Let’s face it, you can have killer content on your website or blog, but if no one can find it, it is a wasted resource.
One of the best ways to make your content more findable is to know what people are searching for and target those keywords. Keyword research is part of both content and SEO strategy and finding the right keywords is not too difficult. Here are five keyword research tools to help improve your SEO.
Google Keyword Planner
If you want to do basic keyword research for your content, Google Keyword Planner is a great place to start. As it is a Google product, it is very reliable and accurate, apart from being user-friendly.
All you need to do is log in to your account and type out the topic you wish to write on, and it gives you all the possible keywords and the average monthly searches for it. The best part is that it also pulls up related terms as well. This is especially useful because long-tail keywords can drive more traffic to your content and blogs.
Long Tail Pro
If you are looking for something more advanced for your marketing strategy, then Long Tail Pro is worth a shot. The tool is comprehensive and quickly pulls up data that you are looking for. In fact, it is so good that a single search can pull up over 800 keywords within seconds.
The tool also helps with competitor analysis. It does all the work for you and gives you keyword usage in the metadata, Moz Rank, domain age and the number of back-links. Now isn’t that cool?
SEMrush
If you are looking to see how you and your competitor rank in search results, then SEMrush is an excellent tool to use. Additionally, the tool also has a keyword search feature that helps you understand what your audience is looking for. This is perhaps one of the best tools for bloggers and content marketers. Its other features are:
~ Finds the perfect keywords for SEO and gives you phrase match, long-tail keywords, and related keywords
~ Provides you with metrics, such as traffic stats, search engine reports and Adsense CPC
If you are still not convinced, take the free trial and experiment with it a bit, and then choose from multiple packages based on your needs.
Soovle
Soovle is a fantastic tool for content and SEO specialists who are looking for a free keyword research tool. When you enter a search term in this tool, it automatically suggests what you can use in your marketing plan. Its coolest feature: not only does it give you keyword suggestions from Google, but also from other sources such as Yahoo and Wikipedia.
While most of us focus only on Google, it is a good idea to contemplate planning for other search engines as it will help boost your website's organic traffic.
UberSuggest
Ubersuggest is perhaps among the best free SEO tools out there in the market. It gives you reliable data as it pulls up keywords from Google suggest. All you need to do is enter your keyword suggestion, select the source from the drop-down menu and the tool gives you search terms from various sources such as the web, images, news, shopping, video, and recipes. The tool also provides you with long tail keyword phrases, making it an ideal free tool for SEO.
There are plenty of benefits of doing high-level keyword research, and all these tools listed above help you with just that. While you may not use all of them together, it is a good idea to experiment with different tools and see what works best for you.
Would you add any other tool to this list? Let us know in the comments below.