Before going to our list of the best keyword research tools for SEO. Let’s see what actually keyword research is.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is one of the most crucial and basic SEO tasks that include searching for popular phrases and words people enter into search engines. It basically is a way of putting efforts to figure out what to rank for. Researching keywords offers marketers a more enhanced understanding of how high the demand is for specific keywords and how difficult it would be to compete for those phrases or terms in the organic search results, giving some direction to optimization efforts.
The primary or basic foundation of SEO is keyword research. Afterward, other factors such as on-page optimization, writing SEO friendly content, a great UX, content that meets user intent, and some other factors come into the picture. Once you will have all this in place, you can anticipate a notable amount of traffic from search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex, and others.
Several companies invest thousands of dollars to pay for keyword research to obtain such targeted content.
For your website to rank organically, the keywords you pick for digital marketing efforts are crucial. Picking the right keywords isn’t always simple as you will require a lot of data to understand if a specific keyword will workout for you.
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Now, as you know the basics of keyword research and understood how valuable it can be, let’s move ahead to discuss types of keyword research and some overview about keyword research tools.
Luckily there are several tools available that can help you figure out which keyword works best for your web strategy. Mainly there are two kinds of keyword research tools:
- Basic Keyword research: Use the seed Keyword to look for profitable Keywords
- Competitor based Keyword research: Look for proven keywords that are helping other sites to gain the website traffic.
In our opinion, Competitor based Keyword research is more efficient because the intent of the keyword research is to search out profitable keywords. And what could be more profitablethan something that is already working out for someone?
You just need a page targeting such profitable keyword and take full advantage of keyword research.
Some of the best keyword research tools for SEO optimization
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner tool is one of the popular and widely utilized keyword research tools.
The sole reason for it being so popular is because it’s free and directly integrated with Google AdWords.
You need an AdWords account to begin using this tool
- Features: One of the biggest higlights of the Keyword Planner tool is the broad information it provides on Google.
- Limitations: You can’t identify how your website or a specific keyword perform on other search engines.
- Pricing: No cost, free to use
Keyword Planner tool is a basic tool that is good for the early stage of a website’s SEO.
However, if you need more detailed and competitive analysis, we recommend choosing other Keyword research tools on the list.
SEM Rush
If you ask people which is the simplest keyword research tool for a blogger? The maximum of the people will say “SEMRUSH”. SEMRUSH is not just a basic keyword research tool, it is much more than that. It allows you to do keyword research in various ways:
- Search for keywords using Seed Keyword
- Search for keywords that drive traffic to competitors
- Keyword gap analysis
The easiest part of this tool is that you can find the keyword from a URL. You just need to add a URL (or your competitor’s URL) and it will display you all the keyword that rank a page or complete website.
Along with the Keyword data, you can watch or observe the monthly search traffic, keyword difficulty, CPC for PPC.
Another handy feature of SEMRush is its Keyword suggestions, where it displays related keywords and keyword variations. This helps in discovering more search term that you could target.
This makes its simpler for you to identify long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords that you can target to defeat your competitors.
You can obtain in-depth keyword such as:
- Keyword traffic volume
- Keyword difficulty score
- Adsense CPC
- Search engine reports
- And other details
Additionally, it offers features like:
- Keyword Manager: This allows you to add keywords in a list and view the updated data. Keyword Manager helps in better management of the keywords
- Keyword difficulty: To check the keyword difficulty score
- Backlink analysis: It additionally suggests the exact websites from which you should take backlinks inorder to rank#1 in the Google search.
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool
Ahrefs is one of the most famous keyword tools out there in the market.
Ahrefs offer extensive detail which also includes the Keyword difficulty. Ahrefs utilizes clickstream data to further show how many click you will get from the search engine. You can utilize the Keyword generator tool to generate ideas for Google, Bing, Amazon, YouTube, and a few other search engines.
This is quite beneficial after the integration of the knowledge graph because several keywords may have huge traffic but few clicks from the search engines. The reason for this is because the answers is displayed directly on search result.
What stands out Ahrefs keyword research tool is its appealing UI and a huge amount of data it offers. Several other features offered by Ahrefs are SEO site audit, Backlink analysis.
Conclusion
I hope the list of Keyword research tools mentioned in this article might help you in choosing the right tools