Keyword research is the pillar of SEO.
With solid keyword research and great content, you can win the Google search results very easily.
However, most keyword research tools are super expensive which makes it very difficult for the newbies to invest in those tools.
But what if I tell you that there are some free keyword research tools on the market that can help you find out some rock-solid keyword ideas for your business within a few seconds?
Yes, that’s 100% true.
In this post, I’m going to share with you the 14 best free keyword research tools that you can use for completely free without even paying a dime.
And most importantly, even though these tools are free, all of these tools are very powerful.
So ready to dive in? Let’s go.
The #1 tool we have on this list of free keyword research tools is Google Keyword Planner.
It’s a very popular keyword research tool among SEO’s and almost most people started doing keyword research with this tool only.
Even though this tool was actually designed for advertisers to find PPC advertising keyword ideas, still it can be a goldmine for finding SEO keyword opportunities.
And the best part about this tool is – the keyword data you’ll get on this tool is actually coming out of Google’s own database.
So it’s pretty reliable as well.
But the drawback of GKP is that it doesn’t show you the exact keyword data.
For example, the average monthly search it shows is very unpredictable and the competition metric is not reliable as well.
However, this tool can help you to find some really cool keyword ideas around your seed keyword and it’s a great starter tool for beginners.
The keyword planner tool of Zutrix is very easy to use and can help you find hundreds of untapped keywords.
To use the tool, enter your seed keyword, select the country and click on “search”.
Then the tool will automatically generate tons of keyword ideas for you.
For example, if we search for the term “digital marketing”, you can see in the picture below that the tool has generated lots of keyword ideas around the term “digital marketing”.
And most importantly, it shows you the exact estimated search volume, competition, CPC (cost-per-click), and trend of each particular keyword.
The most unique thing about Zutrix is the trend metric. Almost all of the free keyword research tools don’t show you the keyword trend metric except Google trends.
Other than that, this tool also allows you to find out keyword ideas for YouTube videos as well.
AnswerThePublic is a great tool that helps to find hidden keyword ideas which are easy to rank.
It gathers the keyword data from Google autocomplete database and finds out questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical, and related queries that people are searching for.
This tool is loved by many SEO experts and people around the globe and it’s probably one of the most popular free keyword research tools on the planet.
To get started with this tool, enter a topic or seed keyword and click on “search”.
Then it will come up with lots of keyword ideas around the topic or seed keyword that you’ve entered.
The best part about this tool is that it shows you keywords in mindmap or card view.
That’s a very interesting interface and you can easily filter out the keywords without spending too much time.
However, the biggest downside of AnswerThePublic is that it doesn’t show you any keyword metrics like search volume, CPC, or competition.
So you might have some issues for evaluating the keywords and ultimately you have to use another tool like Zutrix to find out the metrics of each keyword.
You might not believe this but Google Search can actually work as a double edge sword for keyword research.
It’s the most hidden goldmine for finding keyword ideas.
But how you can use Google search to find keywords?
Let me show you…
Open Google, enter any of your seed keywords on the search bar, and hit space on the keyboard.
Then Google will autocomplete the keyword phases and those autocomplete key phases are the real goldmine of keyword data.
Most of the time keyword research tools only provide you with popular key phrases.
But at the same time, ranking on those popular keywords is quite tough.
And using the Google autocomplete feature will allow you to find out the untapped keywords that even keyword research tools couldn’t find.
Other than that, you can also look at the “people also ask” section of Google results for finding some relevant question keywords that you can include in your content.
Soovle scarps keyword data from Google, YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and Bing…
…And put them together in one place.
So instead of searching for keyword ideas on each of these websites, you can get all the data in one place.
That’s pretty time-saving – Isn’t it?
But how you can use this tool?
Let’s have a look.
Head over to Soovle and enter any seed or board keyword related to your niche.
As an example, I’ll use the keyword “keto diet”.
And you can see, it has generated tons of keyword ideas related to the term keto diet.
You can also export these keywords into a .csv file just by clicking on the download button from the top left corner of the website.
Google trends is not exactly a keyword research tool.
Then why I’m listing it here on this post?
Because even though it’s not a proper keyword research tool, still it can help you to find out the trends of any keywords, keyword interest by a specific region and even provide you with some related search terms that you can include in your keyword list.
See, most of the time we choose any keyword based on its search volume.
But that’s a wrong practice.
Instead of choosing any keyword based on its past performance, you should also have a look at the trend of that keyword.
For example, the keyword “black Friday deals” has an estimated search volume of 550k.
But at the same time, if you look at the trend chart of this keyword, you’ll see that almost 99% of the people are searching for this keyword between November to December.
And the rest of the year, it doesn’t attract any traffic at all.
So instead of publishing a post related to the black friday deals in the month of March, it’s better to publish the post between October to December.
That’s how you can use trend data to attract more visitors from search engines.
On top of that, you can also compare any keywords to figure out which keyword would be worth going after.
YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine after its parent company Google.
And it processes more than 3 billion searches a month.
That’s insanely massive!
What’s more interesting is that you can use this huge search data to find out the keywords that competitors are mostly unheard of.
But how can you do that?
Simple – By using the Autocomplete feature of YouTube search.
Head over to YouTube, type any board keyword around your niche on the YouTube search bar, and hit space on your keyboard.
Then you’ll see YouTube will start suggesting you some long-tail keywords.
Take those keyword ideas and put them together in a spreadsheet.
And then evaluate each keyword based on its search volume, competition, your customer avatar and choose the ideal keywords that you would like to target.
Ubersuggest is an another great free tool for doing keyword research at no cost.
It has a decent keyword database and a pretty elegant user interface.
And unlike most free keyword research tools, it comes with plenty of keyword metrics and tons of more exciting features that will help you to pick the right keyword for your business within a few minutes.
The best part about this tool is that you can even steal the top-performing keywords of your competitors and replicate the same strategy that competitors are using.
To use the tool, enter your head keyword, select the country and click on “search”.
Then it will show you all the important metrics of that keyword starting from search volume to SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, and CPC.
If you scroll down a bit, then you can also see tons of more keyword suggestions around the head keyword that you’ve entered.
You can even sort out the keywords based on search volume, difficulty, CPC, questions, and related queries.
But the only drawback of this tool is that you can only perform 3 keyword searches per day for free.
And if you want to go beyond 3 searches a day, you have to pay for that.
Do you know what’s the best type of keywords that can quickly bring in truckloads of traffic to your website?
Simply targeting the keywords that you’re already ranking for…
…But either on the button of the first page or on the second or third page.
For example, let’s say you’re ranking for a keyword on the 6 – 7 position but that keyword is still bringing you a decent amount of traffic.
In that case, you would have to look for ways to improve the content, the title tags for increasing the CTR and might build some fresh new backlinks so that it boosts up the page ranking.
And just by boosting up the ranking position from 7 to 1, you can double the amount of traffic from that single keyword.
In short: It’s always better to target the existing keywords, than targeting a brand new one.
But the question is: how you can find out these kinds of keywords?
That’s where the role of the Google search console comes in.
Log in to your search console, click on “performance”, click on “average position” and scroll down.
Then you can see all the keywords for which your website is ranking for.
Sort the keywords based on clicks and find out the keywords that are bringing clicks but ranking in a significantly lower position.
Put together those keywords on a spreadsheet along with the page links and try to find out ways to improve the content and the title tags (If CTR is very low).
Keyword surfer is a free chrome extension that will show you the search volume and CPC of each keyword you search for.
On top of that, it will also show you the estimated search volume of Google’s autocomplete results.
And even better, it gives you lots of similar keyword ideas along with estimated search volume based on what you’ve searched.
Still not enough?
Then this chrome extension also allows you to see the estimated search volume of each website and shows you the number of words & the number of exact match keywords on the page.
Overall it’s a great free chrome extension to do keyword research while surfing the web.
QuestionDB is an another outstanding tool that pulls question-based keywords by scraping the web.
It’s kind of very similar to AnswerThePublic but the only difference is that it only pulls out question-based keywords.
And the interface of QuestionDB is also pretty basic compared to AnswerThePublic.
But one thing that is a plus point of this tool is – it does not have a search limit.
While on the flip side, AnswerThePublic has only 3 search limits per day on the free plan.
However, like most of the free tools, it also has a drawback.
On the free plan, it will not show you the full keyword list. Instead, it will only show you 50 keywords for free.
To use this tool, enter any topic or seed keyword around your niche and click on “generate”.
Then within a few seconds, it will find out 50 unique question-based keywords that you can target.
Keyword Sheeter uses Google’s autocomplete database to fetch hundreds and thousands of untapped keyword ideas that most keyword research tools normally can’t find.
It’s so powerful that it can generate up to 1000 keyword ideas within a minute.
Let’s quickly look at how this tool actually works…
To get started, enter your head keyword (you can put more than one keyword at a time) and click on “Sheet keywords”.
As an example, I’ve searched for the keyword “diet plan” and as you can see the tool has generated thousands of new keyword ideas for me related to the term “diet plan”.
You can even filter out the keyword-based on any negative or positive word.
And if you want, you can also export the keyword data as a CSV file with just a single click.
But one disappointing thing about this tool is that it has a very old design and the search volume is also unavailable on the free plan.
Keyworddit is a pretty unique keyword research tool.
Instead of scraping keywords from Google’s database, it pulls out keywords from Reddit threats and comments.
But is it reliable?
Definitely yes because Reddit has a huge community and most probably your ideal customers are also using Reddit on a daily basis.
And by pulling out keywords from Reddit, you’ll exactly know what your ideal customers are searching for and discussing about.
But one thing that you have to keep in mind while using this tool is that you can’t just type in any keyword you want.
There have to be an existing subreddit around your keyword from where the tool will pull data from.
For example, If you type “blog” on the search bar, you’ll see the tool will suggest you two subreddits to choose from.
And if you choose the “blogging” subreddit, you’ll get a result like this:
Of course, since it only pulls out data from Reddit, you’ll get very limited keyword ideas.
But still, it’s not a bad option either if you’re just starting out.
Keyword Tool Dominator is a pretty easy-to-use tool for finding new keyword opportunities for your business.
It has a separate keyword tool for almost all major websites like Amazon, Google, YouTube, Bing, eBay, and more.
If you specifically want to find keywords for your Amazon product or eBay listing then this tool can work like a charm for you.
But how it actually works?
Let’s have a look…
To use the tool, enter your seed keyword, select the country, select the language and click on “search”.
Then it will extract the data from the web and give you a stack of keyword ideas to choose from.
It also has a wonderful filtering option that will allow you to filter out the keywords ideas effortlessly.
Most keyword research tools are pretty expensive.
And for a newbie, it becomes quite difficult to invest in those tools.
However, you don’t have to worry about it now.
Because these days, there are many powerful free tools that can help you to get started with your keyword research.
The tools that I’ve listed in this post are some of the best free keyword research tools that can help you to find untapped and low-competitive keywords very easily.
And most importantly, all of these keyword research tools are 100% free to use.
I hope you got some value out of this post.
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