Hello blogger, how do you do keyword research for your blog? To start with, do you actually do keyword research or you just write as you feel like. In this post, I will show you amazing free keyword research tools for beginners.
As a beginner, I know your budget is not fat and large enough to subscribe for premium keyword research tools that will help your contents go well. This is the reason why this post on the free keyword research tools is coming your way. In the blogging world, the competition for ranking is increasing daily. Top bloggers spend thousands of dollars in keyword research yearly. The keyword research budget for some of these top bloggers are more than the yearly revenue of some of startup blogs. For example, some blogs do not even make up to $100 in three months, while some of the key players in the industry spends more than $500 monthly just for keyword research.
Important Highlights That You Need
With this, you will be totally wrong to try and compete with them. This is why you should start as small as you can and then grow with time. But then, before I list the tools, let me give some highlights that will stand as a guideline in your keyword research goal.
Your keyword will determine the quality of content you create: The kind of keyword you choose will determine the kind of contents you write. As such, if you pay attention to writing quality contents, then more attention should be paid to doing thorough keyword research. Once you master the act of keyword research then your pathway to quality contents becomes brighter.
Go for long tail keywords: As a newbie in the industry, make no mistake about it. Don’t ever focus on short tail keywords, you will not succeed in it. For whatever niche you have chosen, there are key players there who have dominated the niche over a long period of time. As such you cannot come and displace them overnight. It is practically impossible. This does not mean that you cannot rank at all for any keyword you choose. The point is that the big guys in the industry has colonized the world of short-tail keywords and you do not stand a chance to win them. The only secret is to look for long tail keywords and write on.
For example, if I choose to rank for a keyword like keyword research tools with this post, I will surely miss the target. This is because blogs like Backlinko, Ahrefs, Wordstream, Themeisle, Keywordtool, wpbeginner, Zapier, SEMrush and wordtracker dominates the first page at the time of writing this post. While Neilpatel, mailchimp, Kwfinder, Moz, Startupbonsai, Search engine Journal, Shoutmeloud, optinmonster and hubspot dominates the second page. If you do your studies well, you will find out that these are all giants in the industry. Even the third and fourth pages are also dominated by giants.
But then, choosing a long tail keyword like free keyword research tools for beginners will give me better chance of ranking. Though the search volume may be low, but then with time, it will increase. So as earlier stated, make no mistake about it, don’t go for short tail keywords. Go for the long tail. If you can successfully rank for several long tail keywords, then your chances of ranking for short tail keywords will start increasing.
Target keywords with a minimum of 1000 monthly search volume: In choosing a keyword to build contents for, pay attention to the search volume of the keyword. A keyword that gets between 10-100 or 100-1000 search volume a month may not be the best. Except if it is a seasonal keyword which tends to increase in search volume in some seasons. Some of those keywords may have to do with events like valentine, independence, Christmas, vacation and so on. Apart from seasonal keywords, go for keywords that has above 1000 monthly search volume. This will help you get some number of traffic daily.
Write based on keywords: Some bloggers write contents as they feel. This is not in the best practice for successful blogging. If you write as you feel, you may end up coining quality contents that nobody is interested in.
According to Magnus Linklater, Effective content marketing hinges on creating useful, engaging material, but even the best article will go unread if it’s answering a question that no one is asking”.
Keyword research gives you insight into what people are searching for on the internet. As such, if you want to succeed in your blogging career, you must understand what people are searching for and then build contents to suit them. If you write without knowing what people are searching for, no one will be interested in your contents. It will just be likened to opening a phone shop in a thick rural environment where you sell only iPhone. The people may not patronize you because their one year income may not be up to the cost of one of the iPhone. As such, ensure and endeavor to find out what people are searching for before you write contents.
Having listed some of these point, let us proceed to outline the free keyword research tools for beginners. Although, they are not totally free, they have premium versions, but you can leverage the free version for a start.
#1 Google Suggest
Google suggest makes the top of the list of free keyword research tools for beginners. As popularly known, Google is the most widely used search engine on the internet. It is currently the most visited site on the Internet above Facebook and Youtube. With this, Google build a tool known as Google suggest that is integrated into the search engine. When a searcher conducts a search on Google, he is shown links to websites with helpful and useful information regarding what he searched for. While Google does this, it also displays a list of suggestions for the searcher to choose from. These suggestions are lists of what other people are searching and they are closely related to what you are searching for.
With this in mind as a content creator, this tool can be of immense value and significance to you because it is coming directly from Google. This is how it works. Since Google is the most use search engine, it has a repository for all searches conducted via the platform. With this repository, Google is able to know what people are searching at all times. Also, it is able to know searches that are related to what you are searching for. As such, your search phrase may not be proper for the information you are looking for. You can then rephrase your search query based on the suggestions Google made.
This suggestions are very helpful to content creators because the serve as free keywords to build contents for. Google tells you what people are searching for, if you want to rank on Google, build contents that will suit those search queries. This is just the simple logic. Let us show an example with the keyword, “high income skills”.
From the screenshot above, we searched for high income skills, but Google suggested other related keywords we could also rank for. Why did Google suggest these keywords?
Before now, you are aware that Google is the most used search engine on the internet with over 80% share in the search engine market. As such, about 5 billion searches are conducted on it daily. With this record, Google understands what people are searching for. To that end, these suggestions that are displayed as output when you search for a keyword is exactly what other people are searching for. This is Google’s way of telling you that other people are searching for so and so, why don’t you create content around one of those topics. This Google feature makes the top of our list because of its general acceptability and importance. Also, this tool is totally free. Here is an article that teaches you how to use this tool in detail
#2 Answerthepublic
AnswerThePublic is a free keyword research tool owned by Ubersuggest which is powered by NPdigital. It is an autocomplete tool that works with search engines like Google, Bing etc and then coin out useful phrases that could be attached to your intended keyword. It is a keyword research tool that functions like the Google suggest to suggest keywords for your searches. The algorithm for this tool works with Google to know what people are searching for.
Since this tool is not a search engine, it cannot tell what people actually wants. Thus, it is fed by the Google search engine. Since every content is written for people, this tool tells you exactly what people are searching for. Using the same keyword, “high income skill” on this tool, you will have lots of keyword ideas to choose from. These results are divided into 5 parts. Although, there are times the tools segments the result into more than 5 sections. The sections for this search phrase are shown below;
high income skills 8 related
It showed 8 related keyword ideas that has to do with the search phrase.
high income skills 16 comparisons
In this section, it shows 16 other comparisons to the search phrase. Any of these 16 comparisons are also highly related and demanded keywords.
high income skills 43 prepositions
The next section shows 43 propositions to the search term. Also, any of these could be an awesome keyword idea for your content.
high income skills 34 questions
This section shows 34 questions that has to do with the search term. Here, it adds where, why, how etc to the search phrase in order to properly answer the questions people are searching for.
high income skills 193 alphabeticals
In this section, more keywords are suggested to the searcher and they are arranged in alphabetical order. You can go to the platform to understand clearly how it works
How to Use this Tool
Once you click “Get Questions”, the page starts to render with the keywords found. The page is made up of two parts – the keyword wheel and the alphabetical keyword data. If you have the addon installed, you will see keyword metrics in both the sections. For the keyword wheel, you need to move your mouse over a keyword, and you will see a popup appear with the search volume and CPC, as shown in the image
The alphabetical results are shown in individual panels. The keyword volume and CPC are appended to the right of every keyword.
If you click on any of the keyword ideas displayed as output, it takes you to Google search engine where you will see contents on the said keyword.
NOTE: These results are not universal for all search term. The way this tool presents the results for this example above may not be the way it will for another example.
#3 Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is one of the most powerful Keyword research tools for bloggers and content creators. It is owned by NPdigital with the famous and popular SEO guru – Neil Patel as the head. Over the years, Neil Patel has grown to be one of the best SEO guys in the space. As such, his wealth of experience and those of his other team members put together were used to build this powerful tool for your keyword research purpose. Although this is a premium tool with matchless features, yet the free version permits 3 searches per day. If you are a new blogger, (depending on your niche) you may not write up to three contents daily.
In using this tool, you can narrow down your research to specific countries where you want to target. Actually, contents on blogs are not meant for everybody on the internet. Some contents are meant for students in Ghana while some are for Couples in Canada and so on. As such this tool is very effective in location based keyword research. Also, you can search for keywords in various languages. Your contents must not always be targeted to the English audience. This tool also helps you in a variety of languages. Ubersuggest does not only provide information about the searched keyword, it also brings ideas of related keywords you could rather choose. Here are some of the features of the tool;
Search volume: It shows the search volume of a particular keyword and categorizes it in levels of Low, Average and high. Keywords with higher search volume will tend to be better for your content.
SEO difficulty: Ubersuggest also shows the SEO difficulty of the keyword. What this means is how difficult it will be for your content to rank on the said keyword. The SEO difficulty is ranked from 0-100. The level of difficulty increases as the number increases. As such, writing a content because of the search volume may not be in the best practice, you need to also consider the SEO difficulty. When the SEO difficulty is high, it means that there are several sites that are already ranking for the keyword and the possibility of your content outranking them may not be visible. As such, you should choose keywords with high search volume and lesser SEO difficulty.
Paid Difficulty: This is one of the advantages of ubersuggest over other keyword research tools. There are several keywords that companies bid for in order to get to the top on search engine. For example, I may pay to rank for a keyword “High Income Skills” because ordinarily, the competition for the keyword is high and my chances of ranking is low. So paid difficulty, like SEO difficulty indicates how difficult paid traffic will deliver quality result. When the paid difficulty is high, it means that there are lots of other websites that have paid to also rank for the said keywords. Some of them pay far higher than you and as such, would be favoured more than you.
Cost Per Click: This shows how much advertisers are willing to pay for a particular keyword. When the keyword is highly demanded, many people will want to pay to secure a top spot in search engine. In paying, some may pay high in order to achieve their target.
Related keywords: The tool also displays a set of related keywords and several information about the keywords. As such, you may end up choosing another keyword instead of the one you intended.
Trend: Ubersuggest also shows the behavior of a particular keyword over time. It’s not enough that the keyword is in high demand today, will it still be in high demand tomorrow. For example, keywords on black Friday sales will not be in demand around February or June.
Content Ideas: This tool also outputs the websites that are ranking high for the said keyword. For example, if the keyword is “Pet Blogging”, this tool will show you the list of websites that ranks highest on the keyword. With this list of websites, you will be able to know what advantage they had that made them rank high on search engines. If you are able to find this out, you can then modify your content to be better that the ones on the website.
Backlinks: Since the tool shows the websites ranking for the keyword, it goes further to show the number of websites linking to that content. The higher the backlink the better for you. Remember that backlinks is one of Google’s ranking factor.
Social shares: Also, since it shows the websites that ranked well for the keyword, it also shows how many social shares each of those websites have. For Bing search engine, the social shares is among its ranking factors. As such, if your content has much social shares, it tends to perform better on Bing search.
Although the 3 keywords per day may be on the low side, yet half bread is better than none. It is assumed that you are running your blog on no budget, this tool may not give you all you need but atleast, it will guide you in the right path. Although for the free version, I recommend a combination of more than one of these tools listed here.
#4 Google Keyword Planner
The Google Keyword Planner is the first of the best free keyword research tools for beginners. I used this tools a couple of times and it was really amazing. As such, for your startup, I recommend this tool to you. In using this tool, you will get ideas of some related keywords you can also choose. You get an estimated search volume for the keyword, discover new keywords, get keyword forecast and lots more.
Here is how to use the Google Keyword Planner tool. Learn to play around with this tool and get familiar with it. One of the reason why I prefer this tool above others is because it was developed by Google. Google has the world largest and most used search engine. As a matter of fact, Google search engine controls more than 80% of all searches done on the internet. As such, the company is in the best place to tell us what keyword is better than the other. This is the advantage it has over other tools.
#5 Ahrefs
The premium version of the Ahrefs may not be affordable to startups. But the free version will also guide you in your keyword research. The limitation of this tool is that you check for results country by country. This means that if you want to check a keyword performance for 10 countries, you will have to run the search 10 times. This may actually be time consuming, but it is really worth it for newbies.
Also, the results for the keywords are separated by search engine. This means that if you search for the performance of a keyword in Google, you will need to do same thing for Bing. The results will not be general for every search engine. In this way, keyword research may prove to be difficult, but when you begin to achieve results, you will enjoy your effort. One of the best performing content on the blog is titled “Dogpile search engine”. It was through the free ahrefs tool I discovered the keyword and built content around it. Blogging has never been easy at any stage, as such, you must ensure that you put in your best in keyword research.
#6 KWFinder
KWFinder is another amazing keyword research tool that helps with keyword ideas to build quality contents. This tool is not totally free but has a 10 days free trials after which you subscribe for the paid version. It helps searchers find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. With this tool, you can conduct your searches by keywords or domain and get amazing results for your query.
This tool is in-depth in that it shows the keyword trend, search volume, CPC, PPC and Keyword Density. These are basically the things needed in a good keyword research. Also, you could conduct a general search or limit your search to specific countries. Additionally, you can also conduct your search for all languages or still limit it to specific languages. This tool also stores the history of all searches you have conducted on it. As such, you can always refer to your previous searches for anything.
#7 Semrush
Semrush is also another free keyword research tools that should be mentioned here. Do not forget that most of these free tools have their premium versions. As such, they are not completely free. Semrush is one of those amazing tools. In order to use this free tool, Semrush works with Yoast SEO plugin on your site to deliver the keyword research tool. If you use the yoast SEO plugin, then you can as well make use of Semrush because of the seamless integration between the two. It provides 10 free keyword research trials per day, although the result would not be as detailed as the paid version. To be able to use this tool, follow the steps below
- Click on the Add new post on your wordpress dashboard
- Navigate to the Yoast SEO plugin icon on the right side of you dashboard.
- On the Yoast SEO plugin, you will see Schema, SEO, readability and social. Click on SEO
- Enter the keyword you want to get information about on the keyword phrase textbox and click on get related keyphrases.
- Having done this, you can proceed to try as much as 10 keyword phrases of your choice
NOTE: To do this, you must first create and account with Semrush and be fully logged in. This tool provides 10 output per search. Although the results of the searched keyphrase is limited to specified country. This is to say that you search for keywords per country. The result also shows the search volume of the keyword and the keyword trend. The keyword trend shows the performance of the keyword over time.
#8 Google trend
Google trend is a completely free keyword research tools. It helps you with keyword ideas based on what is been searched for in various locations and time. For example, this tool will tell you what was the most popular search today or any specific day. It also tell you the behavior of a particular keyword. What this means is that you will be able to know how the said keyword has been behaving over time. At what time is the keyword at its peak level of demand and at what time is it less demanded. This will help you know which keywords are seasonal and which are demanded frequently. With this, you will be able to make the best keyword decisions for your contents.
According to Wikipedia, Google Trends analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time. It also allows the user to compare the relative search volume of searches between two or more terms. It also has the ability to categorize and organize the data, with special attention given to the breakdown of information by geographical areas.
#9 Wordstream
Wordstream is an online marketing tool developed by LOCALiQ that offers a free keyword research tools to content creators and marketers. It is a tool with detailed and indepth features that can keep you on top of your content marketing career. As such, while you work with a low budget for your keyword research activities, you should consider using this tool as it provides amazing results when compared to other tools. This is a proof that the tool delivers quality results for your keyword query.
This tool partners with Google keyword finder in order to track certain and relevant information like monthly search volume, top of page bid (low range), top of page bid (high range) and competition. In this tool, you have one basic search box where you will input your keyword and then two other drop downs. One of the drop down is where you will choose the country to target your search. This will help you find out relevant information about a keyword in a particular country. Although, if you search for the keyword information in Canada, it does not mean that your content will only focus on Canada. As such, to target audience in various countries, search for the keyword information in various countries.
The second drop dropdown will permit you to choose the category you want to search for. Although, this is not a feature that is common with other tools but is also helps to get specific information about the keyword in question.
#10 Keyword sheeter
Keyword sheeter is another tool for keyword research, although is it not totally free. You can access most of its features through a paid subscription but then the free services can still go a long way in helping you do keyword research properly. You can search for keywords for contents, images, news, YouTube etc using this tool. Another amazing feature of the keyword sheeter is that is has about 15 language integrations that can help you get quality result, even beyond English speaking countries. This too; shows the Search Volume CPC Bids, Exact Keyword Results, All in Title Results Checker, Top 100 SERPs, Term Explorer Difficulty Report, Full Sheet Report, Full Search Engine SERP report and lots of amazing features for you.
#11 Wordtracker
This list of the free keyword research tools will not be complete without mentioning Wordtracker. This tool is another free keyword research tool that will help you in your keyword research journey. For every search you perform, this tool also gives you a list of related keywords to help you with a wider and large scope. It generates results based on some of the following metrics; Volume, competition, IAAP, clicks, impression, CTR, CPC etc. All these metrics will help you strengthen your decision on which keyword to build content on. Also, it tracks data from Google search Console. As such, you can track the performance of your website through this tool as well. Another important feature of this tool is the historical trends it presents. This helps you understudy the performance of a said keyword over time.
CONCLUSION
Having outline 11 amazing free Keyword research tools for you, we have set you free to sail safely and successfully on the keyword research track. Let me not forget to advice you to do a combination of tools for your keyword research. Depending on only one pf these tools may not give you the best and anticipated result. As such, you can combine 2 or 3 of these tool to perform your research. All of us at Infoducation wish you well in your keyword research endeavor
