Free Tools To Improve Your Keyword Research

One of the most essential steps in any search engine optimisation campaign is researching keywords; failure to research good keywords for the website will usually result in very little recurring organic traffic, and ultimately make it far more difficult to make money from the website.
Optimising a website without having performed adequate keyword research will usually result in either targeting keywords which are very popular and virtually impossible to rank for, or target keywords which very few people are searching for, meaning that hardly any traffic is generated from ranking highly in the search engines. However, there are some free tools which can help you to find the best keywords to target.

Google Keyword Tool

Probably the most commonly used keyword analysis tool is Google’s own keyword tool. By entering just a few keywords which are relevant to your website, Google’s keyword tool will return hundreds of suggested keywords which your website could be optimised for, along with details of how many people are searching for these keywords each month. In many cases this can give the website owner some great search terms which they hadn’t even considered, and optimising the site and ultimately ranking highly for these keywords can drive far more search engine traffic to the website.
It is worth remembering that Google’s Keyword Tool was developed to help Adwords advertisers, so some information, such as the estimated Cost Per Click and Competition, are directed at them. Many people who are new to keyword research assume that the estimated Cost Per Click which the Keyword Tool displays for their keyword is the amount which they will get for every click, which is far from true. Similarly, they assume that the Competition displayed in the Keyword Tool is the strength of the competition to rank for that keyword, when in fact it is merely an indicator of how many advertisers are competing to buy adverts for that particular keyword.

Google Analytics

If the website is already set up and attracting traffic then adding the Google Analytics code can provide vast amounts of useful information regarding the website’s traffic sources. By analysing which keywords people are searching for when they access your website, you can get a good idea of which keywords to target during your SEO campaign. By using the data from Google Analytics, most people will find search terms where the website is ranking highly enough to attract some traffic, but could attract a lot more traffic if that keyword was incorporated into the SEO campaign. There are also a number of WordPress plugins which analyse similar data and record all of the search terms which visitors use to find your website.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is another of Google’s free tools which website owners can use to review a wealth of data regarding their website. One of the most useful functions which Webmaster Tools offers is the option to review which keywords your website is currently ranking for within Google’s search results; in many cases there will be a number of search terms which you had no idea you were ranking for. Again, by optimising your website for these terms there is the potential to attract more traffic from the search engines.

SEMrush

While Google’s tools are excellent to analyse the keywords which your website is already ranking highly enough to generate from, with the exception of the Google Keyword tool they really don’t help to find keywords which you haven’t considered. Google’s Keyword Tool is a great tool to pick out keywords which are related to the topic of your website, however there isn’t really any substitute for looking at the keywords which your competitor is ranking for, which is why SEMrush is such a useful tool for anyone running a search engine optimisation campaign.
SEMrush allows users to view a collection of the keywords which a particular website is ranking for in the search engines; while there are many tools which can do this for your website, there are very few tools which can show this data without installing some form of Software on the website, making SEMrush an ideal tool to review your competitors’ keywords. While there will naturally be a crossover between the keywords which your competitors are ranking for and the keywords which Google’s Keyword Tool suggests, in the majority of cases SEMrush will return a number of keywords which the Google Keyword Tool does not, particularly in the more competitive niches.
Due to the resources which this service uses, and the cost involved to the company, SEMrush offer paid as well as free services, with the number of queries limited for free accounts. However, a free account should still be enough to analyse competitors’ keywords and generate some keyword ideas for an SEO campaign.

Checking Competition

Unfortunately no free tool can accurately check the strength of competition for a keyword; in fact, very few premium tools can provide an estimation that can even be considered reasonably accurate. Some tools will make a calculation based on the number of web pages which contain the keyword, however the reality is that when checking the competition only a manual check of the top 10 results in Google can be considered accurate. Very little traffic comes from ranking in any position out with the top 10, so if a top 10 ranking is not achievable then serious consideration should be made as to whether you should target the particular keyword.
Keyword research is regularly undervalued, with millions of websites not optimised for any keywords, or only optimised for a single, usually very competitive keyword. Most SEO experts say that a website should generally be optimised for one main keyword, referred to as the primary keyword, and between 5 and 20 smaller keywords which are easier to rank for, known as secondary keywords. How many secondary keywords the website targets will depend on the size, and of course budget, of the website.