10 of the Best Free Keyword Research Tools for SEO [Video]

Hi my name is AJ Ghergich and today I'm going to talk to you about free keyword research tools that don't suck – because if you're like me, you hear free SEO tool and you're probably thinking it's crappy and it's probably really just freemium and not actually free and will try to push me to purchase at the first moment.

I get it, we've all had that experience. I have plenty of paid keyword research tools, but I still use these tools in my day-to-day to augment my tool sets.

This is my first YouTube video so please subscribe down below and leave a comment if there is a tool that you really like that we didn't cover. I would love to check it out, I'm always interested in new tools. Also, all the tools will be linked in the description as well as place markers where you can jump from tool to tool if you already know all about one, you can skip to the next one. I hope you find it useful. Lets dive into our first tool.

Alright, I'm excited to show you the first keyword tool. This is from SERPs.com and this is a keyword tool that I actually use in my day-to-day in my SEO. The main reason I use this tool – even though it's free – is it's just fast, fast and easy. So, I pin it in my bookmarks and I tend to use it a lot because it's quick and easy to use.

Let me give you an example, let's say we are researching the keyword SEO. Press enter, you'll get keywords quick with no fuss. They have some other features that I really like.

I like that it gives you a cost-per-click estimate and a volume. A lot of free keywords don't give you that. They also give you an estimate of value, but I personally wouldn't put a ton of stock into that because it's so subjective, but it's cool that it's there. So when you're looking at this, another thing you can do is, you can click 'add' and save them to a list and download that as a CSV and you don't have to sign up for anything. It's cool they offer this for free and export the data.

One pro tip – to make this more usable with results of 100 pages, I come down and click view as a single page. You'll then get a ridiculous amount of keywords depending on what you search for. If you're overwhelmed by them, use the filter and that's where this gets very powerful. So if you're looking at SEO but only want things that are talking about SEO tools. You put in tools, and here are all of the keywords that are talking about SEO and tools. So you can see how powerful this is for being a free tool. Be sure to give it a try.

I'm really excited to show you our next tool – that is Keyword Shitter. As you may know, Keyword Shitter has been a staple for enterprise SEO teams and SEO thought leaders for years. Ok, it's possible that was a good example of alternative facts, but Keyword Shitter, despite the silly name, does serve a purpose that I think you'll find useful.

It's very straightforward; let's give it a go. Let's put in keyword research, click 'shit keywords', and that's exactly what it starts doing. It starts going bananas popping out keywords. I've already ran a tab of the same thing to speed it up – you'll see it gives you a ton of stuff, and you may want to use these filters, like remove Moz and it will take it out live while it's running. And you can use this positive/negative filters to get the data more usable because it's frankly an overload of keywords.

Here's a trick that I use – I copy this all out, select it, then I go to a keyword density tool. Yes, I said that right, I know, you're not supposed to use it as an SEO, but it works for this case. So we paste this into SEOBook keyword density tool using the default settings and click submit.

So what I'm mainly paying attention for is two and three word phrases. So select "keyword research tool," "free keyword research," "best keyword research," "google keyword research", and the idea here is taking a big list of 500-600 keywords and distilling it down and looking at what's the most important phrasing. I think that will really help you see what's important in this section.

Now, someone, I don't think the same company, created Keyword Shitter Pro. It has some cool options, but to me it has one fatal flaw which is why I'm not totally recommending it yet. That is, you can see I told it to get me stuff on keyword research and it does, but it only shows me 10 at a time, and I have to keep clicking next, and I'm not going to do that. Yes, I can export it, but I like the original Keyword Shitter because I can see what's happening live and use the filter live. So if they were to tweak this, I think it could be really cool. So, it may be worth checking out Keyword Shitter pro, and it could develop into something quite useful.

Up next, I'm going to show you three tools, but each of these keyword tools actually revolves around this Chrome extension, or Firefox extension if you prefer, which is Keywords Everywhere. Go to keywordseverywhere.com you can click the 'install' button, snag this, then be off to the races. You do need an API key for this, but it's free. Give them your email, they email it back to you, and you can click on update settings, paste in API key and you're good to go.

So, what does this tool do? It actually is a helper for many free tools. So you can see right here a list that it's integrating with, see Keyword Shitter, we just covered that. So what it does is integrate with these tools and gives you Cost-Per-Click and search volume.

Honestly, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Nick Eubanks is the one that told me about this tool. Nick's fantastic to follow on Twitter if you're into keyword research or if you want to make sure you are following the hottest guy in seo. 

So let's check out how this tool works. Even when you search Google – I searched 'keyword research' – and it spits out for you the volume, cost per click, and a competition score. If you notice, there's a star right here. You can "star" anything and add it to your favorites and Keyword Everywhere will keep a tab of that.

So if you click on 'my favorite keyword' you can see a list of all of your data, tons of ways to download it, searchable, sortable, everything you would want and it's all free. So I mentioned earlier I'll show you a three in one. So let me show you two tools Keywords Everywhere integrates with. The first is Uber Suggest, which is now kind of a mainstay. Every keyword research list probably has Uber Suggest on it. I'll be honest that I don't typically use it all that much, but I probably will use it more now that I have the Keywords Everywhere plug-in.

So I've done a quick search here that's filterable, and you can download all the results, just like a lot of the other tools, and with the plug-in installed I can click and add these to my favorite list and I'm also getting this data which is making the tool much better than it is in it's original state. You'regetting the volume, getting the cost per click, so it becomes a lot more usable.

You may also want to check out another old-school keyword research tool, and that is http://soovle.com/. I think I'm pronouncing that right. If i'm not, someone can let me know in the comments. Very simple tool – you can see here I just typed in 'SEO tools'. You can type in anything on the fly that results from anywhere from YouTube to Google, Amazon, Bing, so it's helpful in that sense. The UIs get a little long, so I find it hard to read the text against the logos as it goes over the top. You can also see it's integrated with Keywords Everywhere, so you can see the search volume and cost per click as you are going though this.

What I do is I go up here and download it to Excel. I find it a little easier to sort through the data, and just easier to deal with when I snag it in Excel. So check it out I think can definitely add it to your list.

Next I'm going to show you a tool that I do use all the time, and it also integrates with Keywords Everywhere. The tool that I'm talking about is called Answer the Public and it's really good at doing one specific thing – that is, putting you onto the questions that are being asked in your niche. I put in 'keywords research' and I put in 'US' for the country – there are multiple options you can check out.  Click 'get questions' and check out the results.

The first thing you're going to see is a list of questions, prepositions and the alphabetical list that a lot of the tools use. I usually stick to questions and prepositions, that's why I use this tool. You may find different uses, though. So when you're looking at this, if you were like me, this looks visually very cool but the problem is unless you can spin your head around, it's hard to take it in.

The first thing I do is click 'data'. When I click 'data', I find that the data is easier to process.

What we're looking at here are 29 questions around our keyword that they have returned and you can see it's integrated again with Keywords Everywhere, which is very nice, but I use this for two main purposes.

One is to understand the questions in my niche. I want to know what kind of pain points people are having. What are they looking for? What features do they want? What questions they have about my product or niche? This can help in ideation when you're looking to create blog posts to answer these so that you can be there throughout the buying cycle. All the way from awareness to the decision phase people are asking questions and if you can craft content tailor made to answer that, then you're good to go. The second reason is to earn featured snippets.

If you don't know featured snippets are, I did a big research project lately with a paid keyword research tool called SEMrush, and we analyzed 1.4 million featured snippets. 

But if you don't even know what that is, let me show you an example. Let's check out something like this 'how to do keyword research step-by-step'. How-to keywords are phenomenal at earning featured snippets. So let's click here 'how to do keyword research that by step' and someone has this formatted in a numerical order and it is showing up in Google as a featured snippet. And what's cool about this featured snippet is it sits above all the other organic rankings – it's jumping up to 'position zero' for this keyword and it's free. This is not a paid listing or anything like that. So that's what I use Answer the Public for. I gather a lot of keyword research and ideation from it and try to use that data to earn featured snippets. It's one of my favorite tools and I think it'll be one of yours as well.

So the next tool I want to show you is keyword.io. It's very similar to some of the other tools we have done. It's free and it's very useful, but we'll go through a little quicker since you'll likely be familiar with some of the ways it works.  

I'll just type in 'keyword tools' and click 'search'. You can see it's pretty fast and we already have 380 keywords. Each one you select will show up over to the right. You can add all of them and you can sort them as well. If you only want the ones that say "SEO" you can do that as well. So you can snag all of that.

Now you do have to sign up to download the files – if you go to export, you'll have to sign up in order to download. I will say, though, that if you just highlight this and hit Command+C, you can copy them all out if you don't want to sign up, but that's up to you.

The other thing that makes this a really neat tool is some of the options that you wouldn't normally see like Alibaba or Fiverr, which are some different places you can search. More data is good data, so keyword.io is a nice little tool, so give it a try.

Okay, so let's take a look at another tool, and that's going to be SEOBook. It's very simple, so I think we can go through it pretty quickly, and I think you'll find it very useful.

So let's just put in 'keyword research' like we've been doing. Hit 'Enter' and you can see it takes 10 to 15 seconds, but it's actually quite snappy. In no time you're getting a lot of information – you're getting 'cost per click', 'value', 'monthly search volume' and even 'daily search volume'. So it's quite nice in that sense and you're also getting a lot of keywords. You can see here by just putting in 'keyword research', I have a ton of keywords.

If you put in something like 'SEO', you'll see a very large quantity. You can scroll down and it's just a ton of keywords at your fingertips for free. Now you do have to register, so yeah, that's 1,000 entries and you can export right to CSV. You do have to sign up, but it's free – you just put in your email and sign up and you can go about using the tool. It's pretty self-explanatory so I won't go into great detail, but it's a simple and quite effective keyword research tool.

Let's take a look at SEO Chat next. SEO Chat been around a long time, they have a lot of tools – as you can see just in their SEO tool list. It's quite an extensive, but be sure to check them out. They have a lot of different keyword research tools as well.

Let's take a look at this "suggest tool" I think that's one of their better tools one that you'll find most useful.

So, I've typed in 'keyword research' and I've selected the various sources (so YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Google) and hit 'Search'. It's interesting the way this tool works – it's a little bit different than others. When you first get through here it's a three-step process. I'll show you quickly-  if you select a whole bunch it does take a little bit to process. I'll do 'keyword research tool', 'keyword research', 'keyword research tutorial', just a couple of keywords real quick. I'll go ahead and move onto part two. From these keywords it'll give a bulk suggestion of even more keywords. It's a little bit funny the first time you use it, so I'll walk you right through it.

Again, for the sake of this video I'm just grabbing some of these keywords – that way I can get to part three. You can select up to 100 keywords for part two. Actually, you can select more but it'll only process up to 100 – which is fine because you'll see right here when I click 'Run', this is where information actually gets a lot more valuable.

I only selected a few so I'm getting a small output here, but if you were to run 60 to 80 keywords and take your time picking them out, it'll give you the cost per click estimate and the search volume in a really nice refined list at the end. It's just a little bit different than some of the other tools in getting used to the workflow with the three step process, but it's a very powerful tool. It's quick and easy with no sign up, so definitely check out SEO Chat and their other tools as well.  

So let's look at our next tool, which is actually another Chrome extension, and it's SEOStack keyword tool. It's a free chrome extension – if you just Google it you'll find it right away and you can install it. Once it's installed, just click on their icon and bring it up. It's a nice, clean interface and I've already typed in two keywords that I'm going to check out. There's several modifiers, pretty much what you would expect – YouTube, Google, Amazon, things like that. So I'll select these three and I'll click 'Start'.

What you'll notice is it's very similar to Keyword Shitter in the sense that you're getting a ton of keywords right away – you're close to 400 keywords now and I think it goes up to around 800, I think that's the max for this tool, but it may even be a hundred per keyword. You're going to get more keywords than you can handle, so let's just stop it here at 451 keywords. That's awesome, but the only negative is you're not getting much context, like which one is the most searched or which is the most valuable.

You can take these over to Google Keyword Planner – if you click this button it'll do it for you. But what I would do, I love that they have this plain text view. You can go over here select them all, copy them out, and you can use your Keywords Everywhere plug-in that we installed earlier from Chrome Extensions and click "bulk upload". Then all you do is paste these in and click get search volume and cost per click. So, it's a little extra step, but at the same time, you're still right there in your Chrome Extension. You're not really doing anything additional – and who knows, maybe eventually Keywords Everywhere will integrate with SEO Stack

The next tool I want to show you is called WordZe. WordZe has been around a long time and it's a very powerful tool. You do need to create an account, but it's free, quick and easy to create one.

When you login you have two main options: one is 'ultimate research' and the other is 'long tail keywords'. Ultimate research is the one I use the most, but if you want a lot of keywords you can run the long tail. I will say that WordZe takes longer than other tools to run, so for the interest of this video I've already ran some reports that we can take a peek at. Another cool feature about WordZe is that you can save and store your past projects. You can see here, when I'm going in for ultimate research, I can enter the keywords, select the country and you can also name your project. If you're coming back you can say see past projects here and actually view it.

So this is a project I already ran and I ran it on 'keyword research'. You can see I have one hundred and twenty nine keywords and you're getting a lot of really good information – you're getting monthly search volume, cost per click, and the overall value of the traffic, as well as the PPC comparison, which is really nice for a free tool. So you can see the competition level is lower for this keyword compared to the term 'keyword research'. What's really great about WordZe are the filters, and I'll show you that on the other side with the long tail report I ran. Here's an example of the long tail report you can see this one has, 878 and I think I entered one keyword. So if you had entered by 10 to 15 keywords you would get a ridiculous amount of results, so the filters come in very handy. What I like about them is that you can stack them; you can say include or exclude.

I want to include only average monthly search volumes greater than 20. Click 'Search' and that'll take our 800 results down to 43. You're going to find that a lot of long tail keywords don't get a lot of traffic, but you can play around with these. I like that you can stack them as well – so you can, say, exclude cost per click less than $.20 and hit 'search' – that'll take us down even further to 32 keywords. You can see it's very powerful.

It's a free tool, gives you a lot of great information, and the fact that you can stack these and filter these until your heart's content and then export them to a CSV or text file is very good.

So the last tool I want to show you is LSI Graph. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. You can Google that and find out a lot more about that, but for our purposes I want you to think about when you hear LSI to think about synonyms and related concepts.

For example, if someone wa talking about 'Monster' do you mean energy drinks, or 'Monsters Inc.', or do you mean the job site?

Let's prove here that we're a real human and generate our list. You can see that there are many concepts because we're not being very specific. We can see Monster energy, 'Monster High', and things like that because we were very broad and we have no data showing us what we're into or what direction to go.

Let's be specific and look at 'Monster Jobs' and now we get better results. We're getting things like 'ZipRecruiter', which is a competitor, 'CareerBuilder', and also getting things like 'job search engines' and 'job search sites'.

So if you're optimizing for how to get a job on 'Monster.com', you want to be sure to include some of these semantically related keywords like 'job search engines' or even their competitors. Like, how does this compare to 'ZipRecruiter' or 'Career Builder'? So when you are optimizing nowadays, don't just focus in on they keyword. This tool makes sure that you're getting the other concepts that you should also be including in a document that's fully covering this topic. So, I think you'll find this tool quite helpful and hopefully overall you've found all these tools interesting.

There's a lot of really cool, free options for everyone to give a try.

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Original source: 10 of the Best Free Keyword Research Tools for SEO [Video].
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