The Top 6 Keyword Research Tools For SEO

The highly-coveted spot at the top of a search results page doesn’t come easy. Companies jockey for position on customer’s screens with ferocious intensity, each trying to be the first one clicked. And without a thorough understanding of what users search for, and why, they’re doomed to fail. That’s why keyword research is such a fundamental aspect of search engine optimization. SEO-minded companies must find out which searches generate the most sales and apply their resources accordingly. Here are some of the best tools currently available for making keyword research as efficient (and effective) as possible.

Google AdWords Keyword Planner : Google’s AdWords started 16 years ago, and now generates a vast majority of the company’s revenue, and for a good reason: the program has a proven track record at generating clicks by pairing short ads with selected keywords. It makes sense, then, that its keyword research tool isn’t an afterthought. The tool lets you find out the volume of searches for given keywords, and forecast future potential keyword traffic based on its vast troves of data. And the tool even lets you combine and group keyword lists with new keywords to generate new possibilities. It’s a great place to start, and some users might not need to look any further. Best of all, it’s available for free.

SEMRush : SEMRush’s “all-in-one marketing toolkit” is a secret weapon for many savvy SEO experts, although with endorsements from eBay, Disney, and Amazon, it’s not much of a secret anymore. Although it does a massive number of things, when it comes to research, it’s great for tracking your position on multiple keywords, and the Organic Research feature lets you check what your site is already ranking for, so you can optimize for desirable keywords and discard content bringing in unprofitable clicks. It’s also great for competitive spying; you can run a report on a competitor and “hijack” their keywords by optimizing your own site to outrank them. It’s downright devious.

Keyword Explorer : This tool from Moz is a great way to research, prioritize, and finalize the keywords you want to target, providing a wealth of data with each search. You can try 2 queries a day for free; do it now with a phrase of your choice and look at the treasure trove of info Keyword Explorer spits out. Keyword Explorer scores your keyword for difficulty, like most tools, but goes further by providing scores for opportunity (estimating the click-through rate of results for that search), and priority, a more complex data point taking opportunity, difficulty, and your own custom importance settings into account. It’s for the most intrepid explorers and rewards deep diving.

KWFinder : The folks behind KWFinder are in the business of quickness. The company, called mangools, also makes SERPChecker and SERPWatcher, great tools for monitoring search engine result pages, but their flagship product is an extremely easy-to-use tool for finding keywords to target, particularly long-tail keywords with the potential for easy ranking. It also spits out a simple set of data on the SEO difficulty of each keyword, so decision making about which keywords to target is a snap.

Google Trends : Yes, we already covered the amazing functions of Google’s Keyword Planner, but Trends, which, unlike the planner, is accessible without an AdWords account, can also be a valuable asset for keyword research in its own right. Use Trends to find related searches for your keywords, compare keywords against each other over time and in different geographical areas, and zero in on the right moments to post content. It’s free, it’s very easy to use, and it might just spark something brilliant.

Answer the Public : This site’s artsy, irreverent design doesn’t look at first glance like it’d be home to a great research tool, but don’t be fooled: Answer the Public (ATP) was built by a team with years of experience in PR and SEO to do something very specific, but very useful. You type in a keyword, and ATP scrapes the Web for questions that people have searched using that keyword. It generates an attractive, easily parsed results page with the questions broken down by “what,” “where,” and so on, as well as pairings of the keyword with various prepositions. It’s an immensely useful brainstorming tool; when you’re in a rut and just can’t put yourself in the mind of the consumer, Answer the Public generates a multitude of data to let you know exactly what the public wants to know. And knowing the question in advance makes it easier to be the one there to answer it.