Did you land here searching for the keyword research tools that you can use? Then make sure to read this article as we have listed down some of the best tools that could help you in performing keyword research and pick the right keywords that have great potential to drive traffic to your blogs.
Millions of blogs are published online regularly by bloggers with the main goal to drive organic traffic from search engines. One can get traffic for free from them on a consistent basis as long as the web pages rank higher in the search engines.
Additionally, spending more time on keyword research wouldn’t just help you gain traffic but you would be able to plan a good content strategy for your website. You can get new content ideas that you might not get just brainstorming.
Even though you can easily do keyword research, picking the right keywords that can drive traffic to your website isn’t that easy. You should understand the intent and check if your content can rank higher in the search engines competing with the other websites that are ranking for a keyword.
Depending on your budget and affordability you can use either free or paid keyword research tools. However, mostly paid keyword research tools provide more valuable insights about a particular keyword than a free keyword research tool that makes it easy to select a keyword.
So we have listed some of the best keyword research tools below:
With billions of searches being made on popular search engines like Google and Bing, autocomplete suggestions are highly useful to understand the phrases used around a particular keyword. Answer The Public is a great tool that can help in finding such search queries especially long-tail keywords in a visualized manner.
Using this tool you can get a lot of content ideas that can help in performing keyword research and plan your content strategy.All you have to do is enter the primary keyword related to your niche selecting the country where your target audience resides as shown in the image below.
When you enter a keyword it shows the data of the search queries using that particular keyword under 5 sections Questions, Prepositions, Comparisons, Alphabeticals, and Related Searches.
Didn’t get what they are? Well, then let me explain each section in detail with an example.
i.Questions:
The first one is the “Questions” section under which the keyword suggestions that get started mostly with Question Words like Why, What, When, Where, etc are displayed.
For example, when the keyword “start a blog” is entered there are many Questions shown up as you can see the results obtained in the form of a visualized cloud.
However, if you feel overwhelmed with the visual display of results, you can easily utilize the DATA tab as shown in the image below
ii.Prepositions:
The next section is “Prepositions” where you can find the keyword ideas having a preposition for, is, to, etc and the seed keyword you have entered. When we used the keyword “start a blog” the following results were obtained.
iii.Comparisons:
Under the section “Comparison” you can get the comparison type of keyword ideas. For example, here when we entered “start a blog” you can find that the many are making searches like
- Start a blog or YouTube channel
- Start a blog or Website
iv.Alphabetical:
You can find the different keyword ideas with your seed keyword and the other phrases following the alphabetical order as shown in the image below:
v.Related Keyword Ideas:
In this, you can find the keyword ideas that are related to your seed keyword. When the keyword “Start a Blog” as the seed keyword the results were obtained as shown below:
Soovle is one of the best free keyword suggestion tools out there that would provide a lot of keyword ideas scraped from different search engines used by people like Google, YouTube, Bing, etc altogether in a single place. For example, when the keyword “start a blog” is entered, it fetched the keyword ideas as shown in the image
Soovle also gives you the ability to select the keywords and export providing the feature of Saved Suggestions. Using this you can easily drag and drop the keywords that you find good enough as shown in the image to export them for further analysis reducing your manual efforts.
There are many search queries that are mostly made during specific months of a year related to specific events, festivals, seasons, etc. Google Trends is an excellent tool that one can use to find out the trends of a search term.
The special feature available in this tool is that you can compare the popularity of keywords with one another so that you can easily decide about the keyword and optimize your content for the same.
You can see that Start a blog search term is more popular than Start Blogging even though both have a rise in popularity in the search trends. When you are unaware of the seasonality of a keyword while blogging in micro niches this tool is highly useful
Moreover, you can find the search trends of a keyword not just on the searches being made on the Google Web Search but it also allows you to check the trends on Google Image Search, YouTube, News Search, Image Search, Google Shopping that you might need when you are trying to rank your videos, news blogs, etc respectively on them rather than the Web Search alone.
Keyword Tool is my favorite because this shows the data related to social media platforms apart from the search engines. Entering a seed keyword, you can get the keyword-based search terms selecting the search engine of your choice that is mostly used by your target audience.
Here I have selected Google as my search engine and when “Start a blog” is used as the main keyword, the keyword tool displayed 232 unique keyword ideas as shown in the image.
Depending on the source of traffic you are looking for, you can easily select different search engines like Bing. If you are planning to launch your YouTube channel then you can select it and find the keywords ideas. Similarly, you can select eBay or Amazon to understand for product-related terms. For app store related search, you can select the Playstore option.
Apart from this, you can select Instagram or Twitter to get the list of popular hashtags or profile names with the seed keyword. By the way, if you want to filter the big list of keyword results shown up in the keyword tool, you can make use of the two features available in the tool Filter Results and Negative Keywords.
When you want to pick the keywords with a particular phrase or word Filter Results feature should be used. In contrast, when you want the list of keywords without a particular phrase or term Negative keywords feature can help you with this. This way you can save time instead of trying to filter them one-by-one manually.
Even though you can get hundreds of keyword ideas for free, you must upgrade to their PRO version to see the data such as CPC, search trends, etc of a keyword. However, you can easily export or copy the keywords to the clipboard for analyzing the keywords further in some other tools.
Google Keyword Planner is an amazing tool and performing keyword research using this would be worth your time as it comes directly from the database of the most popular search engine, Google. When the keyword “start a blog” it fetched around 1751 keyword ideas from its database as shown in the image.
Now you might be wondering if there is Google Trends then why Keyword Planner?
Well, Google Trends is mostly for finding the trend of searches being made around a topic and it doesn’t provide in-depth data about the keywords like the competition, search volume estimate, etc that are essential in picking the right keywords.
Uber Suggest is unique because it provides two difficulty scores that are SEO Difficulty and Paid Difficulty for a particular keyword. Entering your seed keyword, you can get the metrics related to keywords like estimated search volume, CPC, etc.
You can also get keyword ideas along with the search volume trends, CPC, and other metrics of each keyword. When the seed keyword “Start a blog” is entered, the results obtained as shown in the image
Additionally, you switch the tabs to find different types of keyword ideas like related, questions, prepositions, comparisons. However, you can get a limited amount of data when you use it for free. If you want more keyword ideas for in-depth keyword research then you need to upgrade to their paid plans that are quite affordable compared to the other tools in the market.
How about making a search on your Google Browser and getting the important metrics or keyword ideas right on the search results page without the need to use a tool separately? Well, then you have to install Keyword Surfer on your Chrome Browser.
The best part is that the extension is totally free to use and just like many other tools it provides many insights when you make a search on Google with a search term. Entering the keyword “Start blogging” here are the search volume and CPC metrics showed up when the country is chosen as “India”.
Not just these metrics of a keyword, but it shows various keyword ideas on the right side of your search results page along with a score called Similarity score based on the relevancy of the seed keyword and the other suggested keyword ideas.
For the term “start blogging”, we got 93 keyword ideas and clicking on the star icon you can easily save them to your clipboard and export them easily. Remember, you can easily change your location and find the data related to that keyword without making a search again as it would automatically refresh the data.
Another interesting benefit of using this tool is that it provides correlation charts of three types:
- Traffic -Shows the details of traffic estimates to each web page in the search engine results
- Words-Shows the word count on each web page in the search engine results
- Keywords-Shows the number of times the exact keyword was used in the content on each of the web pages in the search engine results
These are present right below the keyword ideas section over the right side.Just hover your mouse over the charts to get the exact statistics
So this is a must-have Chrome extension as it is free and the keyword data from around 70 locations is available on your browser itself making it easy to gain new ideas faster.
Semscoop can provide a lot of keyword ideas entering your main keyword choosing the country and language. When you make a search entering a term, it provides you different types of stats apart from the general ones like search volume estimates, CPC, etc.
For example when we made a search for the term “blogging”, we have obtained 499 keyword ideas along with their estimated search volumes, Cost Per Click, Pay Per Click which refers to the advertiser competition of that keyword. However, you can filter the keywords based on their volumes, difficulty scores easily.
Apart from them, you can clearly see that it shows the search seasonality that refers to the historic search trends for a period of time. It also provides you things like estimated content length required that is essential when writing the content for your website so that it can compete with other websites on the search engine results page.
SE Ranking has a suite of tools that can help you with various aspects related to SEO. But here we are going to discuss only a few tools provided in the suite that can help you in picking the right keywords.
The first one is their keyword research tool that provides insights about a particular keyword along with a Keyword Effectiveness Index(KEI) score, which is calculated based on search volume, search results, etc. A higher KEI score indicates that it is a good keyword.
The best part is that you need not visit Google Trends separately because you find it within the dashboard itself under the keyword popularity section. The next one is the keyword suggestion tool under which you can find different types of keywords Similar, Related,Long-tail by just switching the tabs.
Semrush is an All In One Digital Marketing suite of tools that can help you with many things like SEO, Competitor Research, Social Media Scheduling, Lead generation, Content Writing, Digital Advertising. If you are looking for only one tool to do many things then this can be the best choice to pick especially as a blogger.
Semrush has a Keyword Magic Tool that is powerful and easy to use for any beginner. You can find keyword ideas using various tactics like entering a keyword or competitor domain name.Additionally, you can filter the keywords from the results based on search volume, keyword difficulty, etc.
Apart from them, you can use Broad Match and Exact Match to filter the keywords including or excluding a phrase. To demonstrate, I have entered the term “WordPress web hosting” and the 880 keywords were found.
Using the keyword magic we can find the search volumes, Keyword Difficulty score, CPC, Trends , etc that can be highly useful in picking the keywords. It also provides you a tool called keyword manager to save and easily export them later.
Even though the tool has a large set of tools, it still offers a free plan with some limitations on accessibility. I would recommend you to get started with this as it is one of the best tools out there with a free plan.
Ahrefs is similar to Semrush with a suite of tools that can be highly useful for content, keyword and advertising research. It has a tool called Keywords Explorer that can provide you the keyword data from different search engines like Bing, YouTube, etc apart from Google.
Ahrefs is one of the most preferred tools by many bloggers as it can provide a lot of information about clicks on the results that are essential in picking the potential keywords that can drive traffic to a blog. Remember you cannot drive traffic to your blog even though you rank higher when most people don’t actually click on the results.
When I have entered the keyword “start a blog”, it has provided the estimated clicks data along with the search volume and other metrics. Here the search term has a keyword difficulty score of 84 which according to ahrefs is hard to rank.
Also, there are many keyword ideas with the same terms and questions displayed below that can be viewed and filtered based on the metrics like Keyword Difficulty, search volume, etc. You can also export the keywords just saving them in the form of a spreadsheet with all the keyword data.
But Ahrefs has no free plan like Semrush and there is only a free trial that you can get for a week. So if you are just getting started and looking for an affordable solution then Semrush would be a great choice to get started with keyword research.
Final Note:
Publishing quality content without making a research about the type of content your target audience is looking for might not help in reaching the target audience. Using keyword research tools in the right way you can get new content ideas and potential keywords that are easy to rank higher driving more traffic to your blog.