Keywords Everywhere, Keyword Surfer, Answer The Public and Keyword Sheeter are the most robust and intuitive freemium keyword tools for marketers on a budget. These softwares allow you to ideate new keyword ideas quickly and validate their competitiveness directly on the SERP.
Unless your business is focused solely on generating impulsive purchases, it’s almost always important for you to understand and build your content strategy around real customer pain points and needs.
The best way to start is to leverage free keyword research tools to identify the top keywords, trends, search volume, and level of competition to rank for specific phrases people are searching for.
Plus, optimizing your website and content with the right keywords will help your content rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), get you more traffic, and help expand your business online through being connected with more buyers who are ready to buy.
There are many free keyword research tools available online with varying specializations ranging from PPC keywords, broad and long-tailed keywords, SEO keyword, and more. Unless you are a seasoned SEO specialist, it can be confusing when deciding on the right tool to use for conducting your keyword research.
In this article, we will share some of our favorite free keyword research tools that are free to use.
1. Keywords Everywhere
This is a freemium browser add-on that lets you analyze keywords while you are browsing. Do your keyword research as you browse online and get immediately informed about the search volume of each auto-suggested keyword. It allows you to fill your keyword list quickly in a box embedded on the right side of the browser. Keywords Everywhere also has a paid version that starts at $10 if you want to look at monthly search volume, CPC, and competition numbers among other features.
What this means is that marketers like us need to work HARDER AND SMARTER in building their contents. We need to work smarter by establishing extreme clarity of the story we are looking to tell our audience and deliver that message in a quick, uncomplicated way.
We also need to work harder with a content production process that builds a much higher volume of content in different formats in order to penetrate the market in a meaningful way.
Tip: Conduct a search keyword research to identify what questions your target audience is asking and build content to answer those questions. If you are interested in our recommended list of free keywords research tools, check out our blog here.
2. Keyword Surfer
Keyword Surfer is a chrome extension that automatically displays the keyword research results on the right-hand side of SERPs whenever you look for a search term. It is fast, easy to use and equip you with useful data like keyword ideas, search volume, SERPs that rank for the search term entered, and the traffic volume to the first 10 pages for each search term.
3. AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is a powerful free keyword research tool that finds popular questions related to your search terms and provides raw search insights. You also get other keyword ideas through “preposition” keywords and “comparison” keywords. The results are displayed in the form of a downloadable graphic that showcases questions that the public asks related to your search terms.
The free version of this powerful tool is limited to 3 free searches daily, so use them carefully.
4. Keyword Sheeter
Keyword Sheeter is a fast & free keyword research tool that pulls autocomplete results from Google. It delivers real-time data of searches and pulls nearly 1,000 ideas per minute and helps you identify ideas and keywords for blog topics. The free version lets you export the keyword list generated. But you need the paid version to get search volume or data on how competitive it is to rank for a keyword.
5. Keyworddit
Keyworddit is a free keyword research tool that mines Reddit for keywords. You have to enter a specific subreddit with at least 10,000 subscribers and specify a particular timeframe. Keyworddit will then pull up to 500 keyword ideas with search volumes from titles and comments of the threads and return unique keyword phrases and blog topics not found anywhere else.
6. QuestionDb
QuestionDb is a free keyword research tool that generates excellent blog topic ideas. It pulls questions related to your search terms and related topics from question-and-answer websites, like Quora and Reddit. You can also review the source link for each question and review how users are framing their questions and their answers. Its free version limits you to 50 results per search term.
7. Ahrefs Keyword Generator
Ahrefs Keyword Generator is a free keyword research tool that pulls the top 100 keyword ideas from its database of over 8 billion keywords across 170 countries. For each search term, you will find its search volume, keyword difficulty, related questions, and when the result was last updated. Use this tool to generate long-tail keywords, target less competitive phrases and isolate your search within specific search engines and geographical locations. Its free version lets you do unlimited searches without creating an account but it does not allow you to download your results. Without an account, you will also have to fill out Captcha every single time.
8. SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool
9. Moz Keyword Explorer
Moz Keyword Explorer is a well-laid-out research tool where you can view monthly volume, organic difficulty & CTR, and a priority score for each search query. It also provides SERP analysis that pulls 10 specific pages’ ranking for your target keyword. You can view their URL, title, domain authority, page authority, and their number of backlinks to the page and the root domain. The free version allows you to make 10 queries a month with the option to download the keyword research results easily into a spreadsheet.
10. Soovle
Soovle is a free keyword research tool that helps you find popular keywords across multiple channels including websites like Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, and YouTube. It auto generates phrases related to your search terms that will help expand your ideas. Soovle provides unlimited free searches but it’s more of an idea generator as it does not provide metrics like search volume or keyword difficulty.
11. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a keyword research tool that helps you analyze your SEO keywords by providing their average Google positions, impressions, and CTRs. You can use this information to optimize existing SEO content and find related content ideas that contribute to generating new traffic to your site and a higher SEO ranking. If you have a website, you can access Google Search Console for free.
12. Google Trends
Google Trends is a free keyword research tool that helps you find keywords that are new and trending and avoid those losing momentum. It delivers graphs and data on specific keywords used on Google, YouTube, Google Shopping, Images, and News. It helps discover local search trends and point out popular search topics related to an industry or theme. It provides real-time data and also historical search data up to 2004. But it does not provide data on monthly search volume and keyword competition.
13. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a keyword research tool that helps you find the search volume and SEO difficulty of your keywords. It also displays paid difficulty and CPC of your keyword phrase. You will also find the number of backlinks needed to rank on the 1st SERP of Google for a specific search term. With Ubersuggest, you can generate more keyword and page content ideas related to your keyword phrase. The free version is limited to 3 keyword searches per day for a single website.
Final Takeaway
There you have it – a list of top free keyword research tools available to us in 2023.
They each have their unique strengths but also share many similarities. Use these free and easy-to-use tools to generate the right keywords for your SEO optimization for different types of marketing content.
Tonny Lam
President & Co-Founder at Hook + Ladder Digital
