Writing content for your website might be a cup of tea for you. But writing content that brings in organic traffic and generates revenue is a bit more complicated. It takes time and patience to create content that will rank on Google and convert your website visitors into patrons.
This is why keyword research has become an integral part of on-page SEO and content marketing. Without doing proper keyword research you can’t bring in new traffic to your website let alone rank on Google. This is why it is essential for every content creator to spend some time doing keyword research and write content that ranks high on search engines.
But how do you find the perfect keyword especially without spending a fortune on expensive SEO tools?
Here we will discuss some amazing budget-friendly SEO tools that will help you find winning keywords. And no we’re not gonna talk about Google keyword planner.
In this article, I will share the 5 best keyword research tools of 2021. I’ve personally used them all and am still using some of these tools to do keyword research and link building.
Before we explore all these amazing keyword research tools, let’s take about why and how these SEO tools can be helpful for your business or blog.
Importance of SEO & Keyword Research Tools
When it comes to building an online presence, SEO tools are indispensable. It is no wonder that every successful blog or website on the internet spend a lot of time improving their SEO and doing keyword research.
Even though SEO or keyword research tools are not a prerequisite for building a website but it sure helps boost your organic traffic and reach out to potential customers. Using SEO tools will surely save you a lot of time and provide you some additional perks over your competitors if they are not using any SEO tools.
If you are a marketer you probably know that the more data you have the easier it gets for you to understand your audience. The intent of using keyword tools is to understand our audience and create content accordingly.
Having access to a reliable SEO tool is like having an ace up your sleeve. Not only you will get an insight into how your website is performing, but you can also get a peek at your competitor’s SEO strategy and find out what they are doing right or wrong.
Here are 7 reasons why you should definitely invest in a keyword research tool:
- Get a sneak peek at competitors keyword
- Use keyword opportunities to drive more traffic
- Find low competition keywords in your niche
- Get traffic volume data for keywords
- Find keywords you are ranking for
- Find CPC of keywords
- Use keywords to find topics to write about
5 Best Keyword Research Tools To Improve Your SEO
Now…If you are just starting out with SEO you should not rush and invest in SEO or keyword research tools. You should get familiar with the SEO terms and get yourself started by using all the free SEO tools.
There are a lot of free SEO tools that are quite useful and can increase your website traffic remarkably. You should keep using these free keyword research tools until you start to make some money from your blog or business. Once you start to generate recurring revenue you can start investing in more sophisticated SEO and keyword research tool.
So assuming you’re already making some money from your blog or online business, let’s start to explore all these amazing SEO and keyword tools one by one.
1. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the crème de la crème of SEO tools. It is undeniably one of the most amazing SEO keyword research tools for content creators. It can help you find untapped keywords and even spy on competitor’s keywords. Unfortunately, Ahrefs keyword explorer is not a standalone tool. So you will have to pay to use all the amazing tools that come with the whole package.
You can find a plethora of information on each keyword and tons of other metrics. But the best part about Ahrefs keyword explorer is the extensive SERP overview and accurate keyword difficulty score. Apart from that, you can get thousands of keyword suggestions with precise search volume. Another outstanding feature of Ahrefs keyword explorer is the backlink estimation to rank on the first page of Google. You can see how many searchers actually click on the first page results and how many searchers use given keywords to look for search results.
Not only it will help you create a more efficient and strategic marketing campaign but will also help you bring tons of organic traffic to your website.
2. Google Search Console
Please hold your horses before you start cursing me. I know Google search console is not a traditional keyword research tool but it is really helpful if you know how to use it properly. If you want to outperform your competitor in organic search you should focus your attention on the Google search console. It is a free keyword research tool that can suggest you relevant keywords and show you data on keywords that you already rank for.
Search Console also gives you an insight into the keywords that bring in the most traffic to your website over a period of time. It makes finding keywords a piece of cake. You can also see how your keywords are ranking country-wise and act accordingly to improve your ranking for those keywords.
Using Google search console you can see the average ranking position and click-through rate of each keyword. Just make sure to toggle the “Average position” and “Average CTR” columns and you are good to go. You can also see how the images in your web pages are ranking using the Google search console. This tool also shows you the “total impression” your pages get and the number of pages with “first impressions”. Furthermore, you can also see your top growing pages that are bringing traffic to your website.
3. Soovle
This might be a bit controversial but I think Soovle deserves a place in this list. Soovle is a very simple yet effective keyword research tool that can help you find hundreds of relevant keywords in a matter of seconds. One of the most useful features of Soovle is that you can rotate among the search engines to find keywords.
You can find keywords ideas from Google, YouTube, bing, yahoo, and Wikipedia. Furthermore, you can see a list of trending keywords and use them to your advantage. You can also easily save your favorite keyword ideas with Soovle’s “drag & drop” saved suggestions feature and download them in a CSV file.
Soovle makes your keyword research process a lot easier and helps you find untapped keywords that your competitor don’t know of.
4. Keywordtool.io
Want to get thousands of keyword ideas from multiple search engines? Keywordtool.io is just the perfect tool for that. This keyword research tool scrapes data from multiple search engines and provides valuable metrics that can help you improve your SEO.
There are multiple keyword filters and search options to choose from. Using this keyword research tool you can find the search volume of a specific keyword and see keyword trends.
Furthermore, you can see how much are advertisers are willing to pay for specific keywords (CPC) and keyword competition scores. You can also find relevant questions, prepositions, and hashtags of a keyword which can help you make a better SEO and marketing campaign.
If you just want to find relevant keywords without all the data and metrics you can use the tool for free. But if you want an in-depth analysis of keywords you will have to pay to use keyword tool pro.
5. Answer The Public
This is by far the best SEO tool for finding long-tail keywords.
Why?
Because it’s free and amazing. Answer the Public can help you find questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical and relevant keyword searches. All you have to do is enter a keyword and find queries search queries containing who, what, why, where, how, which, when, are, and is.
Let’s have a look at some examples:
If you enter the keyword “SEO” this tool will suggest keywords like…
- what SEO means
- how SEO works
- why SEO is important
- where SEO is used
- can SEO help your business
- will SEO be automated
- which SEO techniques are popular
- are SEO courses worth it
These are just a few examples of questions that you will get for the keyword “SEO”. You can also find keywords in alphabetical order and do much more using this tool.
