Keyword research is important in any good content marketing strategy
You might be asking why keyword research is important.
It’s simple.
Keyword research helps you structure your content marketing strategy so you can create content that covers all of your audience’s pain points and stages in the buyer’s journey.
It can also help to improve your ranking on search engines, like Google.
Keyword search tools can help you come up with keyword ideas and really understand how your audience thinks and discusses concepts related to those words.
They also show you related alternatives that people search for. Some tools show how many monthly searches certain terms receive, along with the difficulty level in terms of creating content that ranks well for the keyword in question.
There are many keyword suggestion tools out there, both free and others with payment plans.
Here are five free keyword search tools to get you started on your content marketing journey.
Google Ads Keyword Planner
Google Ads contains a free Keyword Planner. You can type in some keyword ideas and it will return information for them, along with similar ideas.
You’ll be able to see the average number of monthly searches for any given keyword as well as their value in terms of cost-per-click to give you an idea of their difficulty level.
Google Trends
A great way to check if any of your keyword ideas is topical at the moment is to use Google Trends.
Simply type in your keywords and it will show you their trend. You can filter by country, time frame, category, and look at more information per region.
It also shows you related search queries users have entered as well as similar topics.
Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics is a cool keyword search tool. It’s very visual, showing graphs of topics and keywords that are trending up.
You can search by time frames and categories to see what’s hot right now.
For example, if you set the time filter to ‘Last 3 months’ and choose the ‘home’ category, you’ll see that ‘bread recipe’ and ‘baker’s yeast’ appear as exploding topics. That should come as no surprise as everyone is trying out their baking skills while social distancing at home.
Ideally, you want to get your content on a trending topic published as early as possible before the market becomes saturated.
Answer The Public
When you’re looking for long-tail keywords, Answer The Public is a really good keyword search tool.
Simply enter your keyword and it will show you how users use your keyword in their searches, either in questions, with prepositions, in comparisons, with other words in alphabetical order, and similar items. It gives you tons of ideas.
You can view the results either as a visual representation or in bullet point form.
Ubersuggest
I love Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest as a keyword suggestion tool. You can search for keywords by country and it will show you the monthly searches and difficulty associated with ranking for a keyword.
It also shows you valuable information (backlinks, domain authority, social shares, among others) about other pages that appear on search engines for that keyword.
It then has another section that gives you content ideas linked to the keyword you’ve entered. This can be a good way to see how the competition is discussing your topic so you can identify a gap in the market.
These are just a few suggestions that are free to use. Some of them have paid plans too that give you access to more searches or further insights.
Make sure you check them out as keyword search tools are essential to anyone wanting to create great content that ranks well on Google.
Let me know in the comments what other keyword suggestion tools you recommend. What free ones do you use? Do you use any paid-for tools?
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