6 Tools For Keyword Research You Need In SEO. The lack of precise ranking information makes it difficult to exactly determine your rankings. Still, keywords are an important tool for SEO and content marketing campaigns. Keyword research gives you excellent insights into user search patterns (not to mention knowledge about your target audience), helps guide the topics and focus of your content marketing campaign, and of course, gives you a solid metric with which you can measure your performance. In my keyword research guide, I outline a step-by-step process for exactly how to conduct keyword research for SEO or content marketing campaigns. No keyword tool list would be complete without Google’s Keyword Planner, which is a must-have tool for three reasons: it’s straight from the source (Google), it’s free, and it’s specifically designed to give you accurate keyword information. Also, Moz’s tool will give you more detailed keyword recommendations and will qualitatively rate the cumulative value of each keyword you enter. Google and Moz excel at giving you information for keywords and phrases you enter, but Ubersuggest’s strength lies in helping you come up with more keyword ideas. These won’t be recommended based on search volume, competition, or potential value—but they will help you come up with more specific, relevant, diversified ideas for your campaign. Soovle takes a similar approach as Ubersuggest, but with one critical difference; it relies on the auto-suggest features of several different engines at once, including Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, and Answers.
Keywords have always been a central component of SEO, though
they’ve
undergone an evolution in importance.
Originally, keywords were the beginning and end of SEO; picking
the right keywords was absolutely necessary, and you could
deliberately increase your rankings for those specific keywords,
monitoring your progress with great precision.
These days, the keyword game has been complicated by a handful
of different factors:
- Google’s
Hummingbird update has radically changed the
way Google views keywords (not
to mention content). Now, the search engine focuses on the
semantic context of a user query more than the specific words and
phrases it calls upon, making it hard to achieve one-to-one
momentum by optimizing for specific keywords. - The lack of precise ranking information makes
it difficult to exactly determine your rankings. Google no longer
provides this information, and even though some third-party sites
offer it on their own, it’s still tough to compensate for all the
personalization that happens behind the scenes for individual users
(such as user preferences, search history, device used to perform
the search, geographic location, and whether or not they’re logged
into their Google account). - The volatility of rankings meddles with the
potential consistency of a keyword strategy. Google changes things
constantly, and your competitors will be optimizing alongside you
in real time. - Focusing too much on keywords can compromise
your user experience, hampering your brand reputation or customer
loyalty.
Still, keywords are an important tool for SEO and content
marketing campaigns. Keyword research gives you excellent insights
into user search patterns (not to mention knowledge about your
target audience), helps guide the topics and focus of your content
marketing campaign, and of course, gives you a solid metric with
which you can measure your performance.
In my
keyword research guide, I outline a step-by-step process for
exactly how to conduct keyword research for SEO or content
marketing campaigns. Here, I’ll outline six of my favorite tools to
use for keyword research.
Recommended by Forbes
1. Google’s Keyword Planner.
No keyword tool list would be complete without Google’s Keyword
Planner, which is a must-have tool for three reasons: it’s
straight from the source (Google), it’s free, and it’s specifically
designed to give you accurate keyword information. The only catch
is that it’s designed for paid advertising campaigns (as opposed to
SEO or…
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