Your (Free) SEO Toolkit: Everything Keywords
PART 3: FREE TOOLS FOR KEYWORD RESEARCH
In part 1 of our Toolkit series, we explored a few of the best free options for SEO analytics. Part 2 explored tools for crawling and indexing. This time, we’re diving into free tools that improve your keyword research.
Keywords define your content and are how we understand what people are searching for and how to connect them with our content.
Optimized content helps your audience find you when they’re ready to make a purchase. And the more precise and defined we can be in our keywords, the better traffic we cand rive to our site – the kind of traffic that makes purchases. Keywords allow you to connect with your audience by understanding and targeting what it is they’re searching for.
We can do some of this research by talking to customers, hanging out in relevant forums and groups and investigating SERP features like ‘Related Searches’ and ‘People Also Ask.’ And while there’s value in all of these, they’re also time consuming.
So let’s take a look at good free tools to jumpstart your keyword research:
AnswerThePublic
We love this one – you input a keyword and it’ll give back popular queries based on that keyword. It’ll even give you a cool graphic representation with phrase and questions related to your keyword. This gives you valuable insight into the desires and concerns of potential customers, allowing you to craft content specifically to address them.
Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty
This particular tool is going to tell you just how tough it’ll be to rank for a specific keyword – valuable information that allows you to target your efforts most efficiently and effectively.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere provides data on search volume, CPC and competition for a massive list of search sites, making it a must-have for most SEO professionals. Available for Chrome and Firefox, this one is absolutely worth playing around with as you search for the most effective and efficient keywords.
Glimpse
The Google Trends search extension for Chrome, Glimpse brings Trends into your browser for maximum efficiency. It delivers impeccable insight into trending topics, allowing you to stay on top of current interests and emerging trends. Definitely a valuable add-on to Chrome.
Seed Keywords
Leverage your network to do a little research with Seed Keywords. You’ll use it to ask a question or investigate a topic, sending it to your contacts to ask about the keywords they’d use to find the answer. It’s an organic extension of the initial research we all do, making it a valuable tool in your arsenal.
Wordtracker Scout
This tool is specifically focused on the keywords users search when they’re ready to make a purchase. You can search by domain – maybe a competitor or market leader – or by search, adding versatility to your toolkit.
There are myriad more free tools in this category, many more than we can highlight, and we’d love to hear from you about your favorites in the comments below.