe the Anchor Text column and try to find out which keywords you are not using.
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21. WMS Everywhere
WMS Everywhere is an alternative to Keywords Everywhere which is now paid. The advantage is it has the same functionality but without the cost. This means you can get CPC and search volume within your browser for any keyword.
It also provides related search terms plus also searched for. Which makes it a great tool for brainstorming keyword ideas and more importantly, getting them in your browser. Which is quite convenient. When used with another tool it’s especially powerful.
Conclusion
All the above keyword research tools have their distinctive features. When a user can access keyword suggestions along with the search volumes in the Bing webmaster tool and Keyword planner, the other tools help to find only similar keywords. You can use any of the tools to have great content for SEO.
This article is written by us in association with Ashley Halsey. She is an SEO specialist at Gumessays.com who has been involved in many projects throughout the country. Mother of two children, she enjoys traveling, reading and attending business training courses.
