Crafting compelling and robust content that satisfies both users and search engines requires targeting the right keywords. To find such keywords, SEO experts are leveraging keyword research tools.
These tools go beyond the limitations of manual keyword research to understand your target market and how people are searching for your content, services or products. It suggests keywords that optimize your site to rank higher in search results and funnel new visitors to your website.
What Are the Benefits of Using Keyword Research Tools?
Keyword research tools enable you to efficiently conduct keyword analysis and use the findings to restructure your marketing campaign around a specific product or audience. Here are some more benefits of using a keyword research tool.
Competitive Analysis
Knowing what strategies your competitors are employing is always helpful. With a keyword research tool, you can understand the keywords your competition is targeting by simply dropping a landing page URL or a website into its search box. You can even obtain feedback and volume for different words.
Personalized Keywords
A keyword research tool delivers search query reports that contain newly discovered keywords created from the terms that online users used to find your product or service. You can combine the report with your keywords to create personalized keywords that would be highly relevant to your SEO and business.
Marketing Trend Insights
By in-depth keyword analysis, you get insights into current marketing trends as well as consumer behavior. In this way, the tool helps you to keep up with what is trending. So, you craft relevant content that your audience wants to see.
What Factors Make a Good Keyword Research Tool?
Keyword research tools are undoubtedly a boon for website optimization, but you must consider a few factors before deciding to get one. Here is the list of factors that you should consider.
Keyword research with language target
If your business or site targets audiences of specific regions, keyword research for targeted languages should be your priority, primarily because it will be on top of your multilingual SEO.
Check if your chosen tool has a multilingual glossary and termbase to support your strategic approach. It is necessary to prepare your content with relevant keywords in the target languages before sending it to a language service provider (LSP) for translation or localization. Then your content will successfully attract and retain customers on a global scale.
Statistics for word competition
It is imperative to evaluate the difficulty of a new keyword vertical before targeting it. Your keyword tool must have the ability to analyze keyword competition that would tell the difficulty level to rank for a particular keyword.
The statistics will help you judge keyword competitiveness and estimate the time and effort it may take to achieve top rankings for the targeted word.
In-depth SERP overview
For every keyword, search results differ widely based on the location from where the user is searching. Therefore, your tool must analyze SERPs from different countries, especially the countries you want to target.
The in-depth SERP overview should also show you real-time search results from any location, give you accurate ranking difficulty score and elaborated SEO stats, analyze organic search results, SERP position history, etc.
Reporting
Checking your site ranking regularly for the chosen keywords is not enough to know if your effort to optimize the site is working. You need to have a detailed report that will include an analysis of the pages towards which those target keywords drive traffic.
Besides, it should contain the facts such as traffic your target keywords drive to your web pages and the list of keywords driving the most traffic to your site.
Filtering
Keyword research tools will generate an extensive list of keywords, sometimes hundreds of thousands of keywords. Finding the most appropriate keyword, in such a case, is almost like searching for a needle in a haystack.
But with the help of a proper filtering option, you will be able to narrow your search significantly. Look for the keyword filter option in your tool of choice. This feature will help you filter away those keywords that don’t conform to your requirements.
The Best Keyword Research Tool
In this section, you will find a handpicked list of the best keyword research tools.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a fantastic keyword research tool offering some of the rare SEO features. It has a great UI and provides extensive information about the keywords. It is also an exceptional competitive intelligence functionality, which allows you to see new keywords and keyword movements in search queries.
Pros:
- Has a great UI
- Provides extensive information for search volume and a breakdown of the first-page competition.
Cons:
- It doesn’t integrate with Google analytics
- There is no free trial
Best For: Ahrefs Keyword Explorer is best recognized for providing in-depth information on each keyword.
Pricing: Its pricing starts from $99 per month. If you choose their annual subscription, you will get two months of subscription for free.
Rating: 5 stars
SEMRush
SEMRush is a globally acclaimed SEO tool incorporating exceptional keyword research tools. The tool can search for keywords through multiple options — using a seed keyword, researching your competitors or performing keyword gap analysis.
Pros:
- Can search for keywords through multiple options
- Can find all of the keywords your competitor is ranking for
Cons:
- It has is the technicalities involved in handling the tool.
Best For: SEMRush is the best suggested for competitor analysis.
Pricing: The plan starts from $119.95 per month. You can save 16% on an annual subscription.
Rating: 5 stars
Soovle
Soovle provides keyword suggestions from multiple sources for free. It is a dedicated keyword research tool that gives you keyword ideas from Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon and more.
Pros:
- Is a dedicated keyword research tool
- You can save your favorite keyword ideas
- Allows you to download your favorite keywords to a CSV file
Cons:
- It lacks additional SEO features like analytics and location-based suggestions.
Best For: It is still a simple yet powerful tool for unlimited, quick and efficient keyword searches.
Pricing: Soovle is free to use.
Rating: 4 stars
AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is a solid keyword research tool that tells exactly how people search around for topics. Available with a free version, AnswerThePublic is a fantastic tool, enabling you to discover phrases you might not have thought of. It gives you the visualizations of questions and phrases people ask around for a particular root keyword.
Pros:
- Assists you in discovering new search phrases
- Offers you the visualizations of questions and phrases people ask
- Phrases are based on Google and Bing auto-suggest/auto-complete features
Cons:
- Limited free version.
- The free version limits you to three searches a day.
- Doesn’t show you keyword statistics.
Best For: Altogether, AnswerThePublic is an excellent tool for bloggers.
Pricing: AnswerThePublic offers two plans. The basic paid plan starts from $99 per month, which would cost $79 per month if you opt for an annual subscription.
Rating: 4 stars
Serpstat
Serpstat is a comprehensive keyword research tool with exceptional ability to identify winning keywords. It gives you a detailed overview of keyword research. For example, you can see search volume, competition, CPC and keyword difficulty score, all in one place.
Pros:
- Provides a detailed overview of keyword research
- The keyword difficulty score section shows detailed information on the top 10 web pages
- Incorporates some unique features like Keyword Cluster and Missing Keywords
Cons:
- Serpstat’s keyword difficulty tool may not produce results as accurate as Ahrefs.
Best For: Serpstat could be the best tool for small businesses to research keywords, build new links and develop a strategic SEO platform.
Pricing: Its pricing starts from $69 per month. When you go for an annual subscription, you get a 20% discount.
Rating: 4 stars
Use Keyword Research Tool to Better Your Position
Choosing the right tool matters for the growth of your business. It will help you conduct in-depth keyword analysis and create content for the targeted customers in specific regions while meeting the search engine’s ranking criteria.
Consequently, your site will rank higher in search engine results, getting you more traffic and conversion. So, don’t wait for long. Select a tool from the list above and get ready to create a successful marketing campaign!
Recommended lecture: WHAT IS THE BEST KEYWORD RANK CHECKER?, AHREFS VS. SEMRUSH
