Keyword research for organic SEO used to be easy. You didn’t need any keyword research tools. Put up some content, let google index the content and watch in analytics as the search terms people used piled in. Then make sure you optimised for the keywords that provided the most results. Adding an H1 tag and a title tag or even a url that was an exact match to your keyword was all the rage, back in 2006.

Ten years later, its not so easy. Analytics doesnt give you the words that users search for (unless you pay for PPC ads). There are a ton of tools out there to help, so this is a small review of some of those tools:

keyword research tools

Adwords keyword tool https://adwords.google.co.uk/KeywordPlanner

Plug some keywords into adwords keyword tool and the options will suggest new keywords. Adwords Suggest will also show you keywords like those entered. Generally this tool is used to create ad campaigns. Adwords suggest is usefull when looking for ideas to create new blog posts. e.g. 100k-1M monthly searches with low competition for the term ‘gba’.

Keywordtool http://keywordtool.io

This is a decent service, and gives you a lot of ideas for keywords. It shows autosuggest search terms, unless you are on a paid account. Plugging the information from here into the adwords keyword planner can give great results.

Moz keyword-tool https://moz.com/products/pro/keyword-explorer

This free tool is one that I use. Type in a keyword, and it will give you 1000 related terms. You can export those, sort by volume of searches. Take the top results and put those into the tool again and you get the related terms for those!

Semrush Keyword Analytics semrush.com

Semrush have a free plan, it has access to most of the features you would need (unless you are running campaigns for clients, then they have different tiers based on number of crawls / pages, etc). to get the best use of the tool, it best to let the site crawl your pages and produce a report (and fix the technical issues outlined by semrush – its better to have everything ticked off the lists – from yoast and moz and semrush. that way you wont have any potential things that could be negatively impacting your pages in the SERPS, except toxic links or bad content) – you can then add targeted keywords for pages and semrush will suggest additional keywords for you – the keyword overview tool is very helpful too.

Combining the tools seems to be the best strategy. Working from an excel sheet also seems to be a popular way of doing keyword research. Trying to find keywords for your topic that give good results with low competition

Yoast SEO

I run this site on wordpress. While the free version of YOAST doesnt have a keyword suggest tool, it does give information for your chosen keywords. In the pro version you can target many keywords for a single post, which you shouls be doing.