Top 5 Free Keyword Research Tools

As search engine marketing becomes more competitive, it can be increasingly difficult to achieve good results for the most obvious keywords and phrases, however there are some useful tools available to help you research further and build a good list of more specific and relevant terms. Here we review our top 5 ‘free’ tools available to anyone.

Overture KeyWord Tool – This tool shows the number of searches made in the last month in the UK on the Yahoo (and previously MSN) search engines. The data provided here gives a good indication of the relative number of searches made on terms, although singular, plural and alternative spellings are grouped together, and anomalies sometimes appear in the search volume due to automated tools.

Wordtracker Free trial – This full-featured keyword tool relies on data from the FAST search engine. Although the search volumes may not be very accurate or relevant to the UK, it’s free trail can be useful for looking at the differences in the volume of searches made on singular or plural terms, plus variations, which overture cannot provide.

Google Keyword tool – The keyword research tool from Google does not let you access the most interesting information (exactly how many searches are made for a phrase on Google!), but it does grade keywords on a scale of 1 ‘ 10 for search volume and advertiser competition. It also provides some broad ranging suggestions for keyword variations, and possible negative keywords to avoid.

Microsoft AdLabs ‘ Keyword mutation tool – This tool will provide a range of the most common alternative or misspellings for a term, which can often be easy to target effectively.

List phrase generator – This is particularly useful for creating keyword combinations. Combine one set of terms ‘ (‘houses’, ‘flats’, ‘property’), with another (uk, London, Surrey) to quickly create a list with all combinations.

Leave a Reply