Keyword research tools

Here are some free keyword tools to help kickstart your SEO with zero investment:

• Google Trends

Google Trends visualizes the relative search popularity of a keyword over time. Search volumes are averages taken across many months or years.

• Keyword Generator

Keyword Generator finds up to 150 keyword ideas for any seed keyword. For the first ten keywords on each list, we also show the Keyword Difficulty (KD) score. This is a number between 0–100 that estimates ranking difficulty. Generally speaking, the higher it is, the more backlinks you’ll need to rank. You can also use the Keyword Generator to find keyword ideas for Bing, YouTube, and Amazon. Just switch the search engine at the top of the page.

• Keyword Sheeter

If you want to generate a lot of keyword ideas fast, this is the tool for you. It pulls around 1,000 ideas per minute, and you can export the results for free in one click. The only downside to Keyword Sheeter is that it’s quite basic.

It doesn’t show search volumes or trends data, and it doesn’t group keywords as Keyword Planner does.

• Answer the Public

Answer the Public finds questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabeticals, and related searches.

• Keyword Surfer

Keyword Surfer is a free Chrome extension that shows estimated global and monthly search volumes for any query typed into Google. The only downside is that there’s no way to get search volumes in bulk.

That said, bulk research isn’t the aim of this extension. It’s more for assessing queries as you browse the web.

• Keyworddit

Keyworddit is a unique tool that pulls keyword ideas from Reddit. Enter a subreddit, and it’ll mine the titles and comments of threads to find up to 500 keywords. 

This tool is a fantastic starting point if you know little or nothing about a niche.

For example, if you want to start a blog about paleo dieting but know nothing about the topic, pull ideas from /r/paleo.

This tells you that paleo dieters care about things like:

• Low carb meals;
• Slow cooker recipes;
• Grass-fed produce;
• Etc.
  
  Google Search Console

Google Search Console helps you track your website’s performance in organic search. This means it shows a lot of data about the keywords that you already rank for.

Sort the report by CTR from low to high. This often uncovers keywords that you’re ranking for but never targeted. If any of these have lots of impressions and a low click-through rate, it could be worth targeting that keyword with a new page.

• Questiondb

Questiondb finds the questions people are asking about a specific topic. It pulls these from a database of 48M questions sourced from Reddit. Questions are sorted by popularity, but you can also sort by topic. This is a super useful feature because it also groups questions together. This is useful when writing blog posts, as it helps you understand which questions to answer.

• Bulk Keyword Generator

Bulk Keyword Generator is a keyword research tool for local SEO. It generates keywords based on industry type.