Keyword research isn’t just about a “keyword”; it is about phrases and questions your target audiences are using to find the answers, products, and services they need. These phrases and questions a critical component of any form of a marketing campaign.
While gathering this data can be very time-consuming when you have completed your keyword research, you should have valuable information you need for:
- Creating better SEO strategies
- PR campaigns
- Content ideation — video, text, social, etc.
- Audience research
- Paid advertising
- Local search campaigns
- Competitive research
- Keywords and phrases to ignore
- Brainstorming sessions
Keyword Research Tools
There are a lot of free tools for you to use that can help you gather this essential information. I am going to break down 12 tools that are free, easy to use, and full of valuable data marketers and businesses can use to improve their marketing strategies.
Google Trends
Google Trends will help you see the relative popularity of keywords, provide valuable data on regional variations, and is a great source for evaluating seasonality and trends in changes with search engine volume for specific keywords over time.
This data is valuable because it will help you avoid jumping on a trend that has passed and will let you see what matters to Google users now.
Comparisons:
You can compare multiple keywords to help you determine audience interests over time.
QuestionDB has created a massive database based on questions asked on Reddit that assesses relevance by a keyword also by the category.
The tool recommends using a broad keyword term. Here is a short set of questions people asked for related to the term “BBQ”:
great tool for discovering phrases you might not have thought of or have forgotten.
AnswerThePublic has a free version of their tool, and with it, they allow you to see visualizations of questions and phrases asked around a particular root keyword. The related phrases are fantastic for research and ideation. Note that you have to pay for the Pro version to get regional information for each root keyword. Let’s look at how the tool works. They break the info down into related questions, prepositions, queries by alphabetical order, and related searches.
With the keyword “spring break vacations”, they provided the following related questions:
Also Asked was created to help marketers understand how questions are topically grouped. These questions can help with keywords and related keywords, and also give you a direction on what questions to answer in content.
Here are a couple of the questions that came back for the query “SEO”:
- Does SEO work anymore?
- Why is SEO so expensive?
- Can you pay Google for SEO?
If you are writing about SEO services, reviewing all of these questions could help you determine which phrases to focus on and what questions to answer in your content.
Soovle will generate a quick list of top terms for Wikipedia, Google, Amazon, answers.com, YouTube, Bing, and Yahoo.
Just enter a keyword, and terms will generate over each platform’s logo:
this tool saves you a lot of time and gives you charts you can use in reports.
This tool allows you to compare URLs and gather data on the keyword strategies of other sites. If another site is consistently ranking highly for terms you want, you can quickly see their on-page keyword strategies at a glance.
Which keywords are they using in headings? Which phrases are they using the most?
, keywords in head tag elements, and meta descriptions.</p>
<p><span class=)
keyword research guide, I shared this exact example. Google doesn’t always give you the best data if you are doing keyword research from an account that does not actively spend money on Google Ads.
In the image below, you can see the results from an account that does not spend money on Google Ads. Google gave a range of traffic between 1000 and 10,000 queries per month. That is a pretty broad range and doesn’t really give an accurate picture of what the traffic potential is for this term.
keyword research, and it provides a good deal of information. Free users can perform 10 requests per day, but keep in mind that each query in this tool counts towards your daily limit of 10 queries in Domain and Keyword Analytics.
Each query allows you to see broad match keywords, phrase match, exact match, related, and questions about the keywords.
this article.
I hope these 12 tools can help you begin finding the keywords and phrases that will help you develop effective content and marketing campaigns. Below are some resources that can help you expand your keyword research strategies.
Additional Keyword Research Resources:
