Keyword research can be considered the very first step towards achieving great SEO that will drive your website’s organic traffic. They are the building blocks of SEO without which an SEO campaign would flop. Identifying the right keywords is all a matter of finding the ones that match your customer’s needs and this is why you need an SEO keyword tool.
In 2022, keyword research requires the help of third-party tools, some fall under the free tier while others only offer a free trial after which you can opt to purchase or not. The SEO keyword tool you use for your research will have a direct impact on the kind of data you’ll collect. Some of the best SEO keyword research tools will provide you with excellent actionable data on given search queries and will help you get potentially relevant keyword ideas you’d ordinarily not have thought about.
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With that said, how will you know the best SEO keyword search tools? You need a good knowledge of not only how each tool works, but also how to transform that information into results. This article has put together the best SEO keyword research tools from both the free and paid tiers.
But first, a quick look at why keyword search is important.
How Does Keyword Research Help You?
i. It Guides Your Direction
Researching for keywords gives you a deeper sense of focus and direction because it helps you unearth other keywords and ideas that you may not have had before; this helps you focus on only the best topics within your niche.
ii. Brings New Ideas
You may have an idea in your mind, so when you do keyword research you tend to get more information about it and this can help you expound more on your idea. It keeps the ideas flowing and brings in more ideas.
iii. Effective Use of Time
Keyword searching may be a time-consuming activity, however, it tends to also save you from more waste of time by driving you exactly where you need to be. During the keyword research, you can mark potential articles or products that you can work on in future and thereby giving you a next plan of action that in turn will save you lots of time.
iv. Gets You the Right Audience and Offers You Customer Insights
Of course, this is one of the most important reasons why you‘re doing a keyword search. It keeps you focused on the right audience. This will enable you to master a lot of customer insights. It’s particularly possible if you do some forum search or Google research.
Getting better insights helps you target better and therefore offer better to your clients.
v. You Get Insights on the Best Possibilities to Rank in Search Engines
Google is the most advanced search engine, so when doing your research with that in mind, you gain from all the exposure you get, and this includes getting competitive keywords that will fine-tune your strategy. It will also enable you to pick keywords with the lowest competition but with the highest likelihood of getting listed in the top spots in the Google search.
vi. It Covers Your Competition Analysis
Keyword research helps you determine whether a certain selected topic is worth pursuing or not, it helps you be more specific even within a niche. To get a good competition analysis, you have to find out how authoritative competitors’ websites are; based on the keywords you’re deliberating on.
How SEO Keyword Research Works
This is about identifying keywords that can help rank your website. For instance, if you want to write about pet food, your content should include the word pet food throughout the article. But the likelihood is that many other pet websites are already competing for that same phrase. And this is why it’s important to use long-form phrases.
For example, “organic pet food and product” is a long-form keyword that may not be used by every competitor but has a higher chance of ranking your blog. Long-form keywords are generally more than 4 words and have a lower search volume. For this reason, they have a higher buyer intention and are also easier to rank for.
So, with this clear picture of where you want to take your content, here are the best SEO keyword search tools:
Best SEO Keyword Research Tools
Paid Tools
1. SEMrush
Pricing: Pro Plan- $119, Guru Plan- $229, Business Plan- $449, has a 7-day free trial.
This SEO keyword ranking tool is great at optimization; it allows you to do competitive analysis and tells you for which keyword your competition ranks.
Top Features
Complete organic research – it helps you stay ahead of the competition by giving you the keywords that drive traffic to your competitors’ sites.
Monitor’s ranking changes – it keeps up with the ever-changing internet preferences. It monitors and tells you if your website ranking changes, as well as that of your competition, on a regular basis. On top of this, SEMRush SEO keyword tool helps you identify new competitors to ensure you don’t lose your rankings.
Relevant backlinks– it easily creates a list of spam backlinks and also offers an opportunity of getting relevant links back to your site using the backlink audit tool.
Analyses various websites – This SEO keyword research tool analyses several other competitors at once. This helps you concentrate on the most important or profitable keywords. You can also get the ones missing out from your competitors.
Traffic Analyses – it tracks your competitors’ traffic sources and builds a good content strategy to reach your audience. At the same time, it gives you in-depth data on the sites you plan to invest in.
SEO guidance – SEMRush has an on-page SEO checker that offers insightful suggestions that can help rank better and fix any errors on the same page.
2. Moz Keywords Explorer
Pricing – Starts at $99 per month for the Standard version and goes up to $599 per month for the premium version, has a 30 days Free Trial
This is one of the best SEO keyword tools out there, it offers out-of-the-box solutions with robust features that compete with other top tools. It prides on two very unique data points:
The Organic CTR score – this shows the number of clicks you’re likely to attract on the first Google result page.
The priority score – this is a perfect blend of all the factors a typical tool uses to gather keyword options. It puts together data on CTR, keyword difficulty as well as search volume.
Top Features
Keyword clustering – closely related words can be grouped or clustered together rather than have them sit individually. This enables you to track your ranking more accurately, get to know more about your search visibility and keep you ahead of your competition.
Bulk uploads keywords – you can upload bulk keywords rather than adding them manually to your campaign. You can use a CSV to quickly upload the keywords along with their labels and locations.
SERP feature filter – you can ease the process of prioritizing keywords by using the SERP feature filter. All you need to do is refresh your keywords list in the keyword explorer and then you’ll be able to view and filter your data.
Understand your clients/ customers – get to find out how customers search for your products or services. Discover the keywords they use as well as the questions they are asking, you can leverage this data to give relevant and useful content that can help you rank highly.
Rank tracking – it accurately tracks and ranks your keywords as well as those of your competitors. You can see their location, the search score and so on.
3. Ahrefs
Cost: Lite – $99, Standard – $179, Advanced – $399, Agency – $999, no trial
Ahrefs is another competitive SEO keyword tool. It has the highest-ranking index and allows you to find out about your competitors’ SEO strategies, the keywords they’re using, their backlinks and so forth. Another great thing about Ahrefs is that it has very committed support through phone, email as well as chat.
Top Features
Site Explorer – an overview of any site you want is only a click away. It offers you the Ahrefs rank, the URL rating and the domain rating. It also gives an analysis of how the number of backlinks and repairing domains are improving. This ensures you follow link velocity guidelines. It also shows the organic traffic you’ve acquired over time from the keywords.
Backlink profile – Ahrefs is top when it comes to backlink index. When you enter the URL or domain name in the search box, it gives you all the backlinks directing to the URL or domain. In its lite plan, you’re allowed to view up to 100 URLs and 25 domains per day.
Find new or lost backlinks – This feature allows you to identify backlinks that have been built simply by selecting the date. This is the feature that also allows you to spy on your competitor’s SEO strategy. It will show you if you’ve lost any backlinks or if a blog owner removed a backlink from a guest post.
Organic search – this feature gives you the organic keywords that drive traffic to a URL or a certain domain. You can use this to also discover good blog topics that would draw organic traffic. This feature tracks how your blog ranks in SERPs when targeting a major keyword. Another thing this option can do is show you keywords that you may not be ranking but your competitors are using.
Top pages – this feature returns the best-performing pages depending on the backlinks. Just go to “Top pages” and get the pages with the most traffic on a site. It allows you to see the top pages of a domain in social sharing.
Paid search – This is a bonus for PPC marketers because it boosts the ROI from advertisements when running PPC campaigns. It also allows you to spy on ad copies running with the keywords, and get the location and the campaigns devoid of using VPNs. It shows you the pages that are converting well for your competitors; it’s a great feature when used in advertising.
Keywords Explorer – this feature lets you do the long tail keywords search. All you need to do is simply enter the topic idea or keyword seed and voila. It will calculate the keyword difficulty level and offer you metrics like return rate, related keywords, search suggestions and so on.
4. KWFinder
Pricing: Mangools Basic – $29.90, Mangools Premium – $44.90 and Mangools Agency – $89.90
This SEO keyword tool that’s also an analysis platform has some unique features. For instance, it provides users with keywords that have low SEO difficulty yet have high search rates. It’s very accurate at finding the lowest-cost keyword that offers the highest SERP ranking.
Besides being an SEO keyword tool, KWFinder also tracks the ranking of your pages over time and analyses backlinks that are boosting your search ranks and those that are not.
Top Features
Keywords identification – It helps find high-traffic, low-cost keywords to maximize your search ranking. It offers an accurate figure as compared to other applications that give an approximation.
Competitor analysis – it offers unique SEO metrics (45) to show which authority websites are thriving, the strengths and weak points and how their keyword selection compares to yours. Among the 45 metrics, this SEO keyword tool has, are included the following: the number of external backlinks, visits per month, domain authority, number of shares and so forth.
Ranking progress – this SEO keyword research tool will show you how much organic traffic potential your site has. You can use this information to tweak your plans in order to improve your site’s performance.
User friendly interface – beginners will find this tool easy to use thanks to the wide range of features it offers. Navigating between services such as the source of your traffic, paid and organic searches, and keyword and domain searches is quite smooth because they’re all integrated on the dashboard.
Great support – their support team can be reached any time around the clock, either via email or live chat. KWFinder also offers a robust knowledge base and official FAQ for those who are not tech-savvy.
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5. Keywordseverywhere
Pricing – Pay as you need
This SEO keyword tool is a browser extension add-on that can be installed on either Firefox or Chrome. One of its greatest features is that it offers users access to info like monthly search volume, competition data, as well as cost per click.
Top Features
It shows YouTube insights and tags
It shows related keywords both on Bing and Google (people also search for)
It analyzes URLs to build the list of keywords from the content page and the density of those words.
It’s supported on Google, YouTube, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing and Amazon among others.
6. Ubersuggest
Pricing – Has a 7-day free trial, Individual Plan – $12, Business Plan- $20, Enterprise- $40
This SEO keyword tool specializes in generating or suggesting new keyword ideas, initially, it was built around getting ideas from Google Suggest words, but now it does a lot more than that.
Top Features
SEO keyword – It presents to users the terms that are driving traffic to their websites and how competitors using the same keywords measure up to yours.
SEO checker – this feature shows you any activity that breaks SEO best practices. Users have the option of organizing the results in order of the difficulty to fix that mistake and the impact this error has on current traffic to your website.
Domain review – it offers real quick metrics on your URLs.
Organic keywords – it gives users the number of keywords for which the domain ranks organically.
Backlink score – it gives users the number of websites that drive traffic to your website through links.
Top traffic and SEO pages – it shows the top-performing pages that are driving traffic to your site. You can see the country and the social platforms that are the source of the traffic, and the estimated number of page visits. It also shows backlinks and where they come from. It also gives an in-depth analysis showing the volume, cost per click, visits, buyer intent and the probability that your site to rank for a certain keyword.
Organic monthly traffic – at the same time, this SEO keyword tool shows how much traffic your site gets based on organic keyword searches.
Domain score – it calculates your domain score using several parameters to show whether your website has any authority on Google.
Backlink data – It shows the kind of content people are linking to within your niche. It shows who is doing the linking plus the metrics on the back-linking sites.
Website speed – Ubersuggest shows how fast your site loads on either the desktop or mobile device. It goes further to show all the errors required to get fixed in order for your site to load faster and thus boost your CTR and Google rank.
Content ideas – get to find out what content and particular keywords are performing well. Along with this, you’ll also get to see your domain authority and estimated clicks for certain content.
7. Longtail Pro
Pricing: Starts from Starter Plan – $59.99, Pro Plan – $89.99 and Agency Plan – $299.99
This is a desktop premium SEO keyword research tool that runs on Adobe Air. What’s the best keyword research tool for SEO for beginners? This tool is the one. It has a very simple and straightforward user interface that’s very easy to get familiarized with.
Top Features
Multiple projects – You can run various campaigns at once, this helps you stay organized.
It enables you to generate keywords from your seed keyword.
Allows you to export keywords from Excel spreadsheets.
It helps you find available keyword-rich domain names.
Competitor analysis – it offers an in-depth analysis on your competitors’ organic traffic to give you ideas of what they’re up to.
Rank tracker – LongTailPro comes with a rank tracker to keep you in the loop of how your keywords are driving up more traffic.
It allows you to favorite the best-performing keywords.
8. Serpstat
Pricing – Lite $69 per month, Standard $149 per month, Advanced $299 per month, Enterprise $499
This is another SEO keyword tool with solid features that competes fairly with other tools in the market. It has an excellent audit tool and other great features that have made it the most upvoted tool on Product Hunt.
Top Features
Keyword research – This is its primary feature that can be used for both PPC search campaigns and SEO. You can leverage this to edge your competition through organic and paid keywords.
SEO keyword research – it can be used to identify high-value keywords for SEO campaigns. This SEO keyword tool can also be used to show new content ideas and ways to improve the already existing content.
PPC keywords research – this feature provides you with data such as estimated cost per click, search volume and keyword difficulty which you can use to pick the best-paid keywords.
Backlink analysis – this option provides a complete backlink profile with suggestions for the potentially good content material. On the dashboard, you get to see the number of backlinks and the percentage of those that are do-follow as well as no-follow. They also provide charts to show the new versus lost backlinks over a specified period. It also offers a top-page report that shows the most backlinks of any selected website.
Keyword rank tracking – this feature helps you measure the success of your SEO campaign. It helps you keep track of the position of your most useful organic search keywords along with your website’s visibility in relation to your competition.
Competitive analysis – it gives you an analysis of competitors to help you know more about your competition, who they are and what keywords you’re competing for.
Top organic competitors – this feature presents you with the top competing sites that share the organic keywords with you. On the dashboard, you get to see the keywords that are common, those that are missing as well as a score on how relevant they are.
9. Ranktracker
Cost: Ranktracker – Starter $24, Double Data $59, Quad Data $109, Hex Data $209.
This tool gives you SEO search engine keyword position through an analysis of the competition, research of the keywords and tracking of your search engine ranking all at once. It is excellent at harnessing various data sources to keep you ahead in your SEO.
Top Features
SEO metrics – Ranktracker reveals your search result ranking, your SEO search engine keyword position and the traffic you’re receiving from searches. You can use a filter to see your ranking in different locations or devices.
Local and international ranking updates – it allows you to track the position of your site on the search engines. This can be composed of a selection of keywords either on desktop or mobile.
Keyword finder – this SEO keyword tool can offer you insights on search volume and keywords difficulty, it can also show you your keywords’ relevancy in selected areas.
SERP checker – with Ranktracker, you can get search engine results from up to 50 countries.
Actionable SEO guide – it helps you optimize your website for SEO with Actionable Data and step-by-step guidance that will help you optimize keyword research for maximum traffic.
Web audit – this feature scans through your data points and quickly identifies any hidden SEO errors and guides you on how to resolve them. It also produces useful XML audit data that can be used to compare previous records for recurring errors.
Reports – Fully customizable reports that offer lots of details including your competitors’ ranking, your visibility and much more. This information can be shared via email straight to clients or colleagues.
10. Answer The Public
Cost – Individual $5 per month, Pro $49 per month, Expert $99 per month
This unique SEO keyword research tool extracts questions from Google and Bing and generates categorized keywords from them. When searching for a particular keyword, the results will be several keywords in the form of questions. These questions are further organized into what, where, when, who, why or how forms.
Top Features
Search insights from customers – out of over 3 billion daily Google searches, about 20% are new questions that have never been seen before; these are like fresh cues from your customers’ mind. This tool listens to autocomplete content from search engines and picks out useful questions around your keyword. This goldmine can present you with just the right ideas for exactly what your customers need.
Unlimited daily searches – for the paid version, you won’t have to worry about a daily limit in searches.
New suggestions alerts – compare data and monitor keyword search behavior over time. You can set up a Search Listing Alert which will give you weekly emails with questions being asked about your topic or keywords.
Export results to CSV– you can transfer, filter and pivot your data to Excel spreadsheets if you want.
Hide some unwanted suggestions or branches – if you get too much data, you can prune off the unwanted data and keep only what’s relevant to you.
Unlimited team members – with this SEO keyword tool online the teams have no limit with respect to the number of members. Members can work side by side or run their own research.
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11. SECockpit
Pricing: Personal Plan – $39 per month, Pro – $59 per month and Agency – $99 per month
This SEO keyword ranking tool brings simplicity to work by presenting you with all the data you need to see in one place. It offers quality and relevance with a complete data evaluation including your competitors’ analysis. It requires no installation or downloading, it’s an online tool that can run on the cloud and it is compatible with any internet browser. The only prerequisite is for you to have an account.
Top Features
Keyword research – this feature is extremely fast since it runs on the cloud. This allows you to analyze and process 200 keywords or more per minute. Other tools might only do 2 keywords at the same time at best.
You’re also able to analyze imported keyword lists. It operates in most languages across the globe.
Keyword ideas – once you enter a keyword for search, it comes back with several other suggestions picked from Google search suggest, YouTube search suggest, Google AdWords and Google relates searches. It keeps getting better, you can do a semantic keyword search on your competitors and use the results to gain a new seed word to consider.
Keyword analysis – this feature gives you a detailed analysis drawn from the current best-ranking pages. The analysis includes backlink number, page rank and on-page optimization. Besides collecting all this data, it is user-friendly and very easy to understand.
Competition analysis – this feature enables you to draw data from each first result page of your keyword research. It’s achieved by getting data from Moz’s database because of its accuracy. This feature also allows you to compare URLs with your best competitors and identify eventual errors.
It also provides keyword ideas based on the competition analysis and based on it to create new semantics to boost your page ranks.
Organize keywords – it enables you to select quality keywords among the not-so-relevant ones. Very useful when trying to get a specific word. Besides this, it’s possible to use files to categorize keywords. You can export your data if you need to process it elsewhere (e.g. to a PDF).
12. SpyFu
Pricing: Basic- $39 per month, Pro-$79 per month and Team $299 per month.
This SEO keyword ranking tool takes competitive intelligence to another level. One of its popular features is how it can be used to discover the most useful keywords in your competitors’ organic as well as paid search efforts. This is the reason why this tool is specifically called Spy-Fu, it specializes in spy games.
Top Features
SEO Research – it offers in-depth data on organic search ranking for any given website. This allows you to access the same data and use it to enhance yours.
SEO Overview – the dashboard provides data on the number of organic keywords, inbound links by type, monthly organic traffic, keyword gainer and loser and the value of your organic traffic.
SEO Keywords – this feature allows you to view the best-performing organic keywords for any website and propels you into an advantageous position against your competitors. For every keyword searched, SpyFu shows the keyword difficulty, rank, clicks per month and searches per month.
So, it sorts all these details according to the newly ranked, most valuable, first-page keywords, keyword gains in rank and so forth. To make things better, it can group related keywords to offer better insights into the topics that rank at the top as well as their hierarchy. It’s just brilliant.
SEO Backlinks – this spy tool can provide you with data about any backlink profile for any website. You can see the individual backlinks and for each one of them you get to see the domain authority. It also categorizes the backlinked sites by type in order for you to compare who gets more backlinks between you and your competitors.
PPC Research – it reveals data on the paid search activity for any site you may consider.
PPC Keywords – the feature allows you to see any paid keywords for any site along with data such as cost per click, monthly searches, Ad timeline and total ads and much more. They are grouped into categories to ease up your work.
Keyword rank tracking – this tool tracks your website position on Google. This tool serves as a spy for our competitors as well.
Competitive analysis – The beauty of SpyFu, is that most of the features discussed above can be used to spy on your competition. The SEO research, keywords and rank tracking as well as PPC research can all offer you reliable data to enable a better understanding of the current marketing tactics. You get to discover who your top competitors are and the keywords they’re using, and you are not.
Organic Competitors – Presents a report of your most prominent competitors, the data includes SEO tools keyword density, the keywords that overlap and so forth. It reveals organic keywords that are also in your website.
Free Tools
What Are the Best SEO Keyword Research Tools Free to Use?
13. Google AdWords – Keyword Planner
This is the most popular free tool if you know how to use the Google keyword tool for SEO. The main reason it’s so popular is because it directly integrates with Google Ads. All you need to do in order to use this tool is to have an Ads account which is absolutely free.
Top Features
It offers in-depth data thanks to its link to Google. You, however, cannot use it to gain research data from any other search engine.
Filtering to refine audience and budget – Keyword Planner offers you the option to either search for new keywords or to get multiple keyword lists where you can combine 2 lists for new keyword combinations. It provides the possibility to search volume and trends and the option to get click and cost performance forecasts. You can use any of these filters as they suit your needs.
Get quality over quantity – it gives you relevant keywords along with phrases and new terms. Your SEO keyword search can offer new long-form words, generate new relevant words based on your landing page or can help you identify keywords within your industry that you may not have picked up but customers are using.
Prepare for what others are paying – Competition over keywords may make some of them rank very low, medium or very high. For your SEO search engine keyword position to be higher, you may be required to use the high competition keywords which may cost more per average bid.
Therefore, the keyword planner helps you identify effective keywords that may fit within your budget by revealing data on how much other advertisers are paying for these keywords. This will enable you to boost your chances of being seen by relevant customers.
Analyze you plan and budget – as you find new keywords ideas as mentioned in the above feature, you can add them to your keyword plan where they can be stored temporarily as you create a daily budget based on the detailed forecast of the potential of the selected keywords.
14. Soovle
This SEO keyword tool searches engines for key phrases as well as keywords. It searches on the top 15 search engines such as Google, Bing, Answers.com, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia and a couple of others.
Top Features
People also search – this puts together the queries from all 15 search engines in a single place. These are questions asked by people along with your keyword. It’s therefore important to include them in your content in order to increase the chances of being discovered.
Aggregated research tool – it presents keywords from search engines and is a tool that offers SEO keyword density, competitors’ data and CPC.
Easy GUI – its graphic user interface is pretty simple. When searching for the keyword, it presents all the results from all these different sources simultaneously.
15. Jaaxy
This SEO keyword research tool is best known for long-form keywords that often mean a buying intent. The SEO keyword tool online finder is very effective at reducing your keyword tasks to a bare minimum because the developers ensured it takes all the needed time to build an app that in turn consumes less of the users’ time.
It’s very advanced and takes care of managing your keyword search, competition as well as market research.
Top Features
Alphabet Soup – this feature specifically targets long-form keywords by offering a clue on what customers are searching for on Google. This offers a chance to rank your content for keywords you never even thought about.
Search analysis – this spy function tells you the competitors ranking for the keywords you’re interested in and what they’re ranking with. You can leverage on this information to do better.
Site Rank– if you’re looking for SEO tools to find out where you rank for a keyword then this is the. On top of this, it shows you how your competitors are faring.
Keyword data – this is the most commonly used feature on Jaaxy. Besides giving data about keywords, it also offers data such as estimated traffic, monthly searches, domain availability, keyword quality indicator, SEO tools keyword density and so forth.
Save lists – you can create lists of your keywords and also import these lists to other applications.
Conclusion
SEO will continue to be an essential component of digital marketing. It’s a reliable mainstay and is most likely to remain so, for the foreseeable future. The benefits of being mindful of SEO are pretty evident as they create strong and robust foundations for websites and this is very important in customer satisfaction. With this said, all the above SEO keyword tools are essential in strengthening your SEO and building a functional online presence.
