It’s one of the most time-consuming, but also most important parts of your SEO Strategy. How do you find the right keywords? The keywords you pick are going to be vital in what results you show up for in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). When picking your keywords, you need to find a balance between high-volume keywords and low competition for those keywords. A search with 20,000 searches per month (SPM) is great, but if it’s a highly competitive keyword, the chances of you showing up are slim to none.
Luckily for you, there are plenty of options that can vary in pricing from always free, to free versions of popular software, and paid versions of those software.
Free Keyword Research Options
If you’ve had your website for quite some time and have already been hard at work with a content strategy, then Google Search Console is going to be your best friend when it comes to free options. This tool is very easy to set up, and it allows you to take an in-depth look at how certain keywords have performed on your site for the past 18 months.
You are able to see how a certain keyword has performed for Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Position in the SERPs.
With this tool, you can see what keywords have done well for you in the past, and if you have let them slip over the past several months. For example, you may have been ranked at a 6.1 average position for the keyword “What makes a good rhinoplasty candidate” 6 months ago because you created a great piece of content. But it’s then trailed off to the bottom of page 2 in the last 6 months. In cases like this, you might want to update that piece of content so Google re-indexes the page as a new piece of content.
Since you’ve already had one successful run with that content, Google will see you as an Authority on that topic, which helps with ranking and generating traffic.
You can also use Google Search Console to see what keywords you haven’t been taking advantage of. If you’re ranking at the top of page 3 for a keyword you haven’t even attempted to gain steam for, that might be a sign for you to lock in and try getting that keyword up to page 1.
Freemium Keyword Research Options
These options are what I call “freemium”. That means that they are technically free, but they’re probably going to dangle some better, shinier options in front of you that you can’t use because you’re not paying.
Some of the big hitters in their field are SEMRush and AHRefs. The free versions of both these platforms have some differentiating factors, but they both have a limited Keyword Research Tool.
SEMRush’s free tool allows you to look at your keyword rankings vs your competitors. It may seem like a rude tactic, but one of the easiest ways to find industry-specific keywords is to steal them from your competitor. This does not mean you should copy the content itself. You need to make your own material, but a keyword is fair game.
You may not have thought to target the keyword “different types of rhinoplasty”, but one of your competitors has a blog that is passable but ranking well. If you know you can write a better piece of content for that keyword, you should do it and take over their spot on the SERPs.
AHRef’s free keyword tool is a bit different. As I said before, this is freemium, so they’re going to put better options there for you to use, but it will cost money. One of the free options is a tool called “Low-Hanging Fruit Keywords.”
As the image shows, these are keywords that are in positions 4-15 that you can either create new pieces of content for, or make updates to existing pieces of content. Both of these options are great, and since they are free, you can use both of them when determining your keywords.
Paid Keyword Research Options
The biggest problem with the freemium keyword research options is that they will only give you a limited number of results before telling you “if you want to see more results, pay us.” You should be able to get buy without having to pay if you’re using these products in-house. Once you get into the agency-life, a paid keyword research tool becomes a necessity.
SEMRush and AHRefs are both great options for Search Engine Marketing as a whole, not just keyword research, so if you need a more all-encompassing tool, either of those will work just fine.
If you’re specifically looking for a paid keyword research tool, Keyword Finder is a great option. This tool allows you to search a keyword and the platform will give you long-tail keywords, and other suggested kewords related to the search term you entered in. Along with these suggestions, the platform will give you the searches per month, the difficulty of ranking for that keyword on a scale of 1-100, and the Cost-Per-Click of that keyword in Google ads if you are doing down the paid route.
If you don’t want to handle the keyword research yourself, don’t hesitate to reach out to us and we can get you in touch with an all-star SEO team to take care of all the heavy lifting for you.