For successful marketing, it is important to invest in good keyword research as it happens to be at the very core of SEO practices and pay per click marketing on the internet. If you do not have the right keywords up your sleeve or are not bidding for the most optimal short or long tail keywords, then chances are that you will not get the success you are aiming for. Utilizing optimal keywords as we all know, brings organic search traffic to your page and increases your online visibility. Hence, it’s important to get this part done right, and using some effective SEO keyword research tools is where it all starts.

 

In this post, we help explore some of the best keyword research tools and methods so that you can up your SEO game.

 

  1. Google Keyword Planner

This is the revamped version of the good old Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which is no longer available for use. To access it, you require an AdWords account in order to get keyword suggestions. Even in the midst of all the fancier keyword tool options available on the market, Google’s keyword planner is a must as it provides you with vital search traffic monthly volumes, trends, keyword suggestions and how competitive it is to rank for keywords. With insight and results like this, it allows you to get a much higher volume of appropriate and optimal keywords. If you need to get a rough estimate of the monthly or annual organic searches for a specific keyword, this is the tool to use. The results may not be always accurate, but they can prove useful to review results along with other tools. Besides, it allows you to export up to eight hundred suggestions for the most seen phrases and keywords, and you can even select certain geographic regions (country, state, city). This tool is an absolute standard and is great for coming up with ideas for blog topics too.

 

  1. Ubersuggest

This happens to be one of the best free tools to help you expand upon a base keyword. For the long run, this will help you find longer tail variations to include in your pages, articles or to discuss on social media. This also shows you what Google is suggesting when users start to type in the keywords or search queries. With the aid of these suggestions, you can be pointed to some of the best longtail keyword phrases as well as ideas for quality content. It pretty much takes any keyword you provide it and gives you an almost inexhaustible list of numerical and alphabetized keyword variants of the original you fed it. Taking it even further is a world of fun. Simply add your keywords to unravel more and more keywords that could be big potentially or used for powerful SEO purposes. Click here to try it.

 

  1. Pinterest Search Function

In today’s digital content world, SEO is not just number crunching and mathematical methods where one relies on density ratios that churn out some short tail keyword traffic. Longtail keywords are vital in today’s semantic search world as they can be relevant to our goods and services. Hence, employing semantically related phrases is the new way to recognize and rank good content. Pinterest is great if you are working on SEO for the fashion industry, crafts and hobbies etc. as the trends change really fast. You can use Pinterest Guided Search or Instant Search to get better, longer tailed keywords in this way. Just put in some keywords and you will quickly see how valuable this tool is.

 

  1. Google Trends

Now that you have found some great keywords, you need something to broaden your data depth at this point. Good old trends and news help you get an idea on, simply put, what’s trending. Some methods that can help you are keeping up with the news of the industry, newsjacking for relevant topics and using Google Trends as a tool. Google Trends can help you determine whether certain keywords are increasingly or decreasingly being used over time in certain geographic areas (city, state, country). Also, Google Trends gives a pretty accurate insight of when to expect sharp rises in search traffic and seasonality for particular words. It is an interesting way to find out whether keywords and niches, are shrinking or growing, and if they are seasonal or not. This is great for building authority websites as you can discover relevant topics that are trending up. Google Trends

 

  1. Competitor Keyword Research

This may not be the most effective way to get good keywords, but this will help you to see the meta keywords being used by some of your competitors in order to try and rank organically. Right click on any page and select ‘View Page Source’ or at the top of your screen click View, then Developer in the sub-menu and then View Source. This allows you to locate and read the keywords that they have got, and it will show you all of the html code on that page. Hence, this is truly one of and if not the best ways to conduct competitive keyword research. We do this here at Auctus Marketing all the time for clients and we find it a critical step in helping a company to establish a keyword strategy that’s effective. Please note though, that your competitors might be using some really low quality keywords, or they may not have meta keywords enabled since Google does not include those in their search algorithm. It’s always a good idea to cross-reference the keywords you find on your competitor’s pages with your research from Google’s Keyword Tool. Nonetheless, this is still a good way to understand what is making your competitors do well.

 

  1. Top Google Ads

By observing the top Google Ads, some of the best keywords can be procured. Advertisements on Google perform well only if they have some great keywords that would make online searchers click or respond fast. Additionally, Google will only give the the top ad slots to ads that are performing well. So in a way, these are proven winners. Don’t ignore this, give it a try. After you view the top keywords in these ads, then go to your competitor’s pages to see if they are in fact using these same keywords on their homepage to rank. If so, then simply perform a quick Google search to see where in fact your competitors rank for these keyword terms. Exercises like this are really important and will help you a lot in not only discovering good keywords but also to discover who is really ranking well in your industry.

 

  1. Using Wikipedia

Wikipedia does not exactly provide you catchy keywords, rather it helps you procure information rich content that your audience will be interested in. Using Wikipedia for inspiration and idea generation is the goal. You can write down some keywords from the SERP, Google the required topic with ‘wikipedia’ at the tail of it and write down keywords from the first paragraph of every article.

Much like actual fishing, keyword research depends a lot on what’s in season, where to cast the net and what time to cast it. For that, your current fishing net of a few keywords needs to be expanded, in order to reap more benefits and a bigger catch. So be sure to try some of these tools and methods which will definitely help you to expand your reach. If you have any questions about any of these tools, please let us know. We love keyword research here.

 

Cheers!

Auctus Team

Boston’s Local SEO Services Company

Keyword Research Services