34 SEO Professionals Uncover The Best Keyword Research Tools

For both coming up with content ideas and then optimizing that content, I've found the free to use tool Answer The Public to be of great help. Just pop in a keyword and it will provide a whole range of content ideas from comparisons, propositions, questions, and even related keywords that users are actually typing into search engines.

[Answer The Public] is great to use for blog post ideas and any informational keywords. This tool doesn’t take much explaining, you simply enter a topic keyword and get served with a range of questions that users commonly ask about these topics.

Provide useful answers to them and you’re almost certain to start getting traffic to your website. Answer the public is a free tool, and whilst it may be short of some of the in-depth data that SEMRush provides, it’s definitely worth checking out.

The best free keyword exploring tool is without a doubt Answer The Public. It is particularly great if you are in a need of questions people often ask. I use it when researching for blog posts. It gives you every possible question people have Googled, related to your term and it is a great way of providing you with a knowledge-requests you can answer to.

One of the best keyword research tools that we use here at Bowler Hat is answerthepublic.com. The best thing? It's completely free! Plus, you can download all the data in a CSV for future use. You simply enter a topic or keyword of your choice and it spits out a bunch of suggestions, from questions to prepositions. With this tool, you really will struggle to run out of content ideas.

...try Answer the Public. Just give them a keyword or topic and they'll find hundreds of topic permutations. The results are even arranged by the type of search, including questions (like can plumbers putty stop a leak,) prepositions (like plumbers with leak detection equipment,) comparisons (like Teflon tape vs plumbers putty) and more.

For years, one of my go-to content marketing strategies has been writing content around frequently asked questions in the industries I was competing in. This used to require me to go find the most popular forums, and manually dig up FAQs.

Answer The Public streamlines the entire process. Pop a topic in and answer the public pulls a list of every possible question asked about that topic. If you’ve got a tool like KeywordsEverywhere installed you’ll even be able to see the search volume.

The best free keyword research tool is Answer the Public. You type in your keyword and get questions, prepositions, comparisons, and alphabeticals for your keyword. It is a great one size fits all tool for keyword research, the major thing it doesn't do is give you analysis of each keyword such as traffic, competitiveness or any other metric, but there are many tools for that in addition to Answer the Public.

There's only one keyword research tool that has been useful and remains the most useful. Google Keyword Planner is free in AdWords (even if you don't pay for ads) and it provides all the information you need on keywords data.

Google gives you everything you need. Create an AdWords account and go to the Keyword Planner tool. Make a list of keywords you want to target, and find out the search volume for these terms. Are these terms being searched? If they are, is there a lot of competition? All if this data is free to research, it is up to you to determine which keywords are worth targeting and where you can make progress.

Google’s Keyword Planner is still a good option, too. Sure, it doesn’t have the same level of insight it once did, but being able to find synonymous and related terms in Ad Groups is an invaluable timesaver. Bonus points because it’s free.

Located inside Google Adwords, this free keyword tool is available for anyone with an AdWords account. While its primary focus is for paid search, it can be a great tool for uncovering search volume trends in specific regions. It also can suggest keywords that you might not have thought of.

If you’re using AdWords you’ve probably heard of Keyword Planner. While some of the data is specific to paid advertising, Keyword Planner has many uses for SEO as well. We tend to use Keyword Planner as a starting point to gather ideas and then run data through Moz and SEMRush for verification and additional insights.

I always use Neil Patel's Ubersuggest when I write blog articles. It helps me find lots of potential long tail keywords that the Google Keyword Planner tool won't show me. It's also a great source of inspiration for new articles ideas. Type any keyword, and Ubersuggest will come up with a long list of content ideas that you might not have thought about until then.

Ubersuggest (neilpatel.com/ubersuggest). This tool is also free and provides data on keyword volume, CPC and more. The cool thing about this is that you can choose whether you're using the keyword for the web, an image, shopping, YouTube, and News.

Covering related topics and keywords in your content is a great way to keep readers happy and significantly improve your rankings. Just give LSIGraph your target keyword and it will return a couple handfuls of related keywords worth covering. It can be a little temperamental, but works better as you move towards head terms.

Gone are the days of making new pages for every individual keyword. Markers can leverage LSI Graph (for free) to identify LSI keywords that should be included to help increase the number of keywords a certain page can earn. This tool will help marketers uncover important long-tail keywords that can be leveraged through on-page copy (in a natural way) or as anchor text for internal links across your site.

We've always loved LSIGraph as a keyword generation tool. But as Google continues to increase the power of its latent semantic indexing, this free tool has become more and more important to our content strategy. At its core LSIGraph is a very basic tool, but it does what it does very well.

For keyword research, KWfinder is a fantastic tool that I use a lot. Along with the standard data you’d expect (related long-tail keywords, search volume, CPC) it also gives a numerical SEO difficulty score with a helpful label (“easy”, “possible”, etc.).

My favourite feature is the SERP preview - click on any given keyword and the current SERP for that term is displayed within the tool, along with loads of great metrics about each ranking page such as Moz DA/PA and an estimated number of visits that site receives. It gives a fantastic overview of the competition for a search term and lets you evaluate very quickly whether a keyword is worth the effort of optimization or not. There’s a free version which is limited to five keyword searches per day, but you can pay for many more.

Recently I stumbled upon KWFinder I believe it is a new tool, but it was love at first sight. It gives you top 50 keyword suggestions for free and you need to pay for the rest, but you can search niche-specific terms unlimited times and can bypass that restriction. I don't know if their algorithm differs much, but it regularly gives me fresh suggestions no other tools give. You just feed it with the main semantical keyword for a topic and it gives not only variations of the word, but synonyms as well.

While there are plenty of all-in-one SEO tools that include more features than KWFinder, it sets itself apart with its simplicity and accuracy on search volume and competition. With additional tools such as SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, and the new LinkMiner, the platform is beginning to look like it might rival some of the bigger names such as Moz or Ahrefs in the future.

My favorite new tool for FAQ keyword research right now is Question Analyzer as a feature of Buzzsumo.com. It segments questions into categories so you can get directly to what type of questions you're looking to optimize for. It's also a great tool to come up with content ideas as you can type in a keyword and see the most shared content for that keyword. From there, you can see the influencers who helped make that content powerful.

I love SEMrush's Keyword Magic tool for longtail keyword research. You can see related keywords, and then filter them by length and search volume. If you want a longtail query related to travel that has at least 200 searches a month, you can quickly find a nice variety. You have to sign up for a free account to use the tool, and if you don't pay for a premium account you're limited to one keyword list at a time. The free account works great for content writers and strategists who don't do a lot of SEO work, but like to optimize the content they write with well-researched keywords.

Simply plug in a URL and take advantage of the utterly comprehensive keyword tracking (positioning, difficulty to rank for, as well as volume and percentage of traffic driven to your website through the keyword), site auditing, competitor comparison, page analytics and more. The site even provides handy organic traffic and backlink tracking tools, although Ahrefs provides the superior experience if your priority is backlink checking.

I simply adore this tool. It brings all the right things in order to optimize your content: I compare my leading posts to my competitor's ones and track them and seek any on-page changes.

SEMrush is a great aid in improving your businesses SEO. This handy platform provides the insights your company needs to recognize low competition keywords, which can be used to create original and compelling content, so it is properly and efficiently optimized.

I use SEMrush because it’s an all-rounder; it provides keywords, positions, and volumes where your website ranks. I can paste in a domain and it generates relevant keywords relative to that particular domain and shows which keywords it's already ranking for. You can then create and build content around these keywords to improve your position on Google. Google AdWords is also a great keyword tool, although it is mainly based on keywords, meaning it isn’t as extensive as SEMrush.

Keyword stuffing is out of the question though; Google is too intelligent to let this common practice slide and although SEO is crucial to content, overusing keywords makes for clunky, unclear content, which the reader will recognize has only been created for SEO purposes.

Everyone has their own process for optimizing content, but the SEMrush keyword research tool (premium SaaS product) can adapt to almost every approach. Here are several reasons why it’s our go-to tool:

• Granular Search Demand: The Organic Search Positions report provides search demand information at a keyword level; this is superior to Google Keyword Planner which now combines demand for similar terms into a very broad range with makes accurate targeting difficult.
• Competitor Data: Offering a large database, SEMRush gives access to competitor ranking data which makes the creation of a content gap analysis easy. If you’re unfamiliar, a content gap analysis compares sets of ranking keywords between a target site and its competitors to identify opportunities & “low hanging fruit.” The identification and targeting of keyword themes with the opportunity to improve content performance.
• Historic Performance: The toolset contains data that give users the ability to track performance from both broad or granular perspectives. Whether exporting a graph covering “Total Ranking Keywords” to tracking trends on a per keyword basis, SEMRush offers a lot of flexibility for both agency and in-house users alike.

In closing, we’ve found SEMRush to be incredibly useful when optimizing content. It offers a level of functionality that compares well to that of enterprise level-tools like Conductor and BrightEdge at a fraction of the cost. It’s definitely a go-to keyword research tool for us.

One of my favorite tools to use is the SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool. It's fantastic, you enter a seed keyword and it provides a long list of keywords that you should consider targeting. You have the option to filter the data many ways.

My favorite filter to use, especially with the rapid importance of voice search and having content on your website that answers questions, is the Questions filter. By using the Questions filter SEMrush will identify and only display keywords that are asking a question.

I have several tools that I use in my suite to make sure that our content is ranking for our target keywords as well as to conduct keyword research that we can gear future content towards. My favorite, by far, is SEMRush which is a freemium tool that I use to do a lot of keyword research and quick organic stat check on competitors. The free version has valuable stats regarding estimated organic traffic/month based on keyword ranking, search volume for keywords, and competitor analysis.

A paid SEMRush account allows for extensive keyword analysis of every single keyword you rank for and the estimated search volume/month of each and their change over time along with many other features.

It’s always a concern when it seems like one product is trying to do too many things at once. This was my hesitation when I first learned about SEMRush years ago. But after a few years of daily use, I’m comfortable saying that SEMrush does a little bit of everything, and does it all well. The backbone of SEMrush is the Analytics Reports. From this tool, you can research search data, traffic, and competitors for a domain or a keyword. If you are into paid advertising, you can get a deep look into what keywords your competitors are bidding on and how much traffic they are generating from their efforts. Piggybacking on all of this research is SEMrush’s backlink analysis. We are customers of SEMRush and use most features of the service in our SEO marketing.

The gold standard of keyword planning tools is SEMRush. Not only can you run competitor searches, find out what they’re ranking for, and put together an Eiffel Tower plan, but you can even see how many links a competitor has to their specific page you’re trying to dethrone. This helps you begin to plan an effective outreach campaign alongside your on-page SEO plan. It’s a lot of bang for only a little spend.

Ahrefs is my favorite SEO tool. It helps you check your website's keyword rankings and those of your competitors. It also offers other invaluable tools such as the Content gap tool to see where your competitors are ranking while you're not. A great way to know what content you should create because it's missing on your website.

While Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a tried and true method, I prefer the premium software tool I get with Ahrefs. This tool provides what I feel more accurate keyword data, as well as other highly valuable information such as keyword difficulty scores, related keywords, quick snapshots into the SERPs to see who is ranking and how many links they have to their URLs, and other PPC-related cost-per-click data.

Where Keyword Planner will give you some idea of how difficult a keyword is to rank, the Ahrefs tool provides you a precise estimate of how many links you'll likely need to outrank the top spots to help you determine how competitive it is.

With different web properties and divergent target audiences, I need a tool that's in-depth, accurate, and smart. I use Ahrefs and Moz keyword tool. I love to use Ahrefs for keyword research.

As Google has gotten smarter, it is more important for me to understand keyword phrases instead of individual keywords. Ahrefs can group keywords together and provide a top-level view of key phrases. I can drill down into specific keywords, and Ahrefs provides comprehensive lists of similar keywords and keyphrases.

My vote for aHrefs as best in class for backlink research tools could also be my vote for best in class for keyword research tools if they moved away from their feature restriction based pricing structure which limits the number of returned keyword results.

Ahrefs is mostly known in the industry as a backlink tool, but has become much more than that with recent updates. Ahrefs is now capable of reporting all the keywords a given domain ranks for and sharing what percentage, if any, are driving traffic.

Another functionality that should be used in any worthwhile keyword research is the fluctuation in ranking on the SERP. Once you know which keywords are driving traffic and what the website ranks for, it's much easier to determine your rank potential and the tactics needed to move up the SERPs.

In my personal experience, the free ones don't give you the same insight and multitude of data points as some of the paid ones. We use Ahrefs at KlientBoost...What I look for in a tool is not just initial keyword research, but the ability to track ongoing ranking for particular keywords, get a variety of suggestions based on particular data points, and also be notified if we obtain or lose outbound links. Some tools even allow you to have a workflow feature for assigning tasks to teammates as you're doing your research.

With people being so busy and looking for more efficient ways to carry out tasks, having a more comprehensive tool saves you money -- so might be worth the monthly cost.

I've been doing SEO since the early 2000's and the best SEO tool that I have found is Ahrefs.com. Ahrefs is a paid service, but the time it saves and the value it brings makes it a no-brainer. The amount of data and insight you can gain about your website, competitors, keywords, and backlinks is second to none. I know it gives me a competitive advantage over other SEO [firms] who aren't using the tool.

While Ahrefs is primary a link research tool, its keyword research tools are too good to ignore. Ahrefs can find any website's ranking organic keywords, ballpark the traffic value if you purchased it with PPC, and perform a content gap analysis to see which keywords your competitors are targeting that you're not. Ahrefs also has a great content explorer that will help you find the best performing content for any subject, along with a healthy number of filters to help you narrow down your search. It's a premium tool with several packages, but it's worth every penny.

...if I were going to recommend one single tool, it would easily be Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. This is due in no small part to the additional tools and resources available to users in Ahrefs. I've found amazing opportunities to both capitalize on untapped SERP real estate or to outdo competitors where they're weakest using Ahrefs Keyword Explorer.

I also think that their keyword difficulty metric is one of the most directionally accurate options available in any keyword tool. Couple that with frequent updates, a powerful indexing engine, and fairly accurate search volume numbers and you've got pretty much the ultimate keyword research tool.