Keyword Research & Suggestion Tools

Overview: These are free and paid tools which will help you find which keywords to target and how competitive they are. Here is a video offering an introduction to keyword research

At the bottom of this page are a link to a free keyword research PDF and a few more free background videos about understanding keyword research and using keyword research tools.

Variety is the Spice of Life

SEO Toolbar - Free toolbar that adds a dozen cool keyword research tools right in your browser. :) Pick your favorites amongst them and search all of them with 1 click whenever you want to do keyword research.

Traditional Keyword Suggestion Tools

• 
  SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool - our FREE keyword tool showing top keyword phrases. Features include...
  • estimated search volumes
  • estimated bid prices
  • related search terms
  • estimated search value (bid price * monthly search volume)
  • data for the UK market along with the US market
  • quick export of the top 1,000 most valuable related terms to CSV (which includes various keyword match types for paid search campaigns in the export file)
• International keyword tool - the above database primarily consists of English language keywords. We also offer a keyword tool to search across German, French, Spanish & Italian keywords. It offers estimates of search volume, advertiser competition & organic result counts along with a quick export feature, but does not contain keyword bid prices.
• Microsoft Advertising Intelligence - brilliant extension for Microsoft Excel which puts a load of great keyword research data directly into Excel. Bing also offers an online keyword toolset here. You have to be a Bing advertiser to use this tool, but they offer free PPC ad credit coupons.
• Google AdWords Keyword Planner - recommends keywords based on a keyword you enter or a URL you have the tool analyze. Has a traffic estimator feature which shows the estimated bids prices and ad clicks for the top ranked AdWords ad. Allows you to check for [exact match], "phrase match", or broad match. In the past YouTube had a separate keyword research tool for it, but Google took that offline & folded the feature into their Display Planner. WARNING: Google at one point in time offered the best keyword tool, but they have become more adversarial with offering useful data to anyone who isn't spending money advertising with them, so if you are not running an AdWords ad campaign their tool may return somewhat irrelevant volume data using quite broad ranges.
  • Keywords Everywhere - Firefox & Chrome extensions which integrate data from Google AdWords keyword planner in Google Analytics and various third party keyword tools. This tool was formerly named Keyword Keg.
• Google Shopping Insights - map based tool which shows where various products are more frequently searched for.
• Wordtracker is one of the original keyword tools, offering a suite of advanced features along with selling top keyword reports. They have been one of the longest lasting SEO-related tool providers & were one of the original keyword tools founded nearly a couple decades ago. I also wrote a guide for them on coming up with creative keyword research ideas.
• SEMrush Keyword Magic - tool which comes as part of the competitive research tool SEMrush. Their database contains over 200 million keywords across 30 regional databases.
• Ahrefs Keyword Explorer - tool which comes as part of the link analysis & competitive research tool Ahrefs. Their database contains over 3 billion keywords from over 100 countries. On keywords they also provide granular estimates of click destinations breaking down:
  • searches with no clicks
  • searches which click on ads
  • searches which click on organic results, by site or page
• KWfinder - low-cost keyword research tool.
• Keyword Discovery - free keyword tool from Trellian. Trellian also has a more advanced paid version of Keyword Discovery.
• Keyword Hero - paid tool which replaces keyword (not provided) with AI-driven estimations of the actual keyword data.
• 7Search - smaller database from their smallish PPC ad network
• Ferzy - freemium tool which displays keyword competition levels, bid prices & search volumes
• Grep Words - API-based keyword tool.
• Google Suggest scrapers
  • Google Suggest Tool - shows frequently search for phrases starting with the words and letters in your query.
  • Uber Suggest is a feature-rich tool which uses Google Instant keywords to generate suggestions.
  • KeywordTool.io, Tejji & Infinite Suggest are similar to Uber Suggest.
  • AnswerThePublic - similar to the above, but breaks the search requests down visually into sections of who, what, where, when, why, how & such.
  • Huballin - similar to AnswerThePublic, but with a less graphical interface.
  • KeywordShitter - questionable branding no doubt, but a useful tool for automatically bulk scraping Google suggest. They have a more upmarket offering called KeywordSheeter.

Keyword Valuation Tools

• Both Bing & Adwords offer CPC estimates in their ad platforms, though as mentioned above, Google's data is quite terrible as they aim to obfuscate data to make SEO harder. If you are a large AdWords advertiser they may show somewhat more accurate data, but they still tend to merge some words together & do other shifts as their goal is to get advertisers to spend broadly & aggressively.
• many competitive research tools like SemRush, SpyFu, SearchMetrics & KeywordSpy offer similar databases. Each service has its own strengths and weaknesses (database depth, regional coverage, data exportability, etc.)

Installable Keyword Databases / Desktop Software

These tools offer downloadable databases that you can install on your computer. One issue with these types of databases is they tend to have a bit of noise in them & are a huge download. But the nice thing is there is no recurring fee for the data after you buy it (though they may charge for updates).

• Xedant
• K-meta

More Abstract Keyword Sources

• Keyword Density Analysis Tool - finds common words and phrases on your site.
• LSI Graph - generates a list of keywords based on latent semantic indexing.
• Page Comparison Tool - tool compares the page titles, meta information, and most common two and three word phrases between different pages.
• Thesaurus.com - find related keywords using a traditional thesaurus
• Power Thesaurus - a crowdsourced thesaurus tool.
• Google Global Market Finder - highlights estimated search volumes for related keywords in foreign languages in foreign markets
• Google Contextual Targeting - clusters similar keywords & shows what websites they feel are relevant to those clusters
• Google Trends Datastore - databases of keywords for "how to" searches & other similarly themed databases
• Wikipedia traffic stats - page-level stats across the Wikipedia project. See WikiTrends.net for recent trending articles

Trend Related Keywords

• Exploding Topics - shows fast growing topics
• Amazon.com - offers category based best sellers, new releases, & movers & shakers. There is also a third party Amazon keyword tool which was created by Sistrix.
• Google Trending Searches - shows keywords that are recently hot with daily & realtime data published. Also archives older hot keywords, and Google Trends shows seasonal search trends for most popular keywords.
• Pinterest Trends - US-only keyword trend data for Pinterest
• TrendHunter & Trendwatching - marketing trend websites

Bulk Keyword Editing Tools

• Keyword List Generator - allows you to quickly create large lists of keyword phrases using keywords and modifiers
• Keyword List Cleaner - allows you to quickly create a functional keyword list from most any publicly available keyword source.
• Keyword Misspelling Generator - allows you to generate various misspellings of a keyword or phrase to match common typing errors. Useful for creating keyword lists around your most important keywords to bid on.
• Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Excel plug in - a suite of highly useful and easy to recommend keyword tools that interface with Microsoft Excel.
• Keyword Studio - paid tool with automated grouping of like terms.

Keyword Modifiers

• Keyword Modifiers - Spreadsheet showing common keyword modifiers organized by categories such as price, location, and other common variables.
• keyword tools review post - a couple year old blog post offering a free comparison of different keyword research tools, also showing how keyword modifiers work in a real world example

Background Information on Keywords

50 minute Keyword research video by me...a bit long, but hopefully you find it useful :)

• Dan Thies video on keyword strategy
• Dan Thies video on using my keyword permutation generator tool
• emarketingperformance.com keyword research [PDF]

Retired Keywords Tools

As far as I know, these tools are no longer available. Some of them may have been rebranded or folded into other offerings, while some outright disappeared.

• Google
  • Google Correlate - draw a shape or plug in a keyword & Google will show you other keywords with similar patterns. http://www.google.com/trends/correlate
  • Google Search Based Keyword Tool - shows keyword search volume estimates and keyword values...by keyword, site, or category. http://www.google.com/sktool/
  • YouTube Keyword Tool - keyword information for video searches on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/keyword_tool
  • Google Sets - creates a set of keywords based on a keyword you enter http://labs.google.com/sets
• Yahoo
  • Yahoo Mindset - let Yahoo show you how they can change results for commercial and informational queries http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/
  • Yahoo Term Extraction - delivers a list of most important keywords contained inside a piece of text. http://tools.seobook.com/yahoo-keywords/
  • Yahoo! Buzz Index - search trends and stories about what keywords are hot right now http://buzz.yahoo.com/overall/
  • Yahoo! Clues -- keyword tool offering in-depth demographic data
  • Overture Keyword Tool - was replaced by the Yahoo! Search Marketing Keyword Tool, which was also canceled after the Bing ad syndication deal with Microsoft
• Microsoft
  • Microsoft Keyword Forecast - shows predicted Microsoft search impression count and historical trends. http://adlab.msn.com/ForecastV2/
  • adCenter Labs tools - Microsoft offers a wide array of keyword tools like demographic prediction and content categorization tools. http://adlab.msn.com/
• eBay
  • eBay Pulse - keywords that are currently hot on eBay, organized by category. http://pulse.ebay.com/
  • eBay Marketplace Research - this paid tool allows you to see what items are selling on eBay and for how much http://pages.ebay.com/marketplace_research/
• Other tools
  • WordStream Keyword Tool - allows you to export a list of thousands of keywords for free, though acts as a lead generation tool & requires you to input your email address to get the keyword list. http://freekeywordtool.wordstream.com/
  • Wordtracker Keyword Questions - shows questions people searched for that contain the root keyword you type in. http://labs.wordtracker.com/keyword-questions/
  • Wordtracker Free Keywords - free keyword suggestions from Wordtracker. http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
  • Google Related Keywords - highlights words that Google considers as being related to a keyword, as displayed when you search Google for ~keyword http://www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/index.php
  • Moz popular searches - combines and archives results from many of the tools in this section and a few others http://www.seomoz.org/popular-searches
  • SERPs Kewyordini - quick and easy export like our keyword tool. appears to list more longtail keywords, but has a bit less coverage on some head terms. https://serps.com/tools/keywords
  • Quintura - visual search service which shows related modifiers clustered around your search http://www.quintura.com/
  • Dependency-based Word Similarity - shows words which are often found in the same documents in a corpus of news articles. http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~lindek/demos/depsim.htm

Related Categories

• Analytics Tools - track what keywords you are ranking for and how well they are performing
• Competitive Research Tools - compare your marketing strategies and progress to competitors
• PPC Tools - tools to build your pay per click marketing campaigns
• Rank Checkers - track your rankings

Know Any Other Tools Worth Suggesting?

email me

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