Keyword Research Tools for SEO
Keyword research is hard.
There’s not really a good shortcut for it, because at the end of the day, you need to put the work in to find out what keywords people are using to find things on the internet.
You need to know how to find those keywords, and that’s what this post is going to be about. I use several ‘secret’ keyword research tools to get the edge with my content and create things that people not only WANT to find, but also that competitors maybe haven’t tried yet.
Secret Keyword Research Tools
Here are the main ones I use, alongside an explanation of how I use them to do keyword research.
Longtailpro
I’ll start with an obvious one, Longtailpro. This is a tool I use to directly see how many people are searching for a particular set of keywords. You type in a ‘seed’ keyword and it spits out hundreds of related keywords, and their search volume.
You can see the competition and all sorts of other exciting things within the platform. Great stuff, but this still only pulls information from google keyword planner. It’s GOOD but it’s only the start.
SimilarWeb
This is a GREAT tool for doing keyword research. The idea here is that you type into google your MAIN broad keyword. Let’s say your keyword is ‘fishing’. You find the most popular site or three sites that come up and you put them into SimilarWeb.
Similar web will show you what keywords they are getting the most traffic from! Brilliant. You will find things here that you never would have found with keyword planner or ubersuggest. This is the keywords that are actually brining your competitors traffic right now. Good to know.
Soovle
Soovle works in the same way that ubersuggest does. It combines the search suggestions of several search engines, like Amazon, Yahoo, Bing, Google and more. It’s very interesting to see the different in suggestions based on the search engine.
Of course, Amazon returns much more buyer focused keyword suggestions, as it’s an commerce search engine but there are ALWAYS interesting little gems to be found by running your seed keyword through several other search engines.
Ubersuggest
The big boy of the autosuggest world. This tool will show you all the automatic search suggestions for your seed keyword. You can then export these and run them through keyword planner to get the volumes. However, don’t take it as gospel because keyword planner isn’t 100% accurate.
Amazon
Go to Amazon, type in your seed keyword, let’s say fishing. Now go to the best selling book (or three) and look inside using their ‘take a peek’ feature’. Look at the contents and notice the words the author is using to break up the book chapters. You have now got yourself a new list of seed keywords to explore that you might not have thought about.
This works because the author is usually an expert in that topic. It’s a best selling book so people agree with what he’s saying and are likely to use the same language to describe this thing, so it can’t hurt to try and use these same keywords in your content.
Buzz Sumo (Social proof)
Once you have some keywords, you will want to check which ones are worth going after in terms of volume and difficulty. you can use moz.com to get the difficulty but you can use Buzzsumo to get the social potential.
What I mean by that is that buzz sumo shows you the most popular content for a given keyword and sorts them by how many social shares and links they’ve got. Very useful for seeing which content is responded to well in any industry.
Forums
Again, start by searching for your seed keyword + ‘forum’ and then browse the forum. Run the forums URL through similar web and see where the bulk of the forums traffic is coming from.
This is great because the popular posts on forums are written by people who are interested in that niche and know about it.
They are going to be using phrases and words that ‘insiders’ know. It’s good to weave some of these keywords and their language into your content and add them as semantic keywords. The benefit to your content marketing efforts can be extensive and your traffic data will soon testify to this!
I hope you have enjoyed this post. There is of course a lot more to be said and this is really only scratching the surface for keyword research. There are always new hacks, ninja tricks and exiting new ways to find information coming up.
To learn more, make sure to visit moneyspyke and read my latest blog posts about marketing!
About the author – Stefan Zugor is an entrepreneur who’s passionate about marketing and personal development. He’s got a passive income and marketing blog over at MoneySpyke.com
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