Free Keyword Research Toolkit

One of the keys to making money online with a content website is keyword research. Finding out what people are searching for is the first step in creating any online business which relies on search engine traffic. It doesn't matter whether you make money with adsense, promote affiliate products or sell your own product or service, organic search visitors are what you want.

With that in mind, I've put together a list of free keyword research tools that I use on a regular basis. I use them when I'm researching a new niche or when I'm looking at expanding a website in an existing niche. They give me a fair idea of what people are looking for and what topics I should be writing about.

Wordtracker GTrends Keyword Tool

I've already written about the Wordtracker GTrends free keyword research tool in a previous post so I wont go into too much detail here.

What the tool provides is:

• A list of long tails for your main keyword,
• The approximate search volume, and
• The number of competing pages in Google

You can find the tool at the following url: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/.

Keyword Discovery Free Search Term Suggestion Tool

This is another tool which comes in handy.

The data provided is a list containing:

• Long tails for you main keyword, and
• The annual search volume

According to the website, their data is collected from a number of search engines. However, I find this service to be the least accurate when it comes to the raw numbers. However, I find it useful to get an idea of the relative volume of searches.

What I mean by this is that if another tool tells me that how to make money online is searched for twice as often as ways to make money online, I can compare with Keyword Discovery to see if the ratio is in the same ballpark.

The other thing I use this tool for is to get an idea of the types of phrases people type into search engines.

You can find the tool at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

By rights, this should be the best and most accurate service out there as Google serves the lions share of the world's search queries. And generally it's pretty good. The main thing I've noticed is that not all of the popular variations for a particular search term are listed. Yet if I enter the missing term directly, it happily gives me the volume and long tails as you would expect. I've come across a few anomalies like that.

Although this isn't a real example, it would be like entering internet marketing into the tool then not getting back internet marketing strategy in the results, even though it appears to have good volume. But entering internet marketing strategy directly gives plenty of results.

The Adwords Keyword Tool provides the following information:

• A list of related keywords,
• The monthly search volume for each of these,
• Cost Per Click that advertisers are paying in Adwords,
• Advertiser competition, and
• Trend over time

In addition there are a number of filters. You can target specific countries, you can set broad, phrase or exact match on the keywords and you can also choose to display synonyms.

A full discussion of this tool is an entire article in its own right, so I'll leave it at that for now.

Visit the Adwords Keyword Tool here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2.

Google Insights For Search

Another for the Google stable of tools is Insights for Search. There are heaps of different ways to use this service (probably way more than I've considered).

While it doesn't give you the raw volume of some of the other tools I've discussed here, what I like is that you can slice and dice your keyword research in many different ways. You can look break it down by location, time or category. You can see what's popular more recently verses over the long term. You can look at seasonal search volume.

The best thing to do is jump in and have a play. You can find Insights for Search here: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#.

Google Search-Based Keyword Tool

Yet another one from Google. I find I don't use this service as much as some of the others mentioned. But if you're stuck looking for a niche, you can drill down into categories through multiple levels and get a list of 689 keywords (along with monthly search volume and CPC information) related to 'Wine & Beer Collecting & Brewing' for example.

I haven't explored all of the options yet so once again, just jump in and give it a try.

Visit the Search-Based Keyword Tool at: http://www.google.com/sktool/#.

WordStream Free Keyword Tool

I've only just found this one. Of the free options, this service seems to give the greatest raw volume. You get to see the top 100 keywords as an anonymous user but you need to provide your email address to see the complete list. I presume this is how they make money - by 'targeted offers' to their list.

Check out WordStream here: http://www.wordstream.com/keywords/.

Wonder Wheel and Related Searches

Most internet marketers are already familiar with this so I'll be brief. When you do a search using Google, there is a 'Show option...' link at the top of the search results. There's a heap of things to choose from but a couple that I find handy are Related searches and Wonder wheel.

Related searches is just that - a list of searches which are related to the term you've just used.

Wonder wheel is kind of like a graphical representation of related searches. It shows how the various keywords are related and you can click to further expand various topics.

Word Checker

This one's kind of out of left field. What it lets you do is analyse a word, find the word stem, then using that stem find other similar words by adding prefixes and suffixes to the stem.

So for instance if I enter marketing, it tells me the stem is market. It then gives me a list of similar words - marketer, marketeer and so on. You can then go and plug some of these variations into the tools already discussed above.

Try it out at: http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/wordcheck/.

Please leave me a comment with any other free keyword research tools which I have missed.

One find thing. None of these tools are accurate all of the time. Crosscheck the results from one against another. Don't build a huge search engine optimisation around a search term you've discovered using one of these tools, only to find that the traffic's just not there.

Free Keyword Research Tools - Wordtracker GTrends

There are only a handful of decent free keyword research tools out there and the Wordtracker GTrends keyword research tool is one of them. Anyone familiar with basic internet marketing techniques will understand the importance of keyword research. In a nutshell the tool provides the following information.

• A list of long tails for your main keyword,
• The approximate search volume, and
  
• The number of competing pages in Google

To use the tool, go the the following url: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/

You will be presented with the following screen.


To use the GTrends tool, simply enter your main keyword in the text box labeled Keyword and click on Hit Me. You will notice that there is an Adult Filter drop down list which you can use to filter the results the tool returns. Normally I just leave it at the default of remove offensive, but depending on your niche you may want to play around with this.

If I type in the keyword financial freedom and click 'Hit Me', I will get results similar to those shown below. The free version of this tool which we're using will only show the first 100 results (if there are that many) but that's plenty for when you're just starting out. Once you start making money with your website, then you might like to upgrade to the paid version, but the free one will do us for now.


In the results you can see the search term along with the average daily searches and a little clickable picture of a graph or bar chart. The search terms returned in the results all contain the keyword which you entered. These are all of the long tail variations that people are actually searching for. The average daily searches is just that - it's Wordtacker's estimate of how many people search for that term each day.

At this point, we can do one of two things. We can either drill down on a particular search term to see all of it's long tail variations in the same way we just did for financial freedom, or we can click on the little graph icon. Lets click on the graph to see what that does.



What we see here is the Niche Summary for the keyword financial freedom. It shows us 2 main things:

1. The competition in Google, and
2. The actual visitors per day in Google.

The competition in Google is simply the number of search results returned for a search on financial freedom in Google. Theoretically, the less pages, the lower the competition and therefore the easier it will be to rank for the term. However, I believe this logic to be flawed and I'll explain why soon.

The Actual Visitors is the theoretically the number of visitors a number one ranking in Google would get you for this search term. The tools calculates this information based on the Google Trends data and being Google data, it should be more accurate than the Wordtracker data.

You may notice that in parentheses under the competition and visitor figures, the tool recommends certain numbers - less than 30,000 competition and greater than 100 daily visitors. This is based on the methodology used by the creator of the tool to make money online. The theory is that less than 30,000 results should be fairly easy to rank for and more than 100 visitors per day should be enough for you to start earning some money.

While in principal this approach is okay, particularly if you're just starting out, the reality is a little more complex. The difficulty with placing a limit of 30,000 (or any other number) on the competition is that it doesn't take into account the strength of the sites which show up on the first page of the search results. There may only be 10,000 results, but the top 10 sites might be very strong - well established sites with lots of authority for the term you're chasing.

Alternatively, there may be 500,000 competing pages, but the top 10 may only mention the term in passing. It might be wide open to someone coming in with some fresh, well targeted content.

So while these number are a good starting point, make sure you look into who you'll actually be competing with as well.

At the bottom of the Niche Summary you will see some links to allow you to do some further research.
- You can navigate to the actual results in Google, or
- You can search for affiliate programs in the niche - this is how you'll be making your money, or
- You can go to the Google Trends site to look at the search volume and history in more detail.

The other interesting thing you'll find on the Wordtracker GTrends page is a thesaurus. Think of it as lateral keyword research - branching out to other closely related niches.

I'll leave you with one final thing to remember about keyword research. The Wordtracker GTrends tool, as with most other free keyword research tools will only provide estimates. Use your own common sense as well. If the keyword 'financial freedom in the arctic' happened to show 1,000 daily searches, you can be fairly sure that something is not right. These tools aren't perfect.