You should now be quite familiar with Keyword Research as the topic was featured in our October Digital Marketing Postcard.  We did focus on the Google Adwords Keywords Tool in that post, as this is the tool that we tend to use most often, and it’s the most well-known.  However, there are many other keyword tool options available to you that you may find more useful.  And the best part?  They’re all free!

As keyword research is a major part of your overall SEO and digital marketing strategy, it’s important to constantly research, maintain and upgrade your site keywords.  To make sure you’re getting the most relevant, accurate and useful research results, here is a list of some other free keyword tools that may help you in your work.

Bing Keywords Research

In order to use Bing’s free tool, you’ll need a Microsoft account.  They are currently offering $100 CAD in free search advertising on Yahoo for new sign-ups (this deal expires Jan 31, 2015, so act fast if you want to take advantage!)

Google Correlate

Google Correlate finds search patterns that correspond with real-world trends, including time series (where you can view how search terms vary in popularity over a certain time period).  So you can search for your current keywords, and find alternate keywords that exhibit similar trends.

Google Webmaster Tools

This could be considered an “old school” method of keyword research.  Click on “Search Traffic” –> “Search Queries” and you’ll see a raw list of keywords that have driven traffic to your site, and their average rank.  This data is stored for 90 days, so you can export and play with the history.

Google Trends

This is another tool that we regularly use in conjunction with Google Adwords Keywords Tool for our keyword research.  It allows you to view at a glance how people are searching on Google for the keywords that you are using or thinking of using, and compare search terms and interest across regions.

Internet Marketing Ninjas Keyword Density Analysis Tool

This free keyword tool runs a keyword analysis of existing content based off of a page URL, and reports text data within the following four categories:

• Number of total words on the page
• Number of linked words
• Number of non-linked words
• Number of stop words or very short words used in the non-linked text

This is useful for understanding your own page content and how you can improve it, and it’s also useful for looking at your competitor’s pages.

SEMRush

SEMRush is a paid tool with a free option…and the free option provides a lot of very useful, competitive keyword data through a dashboard of charts and graphs.  Live updates display organically searched keywords, ads keywords, competitors in organic search, competitors in ads search, traffic data, phrase match competition, related keywords, etc.  It’s a massive, detailed dashboard showing you how competitive a keyword can be, by showing you how many competitors in the market are using it and what they are willing to pay for it.

We hope we’ve presented you with some new (and free) alternatives to Google Adwords Keywords Tool that you’ve never heard of or used before.  As useful as the Google Adwords tool is, it’s always smart to invest time in different options to make sure you’re finding as much relevant data as possible.  The keywords landscape is largely focused on trends, so staying on top of them, through as many means possible, is the only way to ensure your keywords and website are always optimized.

For more tips on Keyword Research, check out our October 2014 blog posts for all the details.  If you’d like any additional advice on Keyword Research or Digital Marketing in general, subscribe to our monthly newsletter and never miss a tip, or make sure to contact us!