Keyword research is a science as well as an art. Finding the right keywords for your website pages can be quite an adventure.
There are many tricks to improve your website ranking and make your content more visible on search engines, but it’s obvious that keywords play a key role in SEO.
Here’s where keyword research comes into play.
What is keyword research?
Before diving into exploring what are the best free tools out there for finding the most suitable keywords, let’s talk about what keyword research is and why is it essential to boost your SEO content marketing strategy.
Let’s keep it simple and clear. Keyword research is a SEO technique where the ultimate goal is to find out what terms and phrases your target audience is entering on search engines when looking for specific products or services.
Mastering this technique requires a combination of good keyword research tools and having the proper marketing skills to know how to identify the most suitable terms to match your users’ search intent.
Not all high-volume keywords are relevant when creating content for your site. What matters is to find terms that give your site a higher conversion rate.
You need to learn to find, compare and choose the right words to reach out to users looking for your particular services and, at the same time, beat your competitors by ranking on the first results of search engines.
It’s all about understanding your potential audience and covering their needs.
The perfect keyword = term that makes your content rank higher in search engines and matches your users’ search intent.
5 free keyword research tools to take your SEO to the moon
There are tons of tools for keyword research out there that can help you create content that drives high-quality traffic to your website.
Services like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Majestic or Moz are great to find trends and group ideas for specific topics and keywords.
However, if you are on a tight budget and are looking for free keyword research tools, then the following alternatives can really be very useful to suit your needs.
1. Google keyword tool: Google AdWords Keyword Planner
This is probably one of the most obvious choices, but Google AdWords: Keyword Planner is the perfect free tool to discover the most valuable terms on Google, which for many is the best search engine.
It’s true that this tool is mainly aimed at creating Google Ads, so it’s more powerful when it comes to providing terms for paid search, but Keyword Planner can also be a good free option to start with when developing your SEO content strategy.
All you need to do is to set up a Google account, enter a term, a phrase or a URL as a seed, and discover a lot of keyword ideas.
Results show relevant data for each suggestion like average monthly searches, paid competition and top page bid estimates (high and low).
You can find plenty of ideas for keywords to use on your SEO content marketing strategy with a simple search, but if you want to go the extra mile, you can add your competitors’ domains to get an insight of what terms they are using.
The best way to do so is by using their site pages, rather than their root domains.
In addition to boost your SEO, if you are also thinking about launching a PPC campaign on Google Ads, then Keyword Planner’s forecast is the perfect tool.
You can get a forecast for your ad group of keywords, and find some valuable information such as clicks, impressions, CTR, average CPC and maximum CPC or cost.
AdWords Keyword Planner may not be as detailed or complete as other paid services like Ahrefs or Moz when looking for terms to use to increase your SEO, but you can identify some really good terms, especially if you combine it with other Google keyword tools like Trends or Search Console.
In Google Trends, you can discover for free current search ideas that are relevant and trendy. It also gives you the option to compare keywords.
This tool lets you drill down into search popularity results by time period, location, language and category.
You can explore trends across Web, Image, News and YouTube Search as well as Google Shopping.
Google Search Console is a fantastic free tool to improve your website ranking and CTR.
You can get an insight about which keywords you are currently ranking for, their position, the exact webpage they appear as well as the average number of clicks, impressions and CTR for each of them.
You can filter the results over a time period, and also compare two different time frames.
2. LSIGraph
One of the secrets to streamline your keyword research is to know how to recognize good search term opportunities, and that means considering long-tail keywords (three or more words) and keyword families.
LSIGraph is a very effective tool for finding long search queries for free. The way this tool works is by generating longer keyword ideas that are semantically related to your main term.
You can identify dozens of long-tail keywords in LSIGraph that can be really useful, especially if you are creating engaging content for a niche market.
Long-tail keywords usually have lower search volumes, but also less competition as they are quite specific. That means they are easier to rank for.
The traffic that you get with long-tail terms is more qualified: they speak to your target audience!
The free version of LSIgraph offers information about keywords’ volume, CPC, and level of competition.
Keep in mind that the tool provides a limited number of searches per day on this version.
If you upgrade to Premium, you will be able to filter your searches by country and language, search terms with no limits, discover the latent semantic value (LSV), which helps you identify the most profitable keywords, and get a a list of top performing content (a selection of links from successful webpages using that specific keyword).
3. Ubersuggest
Another free keyword research tool that is worth a try is Ubersuggest by the very well-known content marketing expert, Neil Patel.
Ubersuggest works in a similar way as other paid services like Ahrefs or SEMRush.
You can get amazing keyword suggestions, but also enjoy from other features (some of them from the Premium plan) to improve your SEO like, for example, the option to get backlink data and domain overviews, the option to do crawling analysis and site audits or the one to receive a report with Top SEO pages from your website or your competitors’ sites.
Ubersuggest’s recommended search terms are based on Google SERPs, and the data from Google Ads.
To start with, simply type a domain name or a term on the search box, select your language and country, and find new keywords and content ideas.
This tool provides relevant information for each term like search volume (mobile and desktop), SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, cost per click (CPC), the number of backlinks and domain score for the average web page that ranks in the Top 10 with this particular keyword, age range from searchers, and the number of people clicking on the SEO results.
You can also compare search volume by months, get some keyword ideas related to your main term, and filter your results by categories: suggestions, related, questions, prepositions and comparisons.
4. KWFinder
“Keywords with low SEO difficulty and high search volume.” This is exactly what KWFinder by Mangool promises to SEO specialists.
This is one of the most recommended free keyword research tools, and the reason is simple: it offers valuable data about keywords, backlinks and SERPs information.
When you enter your query or domain in the search box, and right after selecting an specific location and language, you are presented with a panel that contains keyword propositions related to your main term and details about trend results, search volumes, CPC, PPC and keyword difficulty.
KWFinder also provides a SERP overview where you can see the first page results from Google for your selected term.
In that section you can gain extra information such as Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA), Citation Flow (CF), Trust Flow (TF), number of external backlinks, number of Facebook shares, overall link profile strength, and estimated visits for the given URLs.
One of the most useful features about KWFinder is the uploader where you can import your own list of terms from a CVS or TXT file.
There is an option to type several terms, and conduct a group search as well.
This feature allows you to organize your keywords into lists. You can edit, export or delete them anytime you want.
If you are obsessed with keeping track of your queries, then you will love the search history tab too!
5. Answer The Public
Have you ever played to one of these predictive text games on social networks where someone starts a phrase, and then you use the autofill option of your smartphone to finish the sentence?
Answer The Public, in a way, works like these games. Well, or at least, the same way as Google Search works.
The process goes like this: the tool uses autocomplete data from search engines, and then cranks out phrases and questions that actually people are asking around an specific keyword.
It’s like entering on people’s minds.
If your goal is to find long-tail terms or get relevant content ideas for your future articles, then Answer The Public is a great choice.
The service generates topic ideas considering specific terms, and answering the Five Ws (“who?”, “what?”, “when?”, “where?”, and “why?”) plus other categories like “how?”, “can”, “are”, “which?” and “will”.
One of the most original aspects about Answer The Public is the way findings are presented.
Users can see search results displayed in two different formats: one is a wheel with snippets (a great option if you love visual layouts), and the other is a tab-style list.
Results are categorized by questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabeticals, and related.
The free option allows you to run several trials, but as the tools mentioned earlier (with the exception of the ones by Google), this one also limits your daily searches.
With a Premium account you can type as many queries as you want, download data as CVS files, compare results over time, export images in high resolution or hide unwanted suggestions.
Have your tried a free keyword research tool? Tell me in the comments what are your favourite ones.
