What are the main keyword research tasks a SEO and SEA use to do? The tasks are different (better optimizing, saving money, out-competing of competitor), but the primal goal of keyword research is always the same: to get more cheaper targeted traffic. A SEO is looking for keywords for optimized page or analyzes the competitor's landing page. A SEA is looking for keywords for an ad and for the landing page, or analyzes competitor's ad and landing page. Lets further look, which keyword research tools could be helping in this (only free tools and no affiliate links, promised:)
NOTE!
Your first and last keyword research tool must be always the AdWords keyword tool. Not cause we love Google, but cause only there you get the Google's view on the main metrics of an analyzed keyword: traffic, CTR, click price.
Keyword research tools classification
Keyword research tools are mainly of 2 kinds:- Tools where keyword research is a single task
- Tools where keyword research is one of many functions
- Standalone downloadable programs
- Online tools
- Standalone tools
- Browser extensions
- Tools with tied online part and browser extension
- free,
- freemium,
- commercial.
- fully functioning free version
- free version with reduced functions
- free version with using time limit
Well-known keyword research tools
I begin with listing of the keyword research tools, which are in my opinion well-known - the common knowledge state can vary, so don't hesitate too look on the list of well-known products, you could find some tool, which you personally never seen and used before and which will make your day.The whole bunch of sophisticated freemium or commercial market-dominating tools like MOZ, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Raven, SEMRush, Searchmetrics, Kissmetrics etc. Every tool has advanced keyword research and analyzing possibilities and each SEO business must use at least one of them.
Then come well known tools, both performing keyword research as single task and doing keyword research as a part of a suite of SEO tools:
- Trellian's KeywordDiscovery - the Overture successor
- Übersuggest,
- Free keyword tools by SEO Book
- Free keyword tools by Wordstream
- Wordstats from SocialAdsTool
- KeywordSpy
- Wordpot
- KeywordEye
- Advanced Web Ranking
- Keyword analysis tool by Market Samurai
- Keyword research tool included in TrafficTravis suite
- Long Tail Pro
Keyword research tools from Google are such well-known - i will not mention them here. Maybe beside of a single one:
Regarding keyword research this tool is interesting not because time ranges, but because you get to your queried keywords other keywords, are topical field related AND are mostly queried with your query.
Here I've finished up with known keyword tools and with a feeling of fulfilled duty begin with
Keyword research tools outside mainstream
Browser (Firefox) extensions for keyword research
1. KGenKGen calculates word lists by frequency of any page, where it is turned on. Lists can be sorted and exported. Beside of this it calculates the weight of each word in the list. The weight parameter is computed on basis of the place in the page's source code: a word appearing in title has more weight as the same word in the paragraph. In the KGen options you can manipulate the weight, associated with each HTML attribute, create own lists of ignored words and some other individualizations. On data basis of KGen you can make reasoned decisions about improving of own texts and make insights into competitor's texts.
2. ClearForest Gnosis
ClearForest Gnosis analyzes page in real time, whether any keyword on the page is located as entity in a bunch of other internet media. If yes, the keyword(s) are underlined and the extension creates a synced media list. The media list, which are queried, contains beside of Wikipedia, main USA news sites, but can you can change it in the options through deleting or adding of own media URLs. Don't let you warp from using of this extension through the last negative review at Firefox's extensions page. In fact, the support site gives 404 out, but the extension works, on the latest Firefox 31 too - i've tested it. You must just wait some seconds: the extension needs time to parse all sources.
Offline (downloadable) keyword research tools: free or with free version
Developers call it keyword research tool just a "Google's autocomplete scraper". But the tool is far more as this. The tool parses not only Google, but many language versions of it, Amazon, Bing, YouTube etc., can be adjusted by its search on location and time, allows different operations with generated keyword lists, lets import, operates and exports your own keyword lists, uses auto-additions of characters on searching, like "keyword + A, B, n...", establishes wildcard searches. The full version price is 40$.
4. Rapidkeyword keyword research tool
This tool contains big amount of useful functions. The full functions list and good documentation help to max out its possibilities and perform your keyword research on high level. Below some of tool's functions regarding keyword research. management and keywords list composing.
Keyword research
- using the Overture keyword suggestion with data display
- parsing meta-data
- parsing Yahoo related and Google Suggest
- checking the amount of keyword-related running ads on Adwords, Overture and Miva
- sorting keywords on amount of running ads
- finding out how many pages are there in Google for your keywords.
- live keyword query preview
- splitting keyword lists into files with specific number of keywords
- merging keyword lists
- check and deletes duplicates and predefined stopwords
- filter out keywords that include undesired words or stopwords
- removing a list of specific keywords from your master keyword list
- wrapping (exact, broad and phrase match) keywords for using on Google Adwords
- creating keyword phrases from keyword lists
- cleaning up the lists (spec.characters, redundant linefeeds. whitespaces)
- Utilizes RegExp for find, replace and other processing of keywords and lists
- Auto-Save & Load between sessions
- Moves keywords with one click between all keyword tools
5. A1 keyword tools - website ranking and keyword analyzer tool by Micro-Sys
This is definitively one of the tools of my choice. In the awesome documentation you become up and running with this tool. Then i describe in short, what kinds of keyword research are you able to perform with:
- check and track the website's position ranking regarding a given keyword in several search engines
Check your competitor regarding organic and paid search using keywords and pagerank as metrics
get new keywords using suggestions from several search engines
create, manage and combine keyword lists
measure keyword density and keyword weight on any page with personally adjusted weighting of keyword occurrence places like title, headings, anchors etc
export results as XML or CSV
6. Keyword snooper
This tool is noticeable through its integration with Google's keyword planer. It takes keyword suggestions from Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay and Shopping.com. Many keywords can be simultaneously analyzed with Google Trends. Creation and and applying of several filters to keyword lists is possible. The documentation isn't present, but on the tool's website are all use cases detailedly explained. Fully functioning test version is available, the tool costs 39$.
7. Keyword research tool by Keywordcountry
Keyword research is one of 22 other tools in this SEO tool suite. Regarding keyword research there are following functions available:
- generating keyword lists
- rip keywords from competitor page
- checking LSI keywords
- get keyword suggestions on basis of misspelling
- keyword research in many languages
- location based keyword research
- alerts on using new keywords through competitor
8. Rank reporter by Inspyder
Rank reporter is a keyword tool, which monitors a website ranking regarding 20 to 200 keywords through Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and AOL. There are available:
- internal database for results for later using and creating of predictions
- own template system for search engine querying
- integration of AdWords data
- competitor tracking
- scheduled reports
- email alerts if some keyword ranking changes after scheduled querying
- graphic charts of several search engines querying
- Excel and PDF reports
9. Keyword competing
Like the name said this tool is provided mostly to make keyword research on competitor sites. Furthermore it can:
- generate new keywords, keyword variations
- compute their organic and PPC rankings by AdWords and other PPC campaigns
- create keyword variations through batch combinations and replacements using keyword lists
- take keyword suggestions and relations from search engines
- analyze meta keywords, descriptions and titles of given websites
- check keyword competitions
- clarify low and high competition to reduce CPC
- create keyword lists extracting keywords from any analyzed source, like search engine, ad campaign, website, keyword list etc.
| Free Edition |
Standard Edition |
|
|---|---|---|
| Number of Keywords, Competitors, or Queries | ||
Seed keywords
(user specified keywords for simultaneous analysis)
|
2 | 200 |
| Competitors for simultaneous Analysis | 1 | 20 |
| Pages of results for each keyword query | 10 | 10 |
| Depth (Round of searches with new keywords generated) | 2 | 3 |
| Input keywords for extracting Suggest & Related keywords | 5 | 200 |
| Input competitors' domain for extracting Competitor's Meta Tag keywords | 2 | 20 |
| New candidate keywords | 500 | Unlimited |
| New possible competitors | 10 | Unlimited |
10. Good keywords
"Good Keywords", India located developer, offers many SEO tools, regarding keyword research there are 2 commercial tools with free test version and 3 free tools. Regarding commercial tools: the "Competition Strategy Studio" costs 109$, and the "Keyword Strategy Studio" costs 49$, so if decided to purchase the first or both, so it is cheaper to buy the main product, "Internet Strategy Studio" for 129$, which contains, beside of the 2 keyword tools i mentioned before, 10 other SEO tools in addition.
11. Competition Strategy Studio by Good Keywords
Here are the main functions list:
- generate hundreds of related keyword phrases, but also find the top competing sites, URLs and top ranked web-page titles
- measure and export data of any competitor with metrics like PR, links, Alexa rank etc.
- creates spider view of any URL and makes visible title and anchor text, keywords, headings and HTTP header
- define location and language for all measurements
12. Keyword Strategy Studio by Good Keywords
This tool suggests keywords, taking them from
- your import files
- and own parsing of
- recent news,
- social buzz,
- product titles in marketplaces,
- top ranked page titles,
- semantic relations and
- misspelling of given keywords.
- own keyword database, which understand SQL,
- sophisticated keyword list management and correction,
- results export,
- creating of keyword phrases from keyword lists.
13. Keyword Pad by Good Keywords
This tool is seeming to have all possibilities of keyword management from Good Keywords commercial tools. This is the function list in short:
- removing duplicate keywords from keyword lists
- keyword sorting (asc / desc)
- keyword phrases manipulating and cleaning up: removing words at begin, end, in the middle, removing leading or trailing characters, keyword search and replace, remove repeated characters
- creating keyword phrases from misspelling or replacing / recombining of keywords in a keyword phrase
- merge keyword lists
- adding or removing prefix or suffix to keywords
- moving keywords between keyword lists
- export and import keyword lists
14. "Good keywords" keyword research tool by Good Keywords
This is the name-giving tool of the whole suite. It has as the single one of the free tools its own documentation. Lets look, what it can: beside of such known possibilities, like taking keywords from Google's suggestion, creating keywords using misspelling, building keyword phrases using keyword recombining in a keyword phrase it measures a site popularity of sites using a given keyword and link popularity. The source for the site popularity measurement is Alexa ranking. The source for the link popularity measurement are search engines, which are parsed to get to know, how many sites link to the yours. The tool is free but limited to the management of 20.000 keywords.
15. Keyword Explorer by Good Keywords
This tool performs a set of useful queries searching sites with a specified keyword position:
- allintitle
- allinanchor
- exact search (quotated keywords)
- text body search
16. Keyword Optimizer Pro by Dave Guindon
This tools is nothing other as a scraper for suggestions from Google, Yahoo and Bing. It takes your keyword phrase and search for it through 3 search engines adding ascending characters to your keyword phrase, like "keyword1 keyword2 0-9a-z". The tool has however some improvements, like:- you can adjust interval between each search and between each hundred of searches
- you can adjust proxy, add own proxies or let the tool download them
- you can adjust the weighting of each search engine, wherefrom the tool takes keyword suggestions. All search engines must have 100%.
17. Arsyn Keyword Scraper
This tool is nearly a twin to the previous one. The only difference is, that Arsyn keyword scraper takes suggestions from Google web search, news search, shopping, YouTube and recipes. You can download this tool from the homepage and just here: ArsynKeywordScraperInstall.exe.
This tool performs LSI keyword research. LSI keywords in short are topically related keywords. Using of synonyms and such topical related keywords is for Google a signal for topical relevance. That's in general the cause, why perform LSI keyword analyze. How to use this tool you can read on the tool's homepage directly. The tool is free: you can download it from the tool's homepage or just here: UltimateKeywordHunter.msi.
This free tool performs following actions:
- scheduled checks of keyword rankings
- detailed ranking history in charts and tables as long as one year
- managing keyword in keyword groups
- export ranking results in HTML, csv, PDF
20. Rank Tracker tool: part of SEO PowerSuite by Link-Assistent
I name here some functions i like:
- using of 17-19 different keyword suggestion tools and 325 search engines.
- utilizing Google Analytics data
- monitors all parts of Google Universal Search
- monitors most Google services, like appearing in Image search, news search, YouTube, shopping, Places, Books
- monitors geo-targeted appearing
21. Keyword Manager Tool by Redfly
This is another one manager and manipulator of keyword lists. It imports and exports lists. Keyword lists can be modified, duplicated and multiplied. This tool performs following tasks on keyword lists:
- deduplicates keyword lists
- deletes keywords containing user-specified term, or specifically located inside a keyword phrase
- deletes keyword phrases with user-specified word number
- removes unwanted characters like empty lines, line feeds or tabs or repeated character or spaces
- removes character sets like all punctuation or all numbers
- removes or adds words from/to begin or end of keyword phrases
- converts between upper- and lowercase
- searches and replaces single words in keyword phrases
- creates keywords using misspelling with user selected kind of misspelling (character duplicating,
- character swapping, character missing)
- highlights keywords containing user-specified keywords or with given words amount in the keyword phrase
- CSV export
Online keyword research tools
These are 5 autosuggest keyword tools: they perform keyword research through autosuggestion from Google, Amazon, Bing, Ebay and Google product search.
23. Jumbo Keyword
This free tool provides an interface with 70+ functions for manipulating keyword lists. The tool utilizes RegExp in a mighty art for processing keyword lists in several way: character, word and whole phrase manipulations, recombinations, editing, find, replace, deduplication, adding of characters or words conforming own formulated rules, test ad creation, stop word lists creating and processing, negative word lists, broad, exact and negative match types...etc etc. To be honest, i never see a tool with such word processing capabilities.24. Not Provided Estimator: free online keyword research tool by Mike Arnesen, senior SEO analyst at SwellPath
The tool calculates how many site visitors the site gets for a specific set of keywords. For visitor's amount calculating are 3 numbers needed:
- total not provided visits
- total organic traffic (all inclusive)
- the traffic amount for your keyword or segment that you'd like to adjust for not provided.
25. Keyword Tool
Simple and lucid, this tool takes keyword suggestions from Google and YouTube, from all available country versions and in all available languages. No more, no less:)
26. Soovle
This i name an amazing tool! It shows in one and the same browser window the keyword suggestions from 7 to 15 search engines, which can be arranged by user! The list of search engines contains even more, namely 26 searchable projects! Isn't it funny? Default search is through the first 7 search engines from the list below:
- Amazon
- Yahoo
- Bing
- YouTube
- Answers.com
- Wikipedia
- Ask.com
- Ebay.com
- Buy.com
- TWC - the wetter channel
- Netflix.com
- Chacha.com
- Walmart.com
- QQ.com
- Goodsearch.com
- Yandex.com
- Naver.com
- Youku.com
- Hulu.com
- Baidu.com
- Barnes&Noble.com
- PriceGrabber.com
- Dogpile.com
- Foodista.com
- Yelp.com
27. Wikipedia article traffic statistics
With this minimal tool 2 things are possible:
- to look which traffic generates a given article (fill in the article title and get results)
- to look at the top 1000 lists: which articles generate the most traffic.
28. LSIKeywords
This tool analyzes... what would you guess...? YES! Correct! It analyzes LSI keywords!, with excluding words with less as user adjustable character amount as a search option. The tool generates then 3 search result columns with 1, 2 and 3 keyworded phrases and ranks them in descending order.
29. Keyword research tool by GoFindNiches
This tool performs a comparison of 2 keywords with following options:
- Basic search
- Exact intitle
- Exact allintitle
- Exact inurl
- Exact allinurl
- Exact inanchor
- Exact allinanchor
- allintitle
- allinurl
- allinanchor
- Exact intitle + inurl
- Exact intitle + inanchor
- Exact intitle + inurl + inanchor
30. Keyword revealer
It is free, sophisticated and mighty tool. On the main screen it has following filters:- free text keyword search
- average monthly searches
- number of words
- cost per click
- estimated potential earning
- monthly searches
- AdWords CPC
- estimated profit
- word count
- domain availability
- keyword difficulty
- visible keyword difficulty chart
- a graph of the interest over time from 2004 till present
- Moz page authority
- Moz domain authority
- backlinks
- Mozrank
- pagerank
- Google +1s
- FB shares
- FB likes
- Tweets
- URL
- title
- meta description
- h1
Mostly occult keyword research tools
Keyword research tools, created on universities with grants from the defense industry and undisclosedly used by intelligence service, NSA, CIA and by very few SEOs with governmental mandate.
- Synchronic English Web Corpus (Information | Keyword Research): it consists of 467,713,650 words (tokens) from web-extracted texts. It covers the period 2000-2010 and contains 339,907,995 words from 100,000 randomly selected web-pages to form sample of the distribution of texts throughout the web and 127,805,655 words from 56,000 pages selected based on the Open Directory classification of web pages.
- Birmingham Blog Corpus (Information | Keyword Research): it consists of 628,558,282 words extracted from blog texts. The corpus is split into sections according to how the texts were discovered and downloaded:
- Technorati - 427,768,219 words, crawled the top blogs ranked by Technorati
- Google Blog Search - 19,384,429 words, downloaded new posts daily as identified by Google Blog Search
- Blogspot and Wordpress - 181,405,634 words, crawled blogs hosted on blogspot.com and wordpress.com. Extracted date information and separated posts from comments:
- posts - 94,977,062 words
- comments - 86,428,572 words
32. Just The Word keyword research tool based on British National Corpus
- First search results screen displays a list of researched keywords with occurrence frequency numbers. The whole keywords list is split in clusters based on the keyword phrase building pattern.
- Second research results screen appears after clicking on any keyword phrase and displays a list of occurrences with context on the right and left from keyword phrase.
33. ozdic - the English Collocations Dictionary online
Collocations are common word combinations and the essential building blocks of natural-sounding language. The tool puts out the main searched keyword in combination with nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions as well as common phrases. Collocation of keywords are grouped according to part of speech and meaning and helps the keyword researcher to locate the main keyword and the sense of the keyword phrase.34. Corpus.byu.edu multi-corpora keyword research by by Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University
 |
| Screen contains 3 frames: left - options, on the top and bottom: output results of different accomplished keyword searches |
- Global Web-Based English (GloWbE): 1.8 billion words | 1,800,000 texts | web pages | ~ 60% blogs | United States, Great Britain, Australia, India, and 16 other countries.
- Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 440 million words | 190,000 texts | 1990-2012 | evenly divided (~88 million words each) into spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper, academic.
- research or compare any keywords
- limit the research to any given sub-corpus
- build on the research basis collocation lists
- create visual charts of keyword using frequency parametrized with sub-corpora and time ranges.
 |
| Keyword research results of: top image part - two words keyword phrase, bottom image part - one keyword |
- concordance - there you get as analyze result a concordance list of co-occurrences of analyzed keyword with context before and after it and the possibility to expand the context. To start concordance analyze the user must before include keywords through manipulation of "Search Builder".
- collocation - as result of collocation analyze you get a collocation list with all possible keyword usage, keyword context before and after keyword phrases and data columns.
- affixes - this kind of keyword analyze creates a list of keywords, which are created based on the given keyword with added all possible affixes.
- compare frequencies - this analyze can be performed on basis of all or selected corpora and creates a comparing list of given keywords with the frequency data from all corpora and a graphic chart displaying compared frequencies.
38. Internet corpora querying tool
It created by the same university of Leads analyzes keywords and creates long tail keyword lists in English, Chinese, Finnish, Arabic, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish from long open source corpora.
39. NoSketch Engine
Another one multilingual concordance creating keyword tool, which works in German, French, Slovenian, Croatian, Italian and Japanese languages.
40. AntConc by Laurence Anthony of Center for English Language Education in Science and Engineering at Waseda University, Tokio
I describe some of tools AntConc contains, which could be relevant for keyword research:
- Concordance tool: You see search results as "KWIC" (KeyWord In Context) - also common use of words and phrases in a text corpus.
- Collocates: Collocation of a search term allows to deeper research the possible keyword phrases.
- Word list: List of all word usage frequency
- Keyword list: It shows word which are frequent or unfrequent used, compared with other referenced words. With this tool is it possible to identify special keywords.