Ok, I can guess what you’re thinking,
Can free keyword research tools actually save life?
“Yes and No”
YES. Do you know how much money you could be saving if you decide to take a break on those expensive keyword research tools and check out the free ones, if they can still perform the same job?
You can save hundreds of dollars, if not thousands by exploring these free tools to carry out a successful keyword research.
But,
Can saving these dollars save your life?
Money can certainly facilitate saving your life. It terms of paying for unforeseen challenges that might lead to loss of life. Can also pay for vaccines, clean water, etc..
Make sense?
AND NO. Be it a money itself, paid or free keyword tool cannot save your life. They are all inanimate objects and have no direct impact to enhance your living directly.
Free Keyword research tools: Are they worth my time?
Yeah I know how much of a time-saver a paid SEO tool can be, but have you tried measuring the efficiency level when it comes to using a free keyword research tool vs a paid tool?
It may be painfully slow in getting potential ranking keywords for your SEO campaign when you are new to these free tools, but I’d tell you that the process isn’t as tedious as most Premium keyword users emphasize about it.
It just takes a little time to get the perfect keyword research process that works best for your niche.
It might sound as a surprise that you can definitely spend same time on keyword research process using both tools.
Don’t get me wrong here!
There are lots of awesome premium SEO tools out there, but I’m only talking about keyword research tools for SEO.
To be sincere I’ve tried one of the paid keyword research tools [name withheld] and I see no difference atall when compared with (combination of) some of these free tools.
The reason why you should give some of these free keyword generator tools a try is that; some of these paid tools can’t carry out all the complete keyword research process from one dashboard;
- Putting together initial lists of search terms
- Checking the traffic volume of these keywords
- Sorting the keywords with ranking potentiality
- Check for keyword difficulty
- Monitor keywords for ranking
So as you can see, the keyword research processes are likely to be done manually and might require 2 – 3 tools to get the job perfectly done.
Which you know a paid SEO keyword research tool wouldn’t make the task less manual, unless you want to skip some steps.
How effective are the free keyword research tools for an SEO campaign?
Certainly, some free keyword research tools are similarly effective as some of the paid ones, but depending on some criteria like:
- Competition
- Search Volume
- And relevance to your niche
- And many more…
Before you go after a keyword you wish to rank for, what’s the first thing you do?
You got it right! Open up your browser and Google search for the keyword term.
You have to check how tough the competition of that keyword is. Do these results match your query?
Is the competition tight?
Does these websites on the front page look familiar?
Simply check their DAs and backlinks using a free online backlink checker; smallseotools
If they are top Dogs? Then it’s a no no!
Low Dogs? Then maybe to the next process of checking search volume and other metrics.
The above steps can be carried out inside a single premium tool without much difference in results, apart from the time and friction likely to be encountered.
So the question now is…
Should I still go for a free research tool?
If your SEO campaign isn’t on large scale why waste your money? Go with a free tool.
You can settle with a free keyword suggest tool if you’re a small business owner, blogger or an SEO freelancer. Just for tasks on a minimal level.
All you need to do is combine these free tools; I guarantee you will come out with undiscovered long-tail keywords that will bring pretty amazing results.
I have been saved couples of times by combining these tools for my organic keyword research.
If you run an SEO agency or does Search Engine Optimization for handful of clients, then you wouldn’t want to delay your tasks by using a free SEO tool for your keyword research.
Now enough of the Gossips!
If you’re in the league of part-time players like me, then let’s check out these keyword tools.
If you want to get all terms related to your keyword then Ubersuggest got you covered on this.
I’ve never seen keyword research tool that gives one such a massive keyword ideas straight from the BIG G’s bosom.
Whether for SEO keyword research or PPC keyword research, Ubersuggest keyword generator will pour out all the needed data you need to conquer in your rankings.
This tool has no limitation or whatsoever.
Some of the things I love about Ubersuggest is that it gives me hundreds of long-tail keyword variations, keyword volume and keyword difficulty to aid my research.
How do you perform keyword research on Ubersuggest?
Just go to the official website webpage of Ubersuggest on Neilpatel’s Blog
Type in your desired keyword(s) [I will use “Plumbing tools”] into the search bar and select where you want your keywords to be generated from. [I choosed web] then select your language preference. [English/United states].
Then click the “LOOK UP” button and wait for 5 seconds….
Here flows our river of keywords with 918 keyword ideas, the average keyword volume, Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and Competition.
You can choose to select suggestions from only Google keyword planner or Google keyword suggest.
Filter your needed keywords within your search results
Negate the keywords you would like to exclude. One keyword perline
Navigate through the keywords and export your desired keywords as a CSV file into your computer for further evaluation.
As you can see this wonderful tool even makes the work very lighter for you, especially the export option after the addition and subtraction thing.
Since I discovered this amazing free keyword research tool, I no longer guess or formulate keyword questions that are likely to be asked by Web searchers from my head. This tool has got me covered full time!
Not only that, with Answer the Public you also find.
- Comparisons
- Prepositions
- Alphabetical keywords
- And related searches
What this keyword tool does is that it scrapes all the web forums, boards, blogs, and search engines for your keyword term and delivers the results to you like a pregnant maid.
To our “Plumbing tool” research, check out the questions above for the; why, when, how, can etc.
The prepositions below are quite much for this search term… wow!
The comparisons below too are also worth the time. Plumbing tools and accessories sounds reasonable right?
You can go further and check out the alphabetical keyword and related terms.
There are lot to dig in here buddie!
You can choose to add and export the entire keyword lists as an excel document. Up above the image
This tools has already done the most of the brainstorming for you, so your job now is to weed simply export your keywords and weed out the fluffy ones.
Some of you are familiar with Google trends – as a free Google tools that shows you a related keyword term and how search interest varies by regions, dates, categories and search type.
I entered our target keyword above and you saw how the keyword has been trending so far for the past 12 months, worldwide.
Our keyword has been kind of stable and I don’t think it is going rise more that – atleast not soon. Let us see the trend for the past 90 days:
There was a slight increment around mid July and second week of August. You just have to keep on tweaking this both by dates and most importantly your location if you’re targeting a keyword for local ranking.
You can check out the related searches for more keyword ideas for you to really know how viable your potential keyword might be.
Here are the top search queries for our keyword:
Here are the rising queries
Google Trends is such is goldmine in revealing what some of the secrets most of your competitors will never find. It keeps you ahead with the latest trending results for your SEO campaign.
And the next on our free keyword tool for SEO research is
-
SEOChat Keyword Suggest tool
SEOchat is Google keyword suggest tool that mines Google autocomplete and shows you terms that likely relates your keywords.
It creates a list of keyword phrases that all begins with your inputted terms.
This free keyword research tool does not only work as Google keyword suggestion tool, but also features:
- YouTube keyword suggestion tool
- Amazon keyword suggest and
- Bing keyword suggestion utility
With our “plumbing tool” research, you can see the amazing set of suggestions for each of the search engine platforms above. The keywords are further sorted in alphabetical order, if you keep scrolling down.
You get to uncover numerous ideas here.
Another interesting thing about this tool is that it has 3 levels which can help you dig deeper to gain more insights about your keywords.
This tool is indeed worth the try.
-
SEOBook Keyword Research Tool
This is yet another amazing tool that I have recommended to friends, clients and business partners, because it has couples of keyword research features that most of its counterpart doesn’t offer.
But you have to sign-up to able to access all those features.
SEOBook keyword research tool offers you an export option to excel just like Answer The Public and Ubersuggest Kw tool.
It also offers you keyword volume for Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines.
This can serve as alternative to the famous Google keyword planner tool for SEOs and keyword suggestion tool for PPC marketers.
You can generate massive number of list keywords using SEOBook keyword tool
SEOBook also features some other SEO utilities such as:
- Competitive research tool
- Keyword rank checking tool
- Domain name finder
- Keyword comparison tool
- Duplicate checker and many more…
Many marketers I know who that uses this tool never regretted using SEOBook.
Next on our free tools for keyword research is
Most people do not see Seedkeywords as keyword research tool, maybe because it involves a keyword finding process that is not fully completed inside this platform.
I see this tool as a great help for marketers, even outside the scope of performing a keyword research.
I might be wrong tho…
Let’s see how to use Seedkeywords to carry out a keyword research process:
While on the Homepage click the “Create a Scenario” button and you will see the below instruction with a box to input your question
Now what you’d type in here is a question around “our keyword”; plumbing tool.
You can type in questions like, “What are the quality requirements for your ideal plumbing tool” or any question related to plumbing tool. Just create a reasonable scenario which can be answered to.
Then a special seed keyword URL will be generated for you, so it can be distributed and shared to your friends, social media followers, email lists and people that can give you an answer to this query.
Once they click the link, they will be directed to the below page where they can input their answers.
You can access these responses yourself by using same link to see the results of the scenario.
Soovle happens to be one the few SEO tools I personally find very user-friendly and also an easy to use free keyword research tool for marketers.
Soovle gives you plentiful suggestions based on your inputted keyword from the below search engines:
- Google Search Engine
- Bing Search Engine
- Yahoo
- Amazon
- YouTube
- Wikipedia And
- Answers.com
Let us look-up for our keyword term “plumbing tools” with Soovle
As you keep typing into the search box, the more keyword ideas Soovle generates.
This is the ideal keyword revealer for content marketers that are having a bad day coming up with content ideas.
Another reason why you should try this tool is that you never have to stress over waiting for a load time for your keyword to be fetched.
As you keep on typing, variations of keyword suggestions will be generated for you.
If you a niche blogger or a local business owner, then IMforSMB Bulk Keyword Generator is the right keyword research tool for you.
With this tool you can simply generate your desired keyword by choosing your type of business/services:
Enter your location and click “Generate Keywords”:
Here comes our list of keywords
You can tweak this as much as you like, there are a lot of ideas you can get with this tool. As you can see below, we got about 84 new keywords ideas from the “plumbing” niche.
Keywords Everywhere is one of the best free keyword research tools with traffic estimation and other search engine metrics like; Cost-Per-Click, Search volume, competition for your any kind of keyword.
This keyword tool comes as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox browsers.
Keyword Everywhere keeps showing you Google keyword search volume, CPC, and competition data for every keywords on Google search results and WebPages.
I already have this tool installed on my Chrome web browser. This can also serve as replacement for Google Keyword Planner for most marketers.
It helps me a lot to uncover long-tail keywords for any type of keyword I’m interested in going after.
Once you are satisfied with your selected keywords, you can download them in CSV or PDF format.
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Q & A Sites
Question and Answer sites can serve as a great tool for digging out keyword ideas for your blog contents.
To be honest with you, I have never written a blog post without visiting at least 2 – 4 Q & A forums or sites to get topic ideas for my blog contents
Why it is advisable to use Question and Answer sites for developing your content is that; you can actually see and have maximum insights about the actual type of questions real humans ask.
Instead of relying fully on paid or free keyword research tools.
Below are some of the Q & A sites for free keyword ideas:
- Quora
- Yahoo Answers
- Stack Overflow
- Answers.com
- LinkedIn Answers
- WikiAnswers
Protip: You can also do a Facebook custom search to search for related terms and topics around your desired keyword. You’re sure to get helpful comments and massive suggestions from FB groups, profiles and pages.
Other FREE keyword research tools
Below are some of the tools for keyword research that are also free (I haven’t used them yet) and I’ve heard a lot of good commendations about them.
This is also a great tool for a new website owners, and it gives you access for the first 30 keyword searches. Wordstream is a great keyword niche finder for money site owners or local business owners.
With this tool you can get: Long-tail keyword ideas, Meta keywords, PPC keywords, and Search Engine related terms.
This is a tool that combines several lists of keywords and then generates permutations based on the entered keywords. It is so simple to use and efficient according marketers that has utilized this tool
As the name implies, this literally shits a whole lot of keywords and generate suggestions once you input you keyword or string of kws.
You just have to allow it to keep shitting keyword ideas for you. It works by mining Google Autocomplete
This yet another keyword tool that comes as a chrome extension that I see to be very cool, although I haven’t used this one.
This tool digs out relevant keywords, search volume, competition and opportunity level from every web page visited. It also has an export feature for your data.
KeywordTool.io also mines Google Autocomplete like KeywordShitter and some of the SEO tools out there.
This tool gives SEOs a lot of keyword suggestions once they enter their initial keyword. And it is also generates keywords based on Google related terms.
KeywordIn combines multiple lists of keywords and specially designed to save marketers time taken to generate a handful of keywords.
My Final Thoughts
There is no tool that could be more effective than using your initiative to understand the search intent of your prospective audience.
You have to be empathic and know their struggles, pain and have clear understanding of their needs, for you to actually crush it.
This will help you in knowing how to kick-off your keyword research and know the type of metrics to look out for during your research.
With that said
You can use any of these free keyword research tools with no limitation whatsoever.
Although if you still consider an advanced tool, please do checkout the ones with a reasonable amount of trial period before you stake in your bucks.
Here are some of the paid keyword research tools:
- KwFinder
- AhrefS
- Serpstat
- SpyFu
- SEMRush
- Moz Kw explorer
- Many More….
Did I miss or forget to mention any best keyword tool for free research?
Let me know in the comment section.
Kindly share this piece if you find it useful for your SEO research
very insightful and a lot to take in thanks for sharing so much information