The way content is written can be the difference between success and failure in your business or blog. When you’re writing for SEO, it’s not just about what you write, but how you write it that matters. And if you want to succeed in the long run, then you need to learn how to write better.
Writing for SEO means using keywords strategically when creating content. But oftentimes, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. So many people struggle with keyword research because they don’t know where to start.
In today’s post, I’ll share five tools that will help make finding good keywords a lot easier.
1. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is one of the most popular keyword research tools on the internet. It allows you to enter any search term into the tool and see an estimated number of searches performed per month. This is incredibly helpful when trying to find keywords that are likely to bring a decent amount of traffic.
It gives you data on search volume, competition and CPC (cost per click), which are all very important numbers when deciding whether or not to use a certain phrase. You can also see what month of the year has the highest demand.
The tool also gives you access to other paid features such as AdWords, which we’ll get into later.
Using Google Keyword Planner, you should set up two columns: “Global Search Volume” and “Ad Competition” (Figure 1). The Global Search volume column shows the average monthly global searches for the entered keyword. Ad competition shows how competitive the searched terms are for your niche. You’d expect more competition for less-used keywords.
It’s also worth noting that you can use the “Related Searches” feature to discover related keywords. For example, if you were researching how to write longer posts for SEO purposes, you could enter “longer posts” into the tool and find other related terms like “lengthy posts”, “blogging advice”, etc.
2. SEMrush
If you’re looking for more than just the basic information from Google Keyword Planner, then you should check out SEMrush. This website offers tons of additional features like keyword trends and competitive analysis.
This is one of my favorite tools for researching keywords. The key benefit here is that it shows you what words people are searching for on other sites around yours. This is great because it lets you know what terms people are already looking up on other websites, so you can focus on those instead of having to come up with new ones.
SEMrush offers tons of features such as SEO competitor intelligence, link popularity, social media mentions, top-ranking pages, and much more. They even have a feature called “Content Explorer” that allows you to do some basic keyword research. You can use SEMrush free trial to get started with it.
3. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is another tool that I think everyone should try. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s basically a tool designed to allow you to analyze content across multiple sources at once.
Buzzsumo combines some of the best parts of Keyword Planner and SEMrush into one place. You can enter up to three keywords at once and get both popular topics and their associated competitors. Plus, there’s a ton of cool metrics available too, such as social shares, mentions, top brands, etc.’
You can enter a URL or domain name into the search bar, and there are filters you can apply based on the type of content, links, shares, etc. Once you get the results, you can sort them by page rank, date posted, a number of shares, time spent reading, etc.
It’s also useful for seeing who else wrote about your target keyword over time. For example, let’s say you’re trying to rank for “best mattress brands.” You could enter that keyword into Buzzsumo, and it would show you all the articles that mention both “mattress” and “brands” over time.
This allows you to see when people started talking about these two topics together, and this can give you valuable insight into how to write content for your site. To write content faster you can take the help of AI content writer software.
4. MozBar
Moz is probably the most well-known competitor to Google. They offer similar tools as Google including keyword research, rankings, and popularity metrics. The best part is that you can filter out keywords by location or traffic source.
MozBar is very simple to use. Just type your main keyword into the bar and the suggestions that pop up are going to change based on your location. Similar to SEMRush it includes lots of different helpful metrics.
However, it focuses less on competitors and more on what keywords people are actually searching for. Once again, this is useful because it gives you ideas about what words people are already looking for. It is a great resource for finding niche-related keywords. It even allows you to compare several niches side by side.
5. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another SEO tool that is used mostly for backlink analysis. However, it has a ton of really cool features including:
- Domain Authority – A score that tells you how authoritative a given domain is.
- Page Authority – A score that shows you how influential a specific page is.
- Citation Flow – This shows you how much authority a particular page has gained through incoming citations.
- Citation Count – This shows you how many times a certain page was cited in other content.
Ahrefs is similar to SEMrush, but it focuses solely on backlinks. It is a bit different from the other tools mentioned above. Instead of giving you a broad overview of keywords, Ahrefs focuses on SEO-specific stuff.
For example, you can view organic traffic stats, backlink profiles, and even crawl pages on a site. It’s pretty handy for getting a quick look at a page before publishing something. If you’re interested in getting links for your site, this is a great resource.
The reason why I love this tool so much is its ability to show how backlinks work. For example, if you want to optimize for a particular keyword, you need to understand the importance of that keyword’s backlink profile.
And this tool makes it super easy to look through every single page on a site and identify which links are pointing towards it.
You can even export these results to Excel and sort them by domain authority or Page Authority.
6. Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a Chrome extension that integrates with Google Search Console. It pulls data from Google Webmaster Tools and displays it right inside Google itself.
The main benefits of this extension include:
- Ability to easily add custom columns directly within the source code.
- Get instant access to all the data you need, without ever leaving Google.
- Easily filter and export data.
Do you use these keyword research SEO tools? I hope you found this list helpful! Let me know if you have any questions or feedback in the comments section below.
