The Most Useful Online Tools for Keyword Research
When most people think of SEO, thoughts of painstaking work, backbreaking costs and ineffective, immeasurable results often arise. But don’t let the spammy SEO ‘gurus’ of yesteryear deter you from pursuing a more holistic approach to improving your rankings. We are firm believers in best practice search engine optimisation – you’ll find no black hat tricks here – and our clients profit from our excellent research and planning. Our reliance on these two areas shows in our results, and keyword research is an important part of all our SEO activities.
Keyword research is, in our eyes and other digital marketers’ opinions, the most important part of any SEO campaign, whether your objective is to increase traffic and subsequent leads or build brand loyalty, awareness and reputation. Keyword research is essentially a blueprint, consisting of key points that define the very roots of your online marketing efforts. You don’t have to crack on with keyword research alone. As well as enlisting specialists like us to take control of your SEO campaign from start to finish, there are tons of online tools available, some worth their mustard, others not worth the web page they take up.
To sort the wheat from the chaff on the keyword research tool scene however, we thought we’d share the most useful resources around, each of which provides an excellent set up to discover and target the best keywords and search terms for your particular niche.
The big daddy of the keyword research tool world, what better way to impress the biggest search engine around than to get information from the very tools they created. Google Keyword Planner is an intuitive and easy to use platform. As well as providing a great starting point for keyword research, it provides a smooth transition if you want to bolster your marketing activities with PPC advertising later down the line.
Its customisable keyword search, where you can enter your own product/service or scan a landing page you’re in competition with, is a real asset when defining the organic keywords that will put you on the map. Did we mention that Google Keyword Planner is free too!
Want to target long tail search terms in your upcoming campaign? Then the data mining capabilities of Keyword Tool shouldn’t be sniffed at. Using Google tech, this handy tool works to create a database of such suggestions, the first 750 of which are free.
SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is a handy part of their wider package. Relied on by SEO, PPC, content and PR professionals, the Keyword Magic Tool is highly versatile, giving you all you need to recognise new keywords, explore niche keyword groups (and subgroups) and determine various factors that may affect your final keyword choice, such as Cost Per Click (CPC), keyword difficulty, density and search volume. As part of the SEMrush package you’ll also receive lists of related keywords, which may come in handy come SEO campaign review time.
Love a tool? You may want to give our recent blogs a read to discover the best tools for effective content distribution and top tools for social media management.
