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Think you need dozens of tools for keyword research? Think again.
I asked 137 search marketing experts a simple question:
If you could only use 3 tools for keyword research, which 3 would you choose?
Keyword research is at the core of any SEO, PPC or content marketing campaign. If you aren't bidding on or using the right keywords, you're not serving the right content to the right audience at the right stage in the buyer journey. This means less traffic, leads, customers...and dollars.
I wanted to know which keyword research tools the experts were using to get a leg up on the competition and build profitable online marketing campaigns.
There are a ton of top 10, 20, 30...100 lists out their floating around the web. Often, after reading, you're nowhere closer to finding the best tools for your business. That's why I decided to go straight to the source and ask the experts and see if the best keyword research tool would rise to the surface...
Here are the top keyword research tools recommended by the experts...
Note: This post has been updated several times since it was originally published a couple years ago. While many responses have been updated and new ones added, there are experts below who did not respond to update their original response.
Best Tools for Keyword Research (As Voted by 137 Search Marketing Experts)
#1: SEMrush (84 votes) ... [Get 30 days of SEMrush PRO for free here]
#2: Google Keyword Planner (59 votes)
#3: Ahrefs (51 votes) [Read full review here]
#4: Keyword Tool.io (19 votes)
#5: Search Console (16 votes)
#6: AnswerThePublic (14 votes)
#7: Buzzsumo and Ubersuggest (13 votes)
#8: Google Trends (12 votes)
#9: Moz (11 votes)
#10: KWFinder (10 votes)
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The Best Keyword Research Tool For Your Online Marketing Campaigns
Read on to discover each expert's top 3 keyword research tools.
Responses are listed in the order they were received.
#1: Luke Monaghan (Koozai)
If I had to choose three keyword research tools that I use the most regularly, I'd have to choose:
1) SEMrush - Hands down for the competitive insight. Finding what your competition are ranking for is invaluable when building out a strategy to improve organic visibility.
2) SISTRIX - Similar to SEMRush, SISTRIX is great for competitive research, it's also good to identify historical keyword performance on certain domains which is translated into client-friendly visibility chart!
3) Keywordtool.io - for the more long-tail variants of keywords identified by the above tools. SEO has moved on from just targeting an exact-match, vanity keyword, you've got to build long-tail context around such terms.
#2: Gael Breton (Authority Hacker)
Ahrefs is all I need 🙂
#3: Geoff Kenyon (GeoffKenyon.com)
The three tools that I use most frequently for keyword research are, KeywordTool.io, SEMrush, and Excel.
While each of these are useful tools, they all serve very different purposes. KeywordTool.io is great for discovering variations of keywords to built pages around. Frequently, I use this the most for developing content.
I will use the tool to pull in a lot of keywords related to a theme and group them into relevant topics. These topics will either become their own content page or will be combined with other topics to create a page. KeywordTool.io is similar to other tools out there such as Uber Suggest, which I've used for a long time, but it tends to produce more keywords and it provides search volume for the keywords.
SEMrush is great for competitive keyword research. If you look at the organic competitors section of the tool, it will show you who you're competing with for common keywords. You can then go in to each of those competitors and identify keywords that you might not be targeting now, but you should be.
In addition, you can dig into the paid side of search and find out what keywords your competitors are bidding on, and then leverage those keywords for your own organic benefit if you're not already doing so. Search Metrics does this as well, but I've found SEMrush to provide a greater range of keywords and they save more historical keyword data than Search Metrics.
Excel serves a couple different purposes in my keyword research projects. Most simply, I've found Excel to be one of the most effective ways to simply and actionable present keyword research data. I use Excel to create keyword mapping documents where I provide the URL along with the associated keywords, titles, etc.
I've also found Excel to be very useful when you are working with a site that offers services in different areas. Using the concatenate or & formulas, you can easily create permutations of keywords and geographic regions to generate keywords for different services and geographies served.
#4: John Doherty (Credo)
Ahrefs, SEMrush and Answer The Public.
1. Ahrefs is killer for topic research.
2. SEMrush provides me domain-level analysis for competitors.
3. Answer The Public nails question-based keyword research.
#5: Ana Hoffman (Traffic Generation Cafe)
1. SEMrush
2. Market Samurai
3. Google Ads.
But really, only SEMrush :)
#6: Paul Shapiro (Searchwilderness.com)
I think people's aresenal of keyword research tools are mostly the same:
1) You need a tool to examine search volume, most likely Google Keyword Planner
2) A tool to help you generate more keyword ideas. Tools that work with the search engines' autosuggestions are very popular such as KeywordTool.io and Ubersuggest
3) Then people might add a tool broaden the depth of their data, maybe including something like Google Trends or Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool.
Instead of focusing on the 3 tools that everyone needs to cover these important bases, I'll give you my top 3 keyword research tools that you need to go above-and-beyond what everyone else is doing:
1) KNIME - if you want a very open-ended tool that can be used to do all sorts of keyword analysis. It was the focus of my BrightonSEO 2015 talk on doing better semantic keyword research.
2) MarketMuse - This is a tool that's just taking off, but it's AMAZING. It basiciall crawl your website and/or your competitors' website and find keyword gaps using pretty sophisiticated topic modeling algorithims. It works extremely well.
3) Seed Keywords - Sometimes your keyword research needs a human element and you should be asking your consumer audience how they would search for something. Seed Keywords helps you create a small survey and get that feedback.
#7: Matthew Barby (matthewbarby.com)
1) Ahrefs
2) Keyword Keg
3) Infinite Suggest
#8: Chris Dreyer (Rankings.io)
If I was limited to three tools for keyword research, I would use the following:
1) Ahrefs keywords Explorer: We use Ahrefs extensively for link tracking and analysis and their Keywords Explorer is also a useful feature. You can see all of the usual important metrics (search volume, competitiveness, traffic potential, and LSI keywords).
The features that make this stand out are the SERP overview and SERP position history. These reports give you a snapshot of how a site is doing in search for a particular keyword phrase compared with competing domains.
2) SEMrush: Much of our reporting is done out of SEMrush and its Keyword Analytics tool. If you are also doing keyword research for PPC this is a great tool. You can get all the info related to organic search and in addition stuff about ad history and other metrics important to PPC.
3) Search Console (Webmaster Tools): I believe Search Console is overlooked a lot because it’s a free tool provided by Google. Site owners and SEOs that aren’t using this on a regular basis are short changing themselves. There is a wealth of information related to keywords that people are actually using to find your site on this platform.
If you can’t afford using one of the paid solutions out there, this is a perfectly useful alternative. It can help you see what you’re ranking for (and what you’re not ranking for), what pages are associated with which keywords, and your SERP position. All the basics that can help give guidance to your SEO strategy.
#9. Adam Connell (bloggingwizard.com)
1) Ahrefs - These guys have an incredible keyword research tool. You can get great suggestions with this tool and some data that I haven’t seen in other tools - for example, you can see the percentage of searches that click (or don’t click) on search results along with return rate etc.
Ahrefs also supports competitor-based keyword research - type in a domain and see what keywords it ranks for.
However, this is much more than a keyword research tool - it’s a complete SEO research tool. And the fact that it has a huge backlink database makes it even more useful.
2) KWFinder - This is my go-to tool for quick stints of KW research, particularly for using Google’s autocomplete and coming up with question based keyword ideas. It’s got a really slick interface and one click SERP analysis.
3) AnswerThePublic – I mainly use the two tools above for KW research but this deserves a special mention. Type in a seed keyword phrase and it’ll spit out a bunch of relevant questions.
Great way to come up with blog post ideas on the fly. Compared to the above tools, this is a bit of a toy but it’s free so it’s an awesome way to get started without using a paid tool.
#10. Rich Missey (cars.com)
If I were restricted to three tools, they'd be SEMrush, Ubersuggest, and an internal database.
SEMrush is my go-to for organic landscape keyword research. This is where I start to get a pulse on owned domain rankings, competitor rankings, and adjacent business rankings. It also gives me a ballpark of how competitive a phrase/group of phrases/topic appear to be and how much effort it may take to break into the page 1 landscape.
Ubersuggest is a good place to make me get out of my own head. This is where I go to set aside my own predispositions & expectations and see what else pops into the list. I'll find regional term differences, slang, and get an idea where I'm sinking into technobabble hell.
Once I have a list of phrases, rankings, and volumes from these tools, I'll look to internal tools (maybe Excel, Access, or another database) to organize, classify, and forecast opportunity. This is where I'll estimate a competitor's traffic based on volume & position CTR, set goals for a target position, and estimate traffic based off that position's CTR and keyword volume.
#11. Charlie Williams (ScreamingFrog)
1) Google Search Console: One of my favorite keyword sources is the variety of terms you already rank for. There are potentially thousands of interesting angles within your key topics to consider (especially if you use the API), plus Google already thinks you are relevant!
2) Competition analysis: I want to know what the entire potential search market is for my site. And to do that, I need to see what the rest of the market targets, and how the public finds them.
There’s a host of excellent tools for analysing your competition like this; take your pick from Ahrefs, Searchmetrics, Infinite Suggest, Sistrix, STAT, PiDatametrics and more.
As a bonus, they’ll give you plenty of context for your keywords, such as difficulty or if a rich snippet appears.
3) Something to scrape Google suggest: Finally, one of my biggest sources of inspiration is finding the common ways your audience searches within your niche through Google’s (or Bing’s, or Amazon’s) suggested answers.
Some of the best tools I’ve found for this are Infinite Suggest, AnswerThePublic and KeywordTool.io.
There’s plenty of other fantastic tools where you can put in a subject and know you’ll get a great spread of ideas.
Some of my other faves are SEOmonitor’s Topic Explorer and KeywordShitter (sorry about the name…) with the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension installed.
#12. Christine Churchill (keyrelevance.com)
I am a big proponent of using multiple keyword tools and using them synergistically. For example I might take keywords from the Google Keyword Planner or SEMRush and run a few of the top terms into Google Trends to check out seasonality and trend lines.
I also warn people to never just take keywords out of a tool and implement them directly without reviewing them. Over the years I have seen people do some crazy things like take output from the Google tool and dumping them into their PPC campaigns with disastrous results. Scary but true!
My top favorite keyword tools (outside of the Google Planner tool and using your brain) that most people overlook are:
1. Google Trends – Provides years of historical trend data straight from the source.
2.) SEMrush – Fast, efficient results. I like the competitive insights it provides and the site audit information.
3. Ahref’s Keyword Explorer – Provides a useful cross-section of trend and competitive data. Unlike Google’s Keyword planner (which is more of a PPC tool), Ahref’s tool provides an SEO estimate of keyword ranking difficulty.
#13. Everett Sizemore
1) Answer The Public
2) Google (SERPs, trends, people also ask, GSC, AdWords...)
3) Moz
#14. Melissa Fach (Pubcon)
The SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool
SEMrush Keyword Research
SEMrush Keyword Competitors report
#15. Ian Cleary (Razor Social)
1) Inboundwriter - Inboundwriter helps at the ideation phase. I enter in my proposed title for a post and Inboundwriter will indicate how likely it is that I will rank on Google for these keywords. It will also tell me the related keywords that I should consider in my content.
2) SEMrush - Find out what keywords your competitor is ranking on so you can create better content and take some of your competitors traffic.
3) Google Keyword Planner - Find out an estimate of searches for particular keywords. Not always accurate but useful to review alongside the other tools.
#16. Brian Dean (Backlinko)
1) SEMrush
2) SEOcockpit
3) Longtail Pro
#17. Liz Cortes (RebelFish Local)
1) SEMrush
2) SEOcockpit
3) Longtail PRO
#18. Jon Morrow (Smart Blogger)
1) SEMrush
2) Ahrefs
3) Search Console
#19. Kevin Indig (kevin-indig.com)
I like Wikipedia, Ahrefs/SEMrush, and Veescore.
Why? Because traditional keyword research is pretty much dead. Instead, I try to understand what's important about a topic, what the related sub-topics are, and what search volume on other platforms like Youtube looks like.
Thus, I like this setup of Wikipedia (if you can take a manual look), keyword tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush, and a YouTube keyword tool like Veescore.
#20. Georgi Todorov (Digitalnovas)
1) KWFinder - It gives very quick overview on the keyword difficulty and the competition. You can see how many links the pages that rank have, their domain and page authority.
2) Ahrefs - Ahrefs is great for finding low-hanging fruits. I use it to find blogs with lower authority that rank for some high volume keywords. Next step is to create a similar piece of content.
3) SEMrush - that's an awesome tool. I love their Keyword Magic Tool, it helps me check keywords per country.
#21. Ilan Shabad (One Egg)
1) SEMrush - I normally start my keywords research with SEMrush by extracting keywords from the client's website and several of their competitors.
2) Google Keywords Planner - I use this to help expand my initial keyword list & generate additional keyword themes. I will also pull the monthly search volume & avg. CPC per target GEO.
3) Ahrefs Keywords Explorer - I use this tool for the keyword difficulty score, search volume & SERP export for each keyword to help eventuate the off-page competition.
#22. Erin Munson (Launch That)
SEMrush - This one is probably my favorite. I feel like there are so many different tools within SEMrush that I rarely need to use anything else. The only thing I don't really like is that the results you get between the Keyword Overview Tool and the Keyword Magic Tool don't always match up with each other.
However, the Keyword Magic Tool is still in Beta, so maybe that's something they're working on. Just take it with a grain of salt, I guess.
Ahrefs - When I want a second opinion on something or want to use some different tools, that's when I come to Ahrefs. I also really like Ahrefs for keeping track of which featured snippets you have and which ones your competitors have that you might want to go after.
Ryte - This site used to be called OnPage but now is Ryte.com. It's a German company so I feel like a lot of American SEOs that I talk to haven't heard of it. As with most sites, the generic version of their tool is free or you can pay for the pro version.
I just have the free version right now so I don't know all that the pro one can do. But even the free version has A LOT of tools you can use, I haven't even figured them all out yet. But one that I have used is their Content Optimizer. You can take a new or existing content piece of yours, and compare it to one of your competitor's pieces on a similar topic, and see where you might be lacking based on the keywords that are used in each piece.
The first time the site analyzes your site, it will take a while (could take several hours according to them), so make sure you leave time for that. But after that, it automatically tracks information about your site and you don't have to do that long analysis again.
#23. Brendan Hufford (Clique Studios)
If I only had 3 keyword research tools, I'd use tools that focus more on topical research and search intent instead of "keywords."
The best content ranks for thousands of keywords and we're seeing more content that seems to be written to nail a top keyword, but totally misses the long tail. Also, simply doing the research and putting the keywords (and related keywords) in the right places won't help you rank if you don't match the search intent.
We recently wrote about digital marketing and produced a 6k word article about how we teach it as instructors at the University of Chicago. But, no matter how many links we build to it, it'd never rank. When you look at the intent of that search, people want a quick bullet-point list and our epic manifesto wasn't matching.
The tool that I've found to be best for that effort is Ahrefs. I use it to look at content that's held consistent rankings over past updates, reverse engineer what it ranks for, and then I spend the rest of the time using my favorite SEO tool (my brain) to analyze it for levels of search intent (link to image that shows it:
Other tools that smart folks like John-Henry Scherk have recommended to me to continue building better content are Market Muse and Clearscope.
#24. Jacob King (jacobking.com)
1) Google Keyword Tool - still calling it tool, not buying into their Adwords keyword planner BS
2) SEMrush
3) Excel and then Scrapebox keyword scraper for some suggestions merging prefixes and suffixes too
#25. Andrea Lehr (Fractl)
1. SEMrush: This is a staple for most of the SEO world and for good reason - I use it for everything from keyword research and analysis to competitive audits in hopes of finding new opportunities to rank.
2. BuzzSumo: It's one of the first tools I use for content ideation, but it's also great in revealing what your target influencers are already sharing.
3. Buzzstream: Outreach is a huge part of SEO because it's what gets your content links. Their platform helps me organize my campaigns while also keeping track of any influencer relationships--an essential ingredient to generate high-quality links.
#26. Eli Schwartz
Ahrefs is my favorite tool for getting a sense of what keywords my competitors rank for, how long they have ranked, and finding general keyword ideas.
Rank Ranger for really drilling into search console to see what keywords are performing for the site.
The Google Keyword Planner - is my all around most trusted source for relative traffic data on keywords.
#27. James Norquay (Prosperity Media)
Great tools for keyword research in 2018:
1. SEMrush - Great tool for PPC & SEO Analysis.
2. Ahrefs - Has provide great additional data in he last year with the tool. The data set they have is growing daily for Keywords.
3. Keyword Keg - Another great tool for doing analysis on top search terms.
4. Keywords everywhere chrome plugin - great tool for looking at auto suggest search terms.
#28. Kristi Hines, Freelance Writer
My favorite three keyword research tools are Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, and HitTail.
1) Google AdWords Keyword Tool allows you to export up to 800 suggestions for most seed keywords and phrases. You can then use them to optimize your main business pages as well as come up with great topic ideas.
2) Ubersuggest shows you what Google suggests when you start typing in keywords. These suggestions can point you to some great long-tail keyword phrases and content ideas.
3) HitTail connects with your Google Webmaster Tools to help you find the (not provided) keywords that people are searching to find your site - keywords you may not be using as much as you should.
#29. Nick Eubanks (IFTF)
1. Term Explorer
2. SEMrush
3. SerpWoo
1. KWFinder
2. Ahrefs
3. Keywords Everywhere
#31. Connor Wrenn (SEO @ Bankrate Inc.)
SEMrush: Outside of GSC, this is the handiest tool for keyword prospecting at a reasonable price. Now, if only they could brush up their backlink profiler...
Ahrefs: The index I trust most for backlink research. Plus, the keyword tracking here is getting better every day, even though you have to pay more to get full access to it (in that sense, SEMRush will continue to kick its butt). SERP snapshots and featured snippet reports are a big plus here.
NetPeak: You've got to have a crawler tool in there somewhere, and I know enough folks will already vote for Screaming Frog (as they should). However, I don't see NetPeak getting a lot of love, and it should.
For starters, NetPeak reports on over 60 issues across 50 different parameters, and it prioritizes those issues for you, making is easy to deliver the most important insights at the beginning of a campaign. It's in-app filtering capabilities are also very flexible; I can easily generate custom report before I have to export anything into Excel.
And those are just the unique features; it has a lot of the same options you expect out of Screaming Frog, like custom search, custom user agent, and other crawler customizations.
#32. Mike Ramsey (Nifty Marketing & Nifty Law)
1) Google Keyword Planner - There is no better tool for giving somewhat accurate data and ideas. Especially when it comes to local keyword research. Being able to look at a broad keyword like "lawyer" and then narrow the search field to a specific city or market is one of the best uses that only this tool can provide.
2) SEMrush - This tool offers fantastic competitive research around domains to find what keywords could be driving traffic for your competitors. Looking at paid keywords ad spend can also help you know which keywords might have monetary value worth pursuing organically. If a competitor is willing to spend a high ad budget on terms and you think they do a good job running their ad campaign, then its a good indication it is worth organic ranking effort.
3) BuzzSumo - This tool can allow you to take a keyword or concept you are interested in and see what type of content has performed the best around social and link building on the subject. I find this tool to be incredibly useful for finding what type content people seem to care about for specific keywords.
#33. Mark Preston (Mark Preston SEO)
1. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
I have tested every keyword tool going over my 20 year career in this industry and I personally prefer Ahrefs as it gives me an accurate view on the real traffic potential by using the data to make a simple calculation.
2. AnswerThePublic
It may seem strange but I like Answer The Public as it gives me an insight into the industry by researching what questions are being asked within each niche. I can then run a tailored campaign.
3. Google Trends
In every single one of my SEO training sessions. Every single time I demonstrate Google Trends, it creates a light-bulb moment as most people realise they are targeting the wrong audience. So many things can be gained by using Google Trends during the keyword research.
#34. Bill Sebald (Green Lane SEO)
We use Keyword Planner of course (#1). But we're also very fond of Grepwords (#2) and a few Google Suggest tools (choosing the one that best fits the client needs at the moment (#3); our list is here. I'm very fond of Grepwords' extensions for giving search metrics on tools like Ubersuggest.
I use multiple keyword research tools at the same time, for a few reasons. They work to cross-check each other using their different databases. Each offers something a little different, giving me insights the others don’t.
I use Ahrefs to find ideas for keywords to add into content, and content to create around keyword opportunities. I like how Ahrefs shows keyword difficulty, search volume, traffic potential (how much organic search traffic it’s possible to get when you rank #1 for a parent topic keyword) and lets you group keywords together to create lists. It’s really useful.
But, I also use SEMrush - it has the largest keyword database on the market (9.4 billion keywords and counting) and is my go-to for inspiration and brainstorming content strategies.
And finally, I use Moz to track keyword rankings and compare them with Ahrefs, Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. The three together give me a crystal-clear picture of what people are searching for, and which terms are ripe to leverage for maximum results.
If I only used one of them, my strategies wouldn’t be nearly as effective.
#36. Jesus Meca (Real Focus Marketing)
1) Ahrefs
2) SEMrush
3) Keyword Researcher Pro (best auto-complete I've found so far).
#37. Takeshi Young (keshkesh.com)
1) Linkdex
2) AdWords keyword tool
3) Internal search logs
#38. Aleyda Solis (aleydasolis.com)
#39. Kevin Cotch (TopRank Marketing)
If I could only use three tools for keyword research I would use SEMrush, AdWords Keyword Planner, and AnswerThePublic.
SEMrush does a good job providing search volume and keyword difficulty metrics for competitive keywords.
I use the AdWords Keyword Planner for long-to-medium tail keyword phrases that SEMrush doesn't have in its database yet.
The last tool I use for keyword research is AnswerThePublic to find more long-tail keyword phrases that people are actually searching on Google.
#40. Larry Kim (WordStream)
Like countless others, I still use Google Keyword Planner for keyword research in SEO. Google is the one with the vast majority of the search data, so even after all these years, they're still the best place to go to find high-level keyword data.
Once you have all of these great keyword ideas though, how do you prioritize them? I use the secret formula you can find under #3 here (well, it was secret until I shared it with my readers) to assign an actual value to each keyword phrase, factoring in search volume, competition and suggested bids.
Once I have all of this insight in hand, I head over to BuzzSumo to see what angles and headlines are working really well on any given keyword topic. It helps you to see what's already been done, so you can make sure your take on it is unique and interesting.
#41. Cyrus Shepard (cyrusshepard.com)
Top 3 keyword research tools:
1. Keyword Planner
2. Ubersuggest w/ Grepwords Chrome Add-on
3. Mozbar (for competitive analysis)
#42. William Harris (Elumynt)
From an SEO perspective, my favorite tool is Ahrefs. I love the way it presents the data, shows the volume for many platforms including YouTube, and organizes it in a way that I personally find very useful.
My second must-have keyword tool is the Google Keyword Planner. It's not meant for SEO, but it can be a powerful tool if you know how to use it.
If you want to know what Google thinks is associated, how much people are paying to show up for those keywords, etc. then it helps to go straight to the source.
My final one is BuzzSumo. It's not a "keyword" tool in the traditional way, but it can help me figure out what other sites are doing, if those blog articles are getting a lot of shares, and really frame things in the form a question.
#43. Gabriella Sannino (Level343)
We use a lot of tools for keyword research, up to and including good old fashion competitive research, but if I had to narrow it down to three, I'd say Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Tool.io and Ahrefs, in no particular order.
Google Keyword Planner is great for finding a starting keyword bucket and estimated cost for PPC campaigns
Keyword Tool.io also helps with building a keyword bucket and estimated traffic.
Google Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool.io are the "big picture" tools - gives you a good starting point. Ahrefs takes those bucket terms (and helps you find more) and gives you the close up view. Keyword Difficulty, for example, is a very useful metric to review when choosing similar terms.
We always start with manual digging, but by the end of the keyword list, we've used these tools the most.
#44. Josh Laughtlan (jtree.net)
If I could only use 3 tools for organic keyphrase research (what a glorious world it would be) my 3 punch keyphrase research combo would be Google Autocomplete, Keyword Planner and AuthorityLabs Now Provided reports.
Given you have a good idea of where to start and are fairly confident you are speaking the same language as your client, jump start research by generating related keyphrases and long tail variants with the ever so easy to use Google Autocomplete. This tool makes predictions based on what you are typing that are a reflection of Google search activity.
Google's Keyword Planner can then be used to pull historical search volume for any newly discovered Autocomplete phrases in addition to conducting further keyphrase research.
AuthorityLabs Now Provided reports deliver the final blow of the combo by identifying keyphrases classified as "not provided" by Google (AKA hidden) that already send traffic to the site. This process also helps identify new keyphrases to send back to Autocomplete and Keyword Planner for further research.
#45. Annie Cushing (annielytics.com)
1) SEMrush
2) Soovle
3) Ubersuggest
#46. Eric Siu (Single Grain)
#47. Shane Barker (Shane Barker Consulting)
1. SEMrush - Very intuitive and by far the best tool to research competitor keywords. Great for finding keywords you’re not currently targeting, but should be.
2. Google Keyword Planner - It gives excellent keyword ideas and also detailed traffic estimates, which can be useful for understanding the value each keyword might be to you.
3. Wordtracker - It’s very easy to use, helps discover great ideas for longtail keywords for search engines besides Google (Amazon, Bing, the App Store, etc.)
#48. Harris Schachter (Optimize Prime)
It's hard to boil it down to just 3 keyword tools, so instead I'll describe 3 categories of resources.
1. The first is the literal keyword tools, my favorites include BrightEdge's Data Cube, Wordstream, Ubersuggest and others. These tools give you the actual search phrases, either with or without search volume.
2. The second category are keyword tools based on the competition. One of the first things to determine is not only who the business competitors are, but who the SEO competitors are. Keyword research can be done by simply doing research on high-performing competitors. Some of my favorite domain-based keyword tools are SEMrush, SpyFu, and BrightEdge's Data Cube.
3. Finally, there's just good old research through trends and news. Google Trends, keeping up on industry news of the business, and even newsjacking (if there are relevant topics). These all require different resources depending on the business, but once you find the leaders in their news you can not only leverage them for keyword research but also glean insights into how you can become an industry leader yourself (and dominate SEO).
#49. Ben Wood (Hallam Internet)
Google Keyword Planner
Ahrefs
SEMrush
#50. Conor Doyle (iProspect)
SEMrush
Google Keyword Planner
Ahrefs
#51. Alan Silvestri (Growth Gorilla)
1) Ahrefs: This is my main keyword research tool and hub. I use it to gather keyword data, gauge the difficulty and competition, and keyword tracking.
2) Keyword Shitter: I LOVE the name and it’s a super simple, free and easy tool to get all of the Google suggest keywords.
3) Google: This is pretty straight forward but it’s the main reason I like it. I search for my main seed keyword in Google, and use the keywords that Google itself highlights in bold on the search results, plus the “Searches related to” section at the bottom to get keyword variations or LSI. That’s basically what Google is telling you that topic is about. No need for a thousands other tools. I use these to optimize the on page of my target pages as well.
#52. Reginald Chan (BloggingXL)
#53. Maggie Cerciello (SEER Interactive)
I use Infinite Suggest as a staple for any keyword research. The tool pulls in related searches for each query, and it allows me to go down the rabbit hole and get as specific as I can. The end result is a well-rounded keyword set that uncovers relevant queries and topics that I didn't know of before!
I also rely on SEMrush's Keyword Magic Tool. It strings together queries to uncover both head terms and valuable long tail queries. This is a wonderful tool especially for exploring topic clusters.
#54. Dave Michaels (Sage Groove)
My priorities in keyword research:
*Getting a clean list of relevant long-tail keywords for niche content topics, low competition keywords, and stronger semantic SEO.
*Getting accurate search volumes and keyword difficulty.
1. KWFinder: I’m impressed with KWFinder. They get their keyword data from Google (as well as Moz and Majestic). The recommendations are all solid and include separate keyword types (most notably questions) with associated search volume and a robust Keyword Difficulty ranking. Covers local and international markets.
2. LSI Graph: LSI Graph is free and easy to use. It provides latent semantic indexing keywords to support your focus keyword. It’s also helpful for generating new ideas for content.
3. Adwords Keyword Planner: I always like checking Keyword Planner to confirm search volumes and it’s a good alternative for finding competitor keywords.
#55. Tom Demers (Measured SEM)
If I had to stick to three I'd opt for Ahrefs, Google's Keyword Planner, and Google.com.
Personally I like the difficulty scores from Ahrefs and have been using their "Keyword Explorer" more recently to put difficulty data next to terms.
I use Google's Keyword Planner frequently to get additional ideas and volume estimates.
I use Google.com to see the search suggestions that are returned, related searches, and "People Also Ask" features to get an idea of other terms and topics that Google finds relevant (and likely that they know are being searched for) related to a core topic.
#56. Brian Lang (Web Developers Etc)
Google tools (Keyword planner will show the main keywords worth targeting and webmaster tools will show keyword data from your site).
Forums / communities (because they're a great place to see what topics people are talking about).
SEMrush (shows competitor keywords that are driving traffic to their sites).
#57. Tadeusz Szewczyk (OnReact)
Google Trends - The data is meant to be used by real people not marketers. It's a bit vague but uncensored and not meant to drive sales of Google Adwords. It lets me see whether a keyword has a downwards curve over the years or seasonal ups and downs.
SEMrush - They give a quick overview of what a keyword is all about in a larger context with some ready-made insights into potential combinations and competition.
Ubersuggest - It allows me to get lots of relevant keyword phrases without a lot of fuss. I just need to pick the most accurate from then on and find some common sense combinations.
After I used those I just have to test the list I got with Google Keyword Planner and find out whether they really is demand for them. The job is almost done.
#58. Bill Gassett (Max Real Estate Exposure)
1) Ubersuggest
2) Buzzsumo
3) WordStream
#59. Brian Jackson (Kinsta)
If I could only use three tools for keyword research they would be the following:
1) Ahrefs to quickly see “the big picture” when it comes to any keyword I'm researching. I can instantly see the top holders in the SERPs. I then immediately take the top holders list and go check out their sites. I need to make sure I can beat them content-wise, otherwise I will search for another keyword to try and rank for, or perhaps go down the long-tail route. The Ahrefs tool and data quality get better and better every year. It's one of my favorite tools.
2) SEMrush is my go-to tool for any PPC keyword research. Being able to see ad history or what a competitor is doing on their paid campaigns is priceless when it comes to generating new ideas. The keyword difficulty estimation in SEMrush in my opinion is probably one of the most accurate.
3) KWFinder is one of the "newer" kids on the block, but it's probably just about the easiest way I have found to find new long-tail keywords quickly. A couple of things I like about this tool is that it allows me to create lists of keywords. So I can group up my different sites by lists and revisit them at a later date. I can export the data to CSV and start building out campaigns. It also keeps a nice scrolling list of the last 20+ keywords you have looked up. The SEO difficulty indicator comes in very handy as well! As far as ease of use goes, KWFinder wins hands down.
#60. Aaron Agius (Louder Online)
1) Ahrefs
2) Long Tail Pro
3) SEMrush
Bonus points - this post is awesome.
#61. Emily Yost (SuperScript Marketing)
1) Ahrefs - Great tool for competitor research and content gap analysis. I also find the KD score very useful, as it's based on a domain's backlink profile.
2) Google Search Console - I think a lot of SEOs overlook the power of GSC keyword data. I regularly dig through GSC for KWs with high impressions but very low CTR - this gives great insight for gaps in your KW targeting.
3) Ubersuggest - An oldie but a goodie, UberSuggest is my go-to for longtail KW discovery (bonus: it's also wildly entertaining to see what some people have search for).
#62. Loz James (Content Champion)
It’s easy to get sidetracked with all the great keyword research tools available, but I always find myself coming back to the same three:
1) Google Keyword Planner
2) Market Samurai
3) Wordtracker
The last two on this shortlist are paid tools - so going the Google route is a good idea if you’re just starting out.
There’s a load you can achieve with the keyword planner, but I just like to cross check across a few tools to achieve the best results.
#63. Andrew Shotland (Local SEO Guide)
1) SEMrush
2) Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools
3) Clearscope
#64. Sujan Patel (wheniwork.com)
#65. Sam McRoberts (Vudu Marketing)
1) SEMrush
2) AnswerThePublic
3) KeywordTool.io
BuzzSumo, while not a KW tool, is also invaluable as it helps you really explore content that performs well by topic.
#66. Alexandra Tachalova
1) SEMrush
2) Ahrefs
3) Keywordtool.io
#67. Will Blunt (Blogger Sidekick)
#68. Niall Devitt (Tweak Your Biz)
#69. Sue Anne Dunlevie (successfulblogging.com)
I only use Ahrefs.
#70. Sam Hurley (Optim-Eyez)
LongTail Pro — Awesome for uncovering hidden keyword gems otherwise overlooked. Includes plenty of comparable metrics. Great for article topic planning.
Scrapebox — Great to use in combination with LongTail pro and other tools. Collect masses of 'Google Suggest' queries at once! (And it still feels kind of 'hacky'. In a good way!)
SEMRush — Needs no intro 🙂 Beautiful interface and highly intuitive with tonnes of competitor analysis. Very large keyword data set used by millions.
#71. Joshua Hardwick (The SEO Project)
1) Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
2) Google Trends
3) Answer The Public
#72. Leslie Handmaker (Vantiv)
#73. Bob Gladstein (Overdrive Interactive)
1. AdWords Keyword Planner - It's still the standard, although Google keeps making changes that just aren't helpful. I get that they want us to treat closely-related keywords in such a way that we're not creating multiple pages when we should just have one, but I'd appreciate it if they'd still break down the volume for each keyword that makes up a group (or at least list the keywords they're clumping together into a group).
They also seem to be getting this wrong often enough that I've got less confidence that the keywords that make up these groups really belong there. I recently tried to check the volume for the keyword [active monitoring] (the practice of checking on a network by injecting test traffic and seeing how it's handled, as opposed to passive monitoring) and the Keyword Planner gave me the volume for [activity monitor] (aka Fitbit).
2. Answer the Public - very useful for discovering long-tail searches, especially if you're building a FAQ section or targeting quick answers.
3. Ahrefs - I've only recently started using ahrefs for keyword research, but I'm liking it so far, especially when it gives me data on keywords that Google insists on changing on me.
4. (Bonus) Google Search Console's Search Analytics Report (or "Performance" in the new GSC) - Great for finding queries that are getting you impressions, but not clicks, or queries you only get impressions for when they're branded.
#74. Tahmid Jawad (Salient Marketing)
1. Google Keyword Planner - Simple yet the most powerful tool for keyword research.
2. AgencyAnalytics - Keywords ranking monitoring plus search volume both present in a single place.
3. Google Webmaster - Search Queries.
#75. Jordan Kasteler (Hennessey Consulting)
1) Moz Explorer - great for finding questions related to topics.
2) Google Keyword Planner - great for finding what people are willing to pay for those keywords.
3) Keyword.io - great for finding longtail keywords
#76. Joe Howard (WPBuffs)
BuzzSumo: Seeing what kind of content has been performing well over the past week, month or year is essential to predict what kind of content will attract traffic in the future. BuzzSumo does just this, and gives me other essential social and traffic data as well to inform our content decisions. Very slick.
SEMrush: I like to check out the content my competitors publish and see where they're winning links from so I can see if I can get some of my own. SEMrush makes this super simple, and their export function allows me to play with the data as much as I want. Awesome.
Mozbar: This is a great tool for keyword research! In Google search results, you can see the DA of every website listed and find searches without a lot of competition. Great for finding low-hanging fruit and areas for SEO gain. We use it regularly to find keyword opportunities for our content team. Boom!
#77. Nate Oulman (Real Estate Sandpoint)
All three of these tools in 2019 will help you get ahead of your competition
1) Ahrefs - I love there style, function and how I can break down any competitor website profile.
2) SEMRush - Pricing is not bad, and they have really upgraded the backend over the last few years.
3) Moz - Awesome link profile structure and shows a more realistic DA the incoming domains have.
#78. Kurt Frankenberg (shoestring101.com)
Because I run several local businesses and help others to promote theirs, my first, second and third SEO tool is a little off the beaten track:
It's actual human interaction, plus a yellow pad to jot down responses. Let's take for example the little screen repair company I founded as a 30 Day Challenge over on Shoestring101. At first I just wanted to make a business with my 14 year old to show him no one needs to give you a job...you can MAKE a job.
So we started with physical signs and free listings in local directories.
But once we got some actual paying customers we started asking them how THEY might go about finding us if they had used the internet.
So far, "repair screen door" and "repair window screens" is the top response.
These can be further refined by asking customers that already found us, HOW they found us.
In the phone script that I use to close local leads, one of the questions is, "How did you find out about us?" If the answer is "internet", which it almost always is...the followup questions are "what search engine did you use?" and "what keywords did you enter?"
It's these, actual-paying-customer-generated keywords that have been most useful. Better than Market Samurai, better than any Google tool, whatever they're calling it now 😉
Thanks for asking, Robbie! I wouldn't want to tell you that my SEO first, second and third tool was effective without offering compelling proof, so here it is:
If you type in "hack local seo" into Google, you'll find my landmark post, 7 Ways to Hack Local Search SEO for a Free Front Page Listing. In that post I show how I get unlimited leads for my screen repair company and my martial arts studio. See, after getting the right keywords, ya gotta know what to do with 'em.
#79. Joe Williams (Tribe SEO)
1) Keywords Everywhere: a free Chrome plugin that injects keyword search volume data into free Google Keyword Planner accounts, it also gives search volumes for my Google searches and has a nifty bulk upload search volume feature.
2) SEMrush: the daddy keyword research tool for competitor keyword research. It's worth checking out the Guru subscription plan which has historical keyword data and Google positions as far back as January 2012 and this comes in handy when trying to work out when a search engine penalty happened for a potential client.
3) Ahrefs: probably my favorite all-in-one SEO tool and they are edging closer to overtaking SEMRush as my preferred keyword research tool of choice as well. It has just about everything you need from competitive keyword research, a vast database of keywords and accurate search volumes.
#80. David Schneider (Ninja Outreach)
1) Long Tail Pro: This is the case primarily if I am looking to build a niche site. I don't build niche sites anymore and am no longer a user of LTP, but I do think it is a great software and have no problem recommending it.
2) Google's Adword Keyword Planner: Again this isn't something I would go to often BUT it is free and if I am just looking to get an idea of the volume, since in many cases that is the key metric for me, I would probably go here.
3. Ninja Outreach: Full disclosure this is my own tool, and it is actually an outreach tool, so you may be wondering how it plays into Keyword Research. The fact is there are quite a few data points that NinjaOutreach gets for me that I find useful in keyword research, such as the articles that are ranking for the keyword in Google, their domain authority, their page authority, the number of backlinks they have, and other social and contact data. It's pretty valuable stuff, especially if there is going to be an outreach campaign tied into the keyword research. I wrote a great article with Jake from LTP showing the combination of the two tools.
#81. Jay Markwood (Whereoware LLC)
SEMrush
MOZ Pro
Google Adwords Keyword Planner
#82. Umar Khan (Social Cubix)
#83. Ariel Kozicki (Wpromote)
1) BrightEdge
2) SEMRush
3) Google Keyword Planner
Although really I could get away with using BrightEdge alone. Nothing beats the Data Cube!
#84. Hamish Elley-Brown (Online Republic)
1) Google Keyword Planner
2) LSI Keyword Generator
3) Google Adwords
#85. Ryon Flack (Bruce Clay, Inc.)
1) AdWords Keyword Planner – It is always best to get data directly from the source. Also, Google's data tends to be more comprehensive and precise/accurate.
2) Search Console – GSC is a great source for keywords once your site has been live for a while. This is also one of the few good sources for long tail keywords.
3) Bing Ads Intelligence – This tool is useful for harvesting keyword data. You can often compare it with Google’s and one big advantage is that it can integrate directly into Excel.
#86. William Kammer (Levy Online)
1) SEMRush
2) AdWords
3) AnswerThePublic
#87. Saurabh Bisht (Yellow Pages)
1) SEMrush - I believe that among all the 3rd party software, SEMrush has the largest keyword database. Their search volume data is pretty accurate and aligns with the Google keyword planner. Also, based on the type of content that needs to be produced (i.e. informational, transactional, etc.), one can utilize different filtering options available in it.
2) Ahrefs - This is my go-to tool to check if the given keyword performs better for organic results or PPC and whether that search translates to any clicks. It also shows the keyword volume share among different countries. This really helps in deciding if you are targetting the right country, especially for an affiliate or e-commerce site.
3) Keyword Everywhere - Works best when some manual research is required using google auto-suggest. It provides 'Related Keywords' and 'People also search for' terms right next to the Google SERP results and gives the search volume on the fly in Google auto-suggest box.
#88. Jason Acunzo (sorryformarketing.com)
I actually don't use any keyword tools aside from Google Trends, but only rarely do I even use that. I try to talk to many of our target audience members (entrepreneurs) as I can. I attend events, I have phone calls, I sit next to them while working. Generally speaking, I think it's a waste of time to START with keyword tools instead of actual customers. Yes, you can target people in broad swaths and get a high level sense for what's interesting and trending, but at least in the case of our business at NextView Ventures, it's way more powerful to talk to actual "customers" you serve.
#89. Lisa Barone (overit.com)
Can't go wrong with the Google Keyword tool, SEMRush and Google Trends. The Keyword tool for volume estimates, SEMRush to see what keywords competitors are ranking for/targeting, and Google Trends to make sure the traffic is actually coming from countries I'm trying to target. Gives a relatively accurate picture of when to expect traffic spikes and seasonality insight.
#90. David Arrington (Profit Pursuits)
1) If you don't have a budget you can still learn some useful information with the Google Keyword Planner. In addition to the search traffic for your list of keywords, take a look at the trends to see what's likely to remain popular in the future.
Next, take note of the Adwords competition and bid price. If people are bidding on the keyword there's a better chance of converting people to your list or products. The related keywords tool is also great to get alternative ideas. Finally, plug your top keywords into Google to spy on the competition and see the total number of results.
2) If you have some budget it's hard to beat SEMRush. You get a full keyword research suite and competitive intelligence tool in one convenient package. Check out Robbie's in-depth guide to learn how to get every ounce of functionality out of this tool.
3) For a simple interface that still packs in all the important data, go with Long Tail Pro. I especially like the keyword competitiveness feature, and the ability to check for keyword title competition. This goes deeper than just listing the total search results, allowing you to see how many people have specifically targeted your keyword.
#91. Venchito Tampon (Digital Philipines)
1) Ahrefs
2) KeywordTool.io
3) Google (Related Search Suggestions feature)
#92. James Richardson (Optimising)
1. Ahrefs: Solid data for the Australian market (Which is sometimes difficult to get)
2. Google Keyword Planner: Standard.
3. Phone: We find the best way to do keyword research is to really get to know the business either by phone, or in person. Sometimes you can get some gems out of them that you would not otherwise think of sitting in front of your keyboard.
4. SEMrush: I'm a little late to the party but its hard to beat SEMrush for a great multi purpose tool. I've only just started using this more regularly and been loving it.
#93. Joseph Morales (The Marketing Joe)
If I had to use only 3 keyword research tools, I'd use the following.
1) Keywordtool.io (fantastic tool for auto suggest on Google)
2) Soovle. It's a little unconventional and kinda archaic looking, but a fantastic tool that pulls keywords from various search engines.
3) SEMrush. Another fantastic tool with so much available at your fingertips, you won't want to leave. Ha!
#94. Kevin Gamache (Boise Search Strategist)
1) Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool
2) SpyFu Competitive analysis
3) Brightedge Data Cube
Those 3 get me what I need for keyword research.
#95. Patrick Coombe (Elite Search Strategies)
I use 1 and only 1 tool for keyword research: Google Keyword Planner. I've never seen the use for any other tool. They all seem to confuse things and most of them get the data from GKP anyway. There are a few good ones on the market, but I really just don't have the need for more than one keyword research tool.
#97. Jacob Wulff (Thrive Internet Marketing Agency)
1) AdWords Keyword Planner is the clear front runner, but may prove limited in terms of data.
2) SpyFu is also a serious contender as it provides a slew of competitor keyword data to analyze.
3) KeywordTool.io which is both affordable and provides many metrics that Google's option doesn't include.
#98. Carina Parry-Stevens (Fast Web Media)
If I could only use 3 tools for keyword research, it wouldn't be a difficult decision for me to make.
The first one is Google Adwords Keyword Planner - it's the king of keyword research tools as far as I'm concerned. The downside is, you have to have put at least one PPC campaign live to use it.
Keywordtool.io is good for generating keyword ideas to target. It's not the most accurate in terms of search volume, but great for maximizing a blend of keywords in your SEO copy.
A more recent tool I've come to really rate is SEMRush's Keyword Magic Tool. I like the fact you can build lists, the search volume seems accurate and the keyword difficulty rating is particularly useful.
#99. Jason Mun (Bespoke)
KeywordTool.io - Great tool to get suggests data along with monthly search volumes FAST - Ability to get question based queries easily for content ideas as well.
SEMrush - Great for gathering keyword ideas of competitors. Love the Domain vs Domain feature where you can find common intersect keywords between websites.
Their Keyword Magic tool is fantastic. Great features and one-click to get question based content ideas.
Ahrefs - Their keyword explorer is also awesome. A great tool to analyse a specific keyword and get semantically relevant keywords from a seed keyword - Content explorer within Ahrefs is another of my favourite when planning content for clients. I can use this to see high performing articles and analyse what keywords they are ranking for.
#100. Jignesh Gohel (olbuz.com)
By considering the latest enhancement in SEO industry, we really need to take care of various points while doing keyword research.
For example, mobile traffic, voice search queries, local business related queries (near me) and search intent. Here if we choose the keywords based on its difficulty and volume, chances are there, we may miss some great opportunities.
My strategy is very simple, I generally use a combination of tools to filter out keywords + manual analysis from the Google search result data.
If I have to name the 3 keyword research tools, I would include:
1. Google Keyword Planner
2. SEMrush
3. Ahrefs and Ubersuggest (tie)
#102. Stoney deGeyter (Pole Position Marketing)
- Google Adwords Keyword Planner for keyword ideas
- Keyword Explorer for discovery and data
- Microsoft Excel for data organization, filtering etc.
#104. Carrie Hill (Ignitor Digital)
I've actually stopped using keyword tools for the most part.
That said, I do use the SEMrush Keyword Magic tool a bit but find that talking to clients, and having them talk to their customer service people & customers does MUCH more than a tool does.
Using the words that customers use to describe a product or service matches with how queries are typed into search boxes. I also use search suggest and the featured snippet PAA boxes. This helps with connecting entities together when you interlink pages.
For example:
Doctor > plastic surgeon > rhinoplasty > nose job > non-surgical nose job > Juvederm| Botox| Bellafill.
Then tying all those entity keywords in with local/geo keywords: nearby, near me, Colorado, Denver, Aurora, Saddle Ridge.
Then tying those with descriptors to create a keyword map: best, reviews, recommended, highest rated, top results, before and after.
#105. Craig Campbell (Craig Campbell SEO)
1) Ahrefs
2) SEMrush
3) Serpstat
#106. Nefer Lopez (Growth Hacker Kitchen)
Here are my top 3 keyword research tools:
1) Google Keyword planning tool.
2) Keywordtool.io
3) Buzzsumo - it's not a keyword tool, per se, but I like the social validation of certain keyword themes I have in mind.
#108. Joe Putnam (iSpionage)
The three tools I would use for keyword research are:
1) iSpionage
2) KWFinder
3) Google Keyword Planner
#109. Justin Herring (YEAH! Local)
1) KWFinder.com for niche and local keyword research.
2) Google Search Console for keywords you didn't know your were ranking for.
3) Ahrefs for competitor keyword research.
#110. Shane Melaugh (IM Impact)
I'd use SEOcockpit and I really don't know if there's anything else I'd need in addition.
#111. Zac Johnson (Blogging.org)
1) Ahrefs
2) Majestic SEO
3) SEMrush
#112. Jason Acidre (Xight Interactive)
1) SEMRush - their pro version can certainly provide a lot of useful data (which can help you lead to practical insights) in terms of keyword research and competitive intelligence.
2) Google Keyword Planner - I'd also suggest Keyword.io, they have tons of other relevant suggestions (based on Google and Youtube's autocomplete search/suggest feature.
3) Google Analytics - really useful especially when you've already built enough traffic to better understand user behavior for certain key terms you're aiming to get more value from (particularly long-tail keywords).
#113. Ann Smarty (SEO Smarty)
1) Serpstat
2) SpyFu
3) Text Optimizer
#114. Ryan Stewart (Webris)
1) SEMrush
2) Google Keyword Tool
3) Google Analytics (Queries and Search Terms report)
#115. AJ Ghergich (ghergich.com)
1) SEMrush
2) KeywordKeg
3) AnswerThePublic
#116. Stephen Jeske (CanIRank)
CanIRank is the only tool I use or need for keyword research. Two things I particularly like is that it assigns a ranking probability for each keyword I'm researching, plus it has a heat map that shows me what I need to do to compete with those entries on the first page of Google.
That way I can focus on going after keywords for which I have a realistic chance of ranking, and concentrate my efforts on doing things that will really move the needle.
AnswerThePublic is a great tool too, if you're looking for a starting point for content ideas. It's like Google's autosuggest on steroids, with some really neat data visualization.
#117. Wade McMaster (We'll Build Your Blog)
1. Google
2. SEMrush
3. Ubersuggest
#118. Sean Si (SEO-Hacker)
Google Keyword Planner - It helps to have the data straight from the search engine itself. With this tool, I am confident that the data is valuable and accurate. Lastly, the reports are easy to pull up as you can have it straight to a Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file.
SEMrush - Their tool is constantly evolving to cater keyword research. What I like about SEMrush is the options they present you with. It's easy to navigate and packed with features that you don't see in other keyword research tools. Their database provides many choices that are essential for SEO.
KWFinder- This is a simple tool that even a rookie SEO Specialist can use. It does all the work for you and this is vital especially for those who are looking for time-efficient tools to use for their research.
#119. Helen Pollitt (Reflect Digital)
Keyword Hero - this beta product is proving to be the most exciting keyword tool entering the market. Designed to recover the lost "not provided" organic keywords from Google Analytics, my testing so far has suggested it does exactly that!
Using information from a range of sources, including Google Search Console, clickstream data and browser plugins, we might truly be on the cusp of a keyword revolution.
Keywords Everywhere - this simple but crucial Chrome and Firefox extension gives information on search volumes of keywords straight onto some of your most frequented data websites, including Google search, Majestic's anchor text report and Google Trends. So convenient.
Authoritas - specifically the keyword potential report. This handy report looks at existing keyword data in your account and automatically suggests keywords where an improvement in their rankings could lead to significant gains in search traffic. It's a great way to focus your keyword research and identify where to spend your time and energy.
#120. Jan-Willem Bobbink (notprovided.eu)
1) SEMrush
2) SearchMetrics
3. Keyword Tool.io
#121. Tyler Tafelsky (Yisoo Training)
For more data-driven keyword research processes, Ahrefs and Google's Keyword Planner are my go-to tools. However, I do think Google Predictive Search can be a valuable and often overlooked keyword research tool, especially considering the value of long-tail keyword targeting.
With the competitive nature of SEO becoming more and more fierce, most websites need to incorporate lesser competitive long-tails into their strategy, as short-tail counterparts may take years to achieve top rankings.
Using Predictive Search can help you pinpoint those perfect phrases that might not be evident from using Keyword Planner or Ahrefs alone.
#122. Jon Dykstra (Fat Stack Blog)
I use two keyword research tools. They are:
Ahrefs: This tool provides loads of data and metrics for discovering new keywords, researching the competition and pointing out keyword gaps on my own sites. It's amazing and is the one KW/SEO software program I use for every website I own.
Keywordshitter.com is my favorite tool for finding long tail KW opportunities as well as looking for KW phrases which can be used to create multiple pieces of content targeting many similar phrases.
For example, I recently discovered using this tool that people search for a topic within one of my niches with a phrase including "... starting with A", "... starting with B" and so on.
That made it easy for me to create 26 pieces of content, each targeting searches for aspects in my niche based on the the first letter. This is just one of many examples of how I use Keywordshitter.
#123. Miles Anthony Smith (Kompelling LLC)
For organic search keyword research, the best bang for your buck is SEMrush, hands down. It allows you to spy on what keywords your competitors are ranking for and with what content. Plus, you can drop in specific keywords, and it will show you lots of related ones. Then you can sift and sort by many fields and export.
It even has a site audit tool that you can use so as not to have to pay for a separate tool. On top of that, you can see what competitor's ads are (display, PPC, or PLA) and piggyback off of their success.
I use Buzzsumo for topical research to see which ones are trending on social media (like infographics, how-to's, listicles, etc.).
And for non-Google keyword research (like Amazon, YouTube, ebay), I use keywordtool.io. I also recommend you stay away from Google Keyword Planner for organic search since it can be misleading; it really should only be used for paid keyword research.
#124. Jack Saville (Bynder)
Moz Keyword Explorer is my first port of call for keyword research. It is great at giving rough keyword volume data and is great for offering keyword suggestions.
For more specific keyword volume data I call upon Google Keyword Planner.
Then for even more accurate keyword volume data I ask our PPC team to bid on a word and use the impressions and impression share metrics to get an accurate monthly search volume figure.
#125. Ryan Scollon (www.ryanscollon.co.uk)
Tool #1 would be Answer The Public. It gives loads of great suggestions, and even covers prepositions, questions and then goes through each letter from A-Z to find any other keyword ideas.
Tool #2 would be Google search. You can't get much better than that. There is the autosuggest when typing in a search term, but you can also find a list at the bottom of the search results called 'Searches related to ..' and it will give you around 8 other suggestions.
Tool #3 would be Adwords keyword planner. It's my least favorite out of the three, but I do like how it groups keywords together. So say you were looking at keyword ideas for wedding rings, it will show different groups such as 'Gold rings' and then show you a bunch of terms related to that group.
#126. Ryan White (Banc)
SEMrush - The Keyword Magic Tool is absolutely amazing. Gives you an amazing selection of specific filters to help you easily find and filter the correct keywords which turns keyword research into a fun task whilst still giving you in-depth data.
Search Console - Absolute beast when trying to find out what keywords are actually being used when users to access your site and can give you a bit of an insight on how to improve performance of individual pages.
Sistrix - This tool lets us know exactly how competitors are ranking for specific keywords. With this we are able to gauge the difficulty and opportunity of each individual keyword
#127. Dave Rigotti (Bizible)
Bizible
SEMrush
Excel
#128. Antony Robinson (Pure Optimisation Ltd)
My three goto tools are SEO Monitor, DeepCrawl and Ahrefs.
SEOmonitor:
I utilise SEO Monitor for three main reasons;
1. SEO Monitor has an incredibly insightful keyword/content research tool providing a prioritised list of opportunities.
2. For new business pitching it provides a great commercial modelling tool for traffic uplift of non-brand organic terms.
3. SEO Monitor's primary function of rank tracking and reporting suite facilitates user free reporting direct to clients.
Deepcrawl:
I find this to be simply the best technical SEO Tool on the market for monitoring crawl-ability, crawl budget and SEO improvement opportunities. Of all the tools the agency uses, this is without doubt our most important.
Ahrefs:
As every SEO knows, monitoring a client's backlink profile is an integral and essential function. The link data AHRefs provides is as robust as any yet is significantly more cost effective.
#129. Mackenzie Peters (Gustin Quon)
Google Keyword Planner + keywordtool.io to get a baseline/set of keywords to work with then SEM Rush for competitive research & so much more.
#131. Natalie Athanasiadis (Ormi Media)
SEMrush: This is a great tool to find out what your competitors are ranking for so that you can be highly strategic and increase your visibility in those areas to increase your market share.
Google Search Console: This is sometimes passed over for other paid platforms but there is a wealth of knowledge in here. Google also Beta testing a brand new Search Console design that allows for year on year comparison of keyword rankings which could provide even further value.
Google Trends: Lastly, Google Trends can give you some incredible insights relating to specific industries. A great platform to incorporate into your content planning.
#132. Freddie Chatt
1) Ahrefs - Their keyword explorer is flawless, accurate and provides a great indication of difficulty. A great source of discovering additional keywords to help structure the content you are creating.
2) Keywords Everywhere - Incredible Chrome plugin for a quick snapshot in all the tools you use regularly as an SEO. Also shows the related keywords and 'people also searched for' queries and volumes directly within the SERPs. All for a super-affordable price.
3) AnswerThePublic - If you want to know all of the questions ever asked around a topic. This is the perfect tool - great for content creation.
#133. Evgeniy Garkaviy (Online Strategist at Hopespring)
1) Google Keyword Planner: This tools is fantastic because it can help me to identify long tail keywords for
my niche. It is official Google’s tool and it has the recent trends and keyword variations. For example
you may think that this keyword is great “buy ipad air in liverpool” but Google may suggest “iPad air sale
Liverpool”. Yes, not often it is accurate but when I’m using it alongside the other tools – I can get clear
idea.
2) SpyFu: I suggest to have paid account on SpyFu. I just need to find my competitors who using Adwords and review them using this tool. It will show me what ads and keywords they are using. Note that my competitor who paid for that particular keyword knows exactly that it is important for his business including recent trends. Also using SEO feature you can input any URL and find our which keywords they are ranking for.
3) Yandex Wordstat. It is very similar to Google Keyword planner. Yandex is Russian search engine but it does not mean that you can use it only for Russian keywords. In Russia many people use this search engine for US searches too. And Wordstat can show me what keywords they were using to find my niche.
4) SEMrush.
I started using SEMrush a long time ago. At the moment it has a lot of resources for both free and paid quality keyword research.
Recently I had a dilemma with one of my projects, it is related to ecards and many people still using word “cards” instead of “ecards” but Google Keyword Planner and some other tools showed almost the same information for both keywords. At the same time I did not want to have many words “cards” and “ecards” on the landing pages. Semrush helped very much. I found correct data and made a nice PPC campaign.
#134. Hayden Miyamoto (nohatdigital.com)
1) Long Tail Pro
LTP differentiates itself from other KWs tools because it provides you with an idea of how difficult a keyword is to rank for - it doesn’t just spit out KW ideas endlessly. There are definitely reasonably good free keyword tools out there, but in my opinion Long Tail Pro (Platinum version) pretty much pays for itself over time.
2) SEMrush
SEMRush is great for scoping out the competition and for finding keywords that other sites in your niche are ranking for. It’s a little more expensive for the average user, but if you’re playing at a high level, it’s indispensable.
3) Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is useful as a way to find a ton of KWs at once - the only issue is that you have no idea whether those KWs are competitive or not. In tandem with LTP though, ubersuggest is great - I can just import a ton of KWs at once and then see if they’re worth targeting or not.
#135. Spencer Hawes (nichepursuits.com)
1) Long Tail Pro
Obviously, I’m the creator of LTP, so there may be a little bit of bias in this - but I stand by LTP 100%. In fact, I use it frequently for my own KW research, and on my Niche Site Project 3.0, I’m encouraging my latest mentee to use it as well.
2) Google Trends
I’ve found google trends to be an interesting way to see if a keyword (and by extension a niche) is growing or shrinking, and whether it’s seasonal or not. I can’t think of any other tool out there that can reliably tell you this information, so that’s really useful. Also, if you’re building a site, especially an authority site, getting onto something that’s trending upwards is a fantastic idea.
3) SEMrush
SEMrush is a very useful tool for both researching competitors when starting a site or for growing an established site. I really like to find weaker niche sites that still seem to be ranking for lots of keywords; SEMrush helps me see what they are ranking for and what I can potentially target. You can also see what keywords you’re on the cusp of ranking for with your established site - another very useful feature.
You can even see things like whether or not your competitor’s are running paid traffic. SEMRush is just so versatile, and it has a lot of functionality that’s really useful if you already have a successful site going.
#136. Adam Chronister (Enleaf)
At Enleaf we use a lot of different tools and tactics for keyword research.
Some of our favorite tools and tactics include using SEMrush utilizing its Keyword Analytics tools. (Related Keywords, Keyword Difficulty, Keyword Magic Tool, etc) in addition to this, we still use Google Keyword Planner and often contrast and compare what we get there with what we pull out of SEMrush.
Then, probably the most accessible tool we use is good old Google. We will often use Google Auto-Suggest and the Search Related To features to help generate seed words in our initial keyword research phase.
#137. Robbie Richards (robbierichards.com)
1) SEMrush - I use the Keyword Magic tool to quickly find hundreds of targeted long tail keywords touching every stage of the funnel.
I also like to use the tool's paid search reports to uncover valuable bottom funnel keywords to incorporate into a client's content strategy.
2) Ahrefs - the Keyword Explorer has come a long way in the last 12 months. I now find myself relying heavily on the link data inside the SERP Overview reports to more accurately qualify keyword opportunities.
3) Google Autosuggest/ Related Search - it's always good to drop in some seed keywords and topics to see exactly what other people are searching.
Use the Keywords Everywhere chrome extension to see search volume and CPC data inside the SERPs and some third applications.
THAT'S A WRAP!
A big thanks to everyone who contributed to the roundup. Please share if you found it useful!
137 Online Marketing Experts Reveal Top Keyword Research Tools
And, just to recap, here are the results one more time...
Best Tools for Keyword Research (As Voted by 137 Search Marketing Experts)
#1: SEMrush (84 votes) ... [Get One Month of SEMrush PRO for free here]
#2: Google Keyword Planner (59 votes)
#3: Ahrefs (51 votes) [Read full review here]
#4: Keyword Tool.io (19 votes)
#5: Search Console (16 votes)
#6: AnswerThePublic (14 votes)
#7: Buzzsumo and Ubersuggest (13 votes)
#8: Google Trends (12 votes)
#9: Moz (11 votes)
#10: KWFinder (10 votes)
If you could only use 3 tools for keyword research, which 3 would you choose?
Let me know in the comments below...
HI Rob,
Great to hear from all these experts sharing their favorite Tools for doing keyword research.
I have a question though,You haven’t included your 3 favorite tools.It would be interesting to hear yours as well.
Yeah, I thought it might look weird if I included myself 🙂 My top 3:
1) SEMrush
2) Google Keyword Tool
3) Google suggest
I Agree Rob.
Hi Robbie
Excellent roundup 🙂 Thanks for including me amongst so many talented experts.
Looks like I’ll be checking out SEMrush and Keyword Tool.io.
Best wishes
Loz
Thanks for contributing, Loz!
Another tool, Webbee Spider, which scrap competitor’s keywords from titles, h1 and anchor texts. A combination of semRUSH, Keyword Planner and this tool can be used for keyword research. See the comment by some Moz contributor. http://moz.com/blog/keyword-research-in-90-minutes#comment-321375
Webbee Spider sounds interesting. Will definitely check it out. To complement SEMrush and Keyword Planner, I used Keywords Heaven and their keyword tools.
That one massive list of tools! May take an hour of just scrolling! Thanks for including me, Robbie!
Never heard of keyword.io before, good stuff!
its a good keyword checker tool.hope you notice it
Such a great list and learned about some interesting keywords research tools too. I will definitely give a try to some of them.
Thank you for including my favorite tools 🙂
IMHO you’ve got the right anwser!
Wow! Google Keyword Planner just coming under SEMrush
It’s really a great free tool isn’t it?
It’s definitely a handy free tool 🙂 I’m a HUGE fan of SEMrush too. A few newbies in there I need to explore…
Big post and a fantastic roundup. I found couple of new tools but my all time favorites are Google Keyword-planner, Ubersuggest and Google Webmaster Search Queries. SEMRush is also good for this job. But I am now thinking of exploring couple of new tools. Thanks for sharing this post and the resources.
No worries Sonia 🙂
The Keyword Planer is my standard Tool for Keyword Research. But the usability ist not the best. SEMrush ist faster, but for the german market not so precise as Sistrix.
In Germany i would say Sistrix and Keyword Planer.
Thanks so much for including me with this great group of bloggers, Robbie!
Great info that I will recommend to my readers and clients.
Sue
Awesome, thanks Sue!
Nice roundup Rob,
Nick Eubanks surely knows his stuff
If I’m forced to add another tool besides the ones he mention, I’ll just add Scrapebox and voila!
Keyword research magic 😀
Scrapebox would be a solid addition for sure. Thanks for stopping by Brandon 😉
Thanks Robbie 🙂
Matt from Keyword Eye here – happy to get a mention towards the end of this post. I’d love to get some feedback on our tools from yourself and your readers. Some of our tools are powered by Grepwords / SEMRush – we’ve also got Google, YouTube & Amazon autocomplete tools too.
We do need to get our name out there a little more – would really like to get more mentions on keyword tool lists like this in the future.
SECockpit is something i never heard before. Since Brain dean suggesting this i’m going to give it a try. Thanks for such kind of posts.
Great post Robbie!
Can’t wait to check out some of these tools.
Like you and many on this list, I’m a big fan of SEMrush. I’m far from being a power user so I’m really looking forward to reading your new eBook “The Ultimate SEMrush Playbook”.
And after reading all those expert testimonials on SEMrush, may I suggest adding another CTA for the book at the end of the post. I think it would have a killer conversion rate.
Thanks for the recommendation, Stephen! Just added a form to the bottom. We’ll see how it goes 😉
Very good article about keyword research tools!
Many Thanks 😉
This is really a helpful page. It is first time I come to know so many tools I was not aware of. I using Google keyword planner but now I will try some other I found here. Thanks
Awesome, thanks Harry! Which tools are you going to give a try?
Hello! thanks for the information on the SEO tools used by experts.
I have a question relating the Google Keyword Planner: it contains information on the keywords used on Adwords right? how is this helpfull for getting information on SEO keywords? For that I would use Google Trends… what am I getting wrong?
I mean: keywords for Adwords is different from keywords for SEO… right?
Hey Felix,
The Google Keyword Tool is SUPER helpful for building a foundation for your keyword research strategy. At the end of the day, these search numbers are coming straight from the horses mouth. You can filter down to a hyper-local level and see which keywords are getting the largest search volume. Plus, with it’s integration with PPC you can get a quick idea about commercial intent by looking at the bid and competition metrics. How much are people bidding on KWs, higher = more likely to generate a return. Usually its aligned with search intent. That said, the trending data is a little less reliable. I would still use Trends to analyze the popularity/ seasonality of KW search volume.
To answer your final question, yes but not really. You can definitely use AdWord keyword planner tool to get solid organic search volume estimates. However, don’t just stop there. Leverage other tools to find longer tail variations you can map against various stages of the buyer journey. I like to use SEMrush, Keyword Tool.io and Google autosuggest.
I hope that helps!
Robbie, thank you very much for the reply. Right now I am quite frustrated because I get very different results in Keyword Planner and in Google Trends. SEMrush is not available for Austria yet but I will check keyword tool.io or other services offered as sistrix.de or xovi.de
Thanks!
Hey Felix,
Definitely recommend leveraging both tools. Pay more attention to Trends for seasonality etc..
Great Top 10 keyword research tools list. Thank you for posting Robbie! I really appreciated the feedback from the experts. There are a definitely a few tools here worthy of taking note of. I have also been using DYNO Mapper (http://www.dynomapper.com) as a keyword research tool. DYNO Mapper is a visual sitemap generator that delivers keywords on all pages of any site. The user simply inputs any existing URL into the system and it will scan thousands of pages.
Thanks Josh, I’ll have to check it out.
Really an Awesome List to go through. Thanks for sharing the nice article.
Really awesome list of tools to explore! Thanks Robbie 😀
Keywords research is one of the most important factor topics for every webmasters. Thanks for sharing such a great source of information. I know this blog is going to help many bloggers and webmasters.
Hello Robbie,
Keyword research is very important part of online marketing. Generally I used Google Adwords, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest for keyword research. I have heard some new keyword reseach tools from expert which i will try to use such as a Grepwords, Linkdex, SerpWoo, Longtailpro. Thanks to all expert and Specially thanks to Robbie
Thanks Anant!
It’s always great to read the views of experts. The positive aspect I found on this article is KWFinder, a great tool to find long tail keywords with SEO/PPC competitiveness.
Dropping Long Tail Pro for some time now.
Great Share!
Great article, Rob.
I like how there are 58 different preferences from people working in the field.
Although it’s a pain the you are asked to sign into Adwords in order to use Google’s keyword planner. I am just starting my website however and don’t have a lot of contents yet so I think it’s better to add more contents before using PPC.
As of now I will check other keyword tools.
Thanks!
Hey Anh,
Depending on your niche, it may not make sense to use Google PPC to start. Instead, set up your facebook custom audiences.
After using keyword research tool, if we had to use a keyword in a certain time, and then after doing research again, there is a change in the keyword word combinations, do we need to rename the url of the page that already exists?
Hey Souvik,
Before you go changing the URL structure, focus on optimizing the other on-page elements such as Title tag, alt tag, body copy, internal links etc..for the new target keyword. The URL shouldn’t be a make or break.
thanks Buddy ,,,such a great post i found on your site.its my first time on your site but i bookmarked you.same as your experts i also like
1. SEMRush
2. Google Keywords Tool
Thanks Jagmohan! What’s your favorite feature of SEMrush?
I personally use Rankscanner.com – even though it’s for tracking keywords, it’s also quite good for developing new ideas for keywords to rank for on Google as it suggest new keywords when you add keywords yourself.
Sweet, I’ll have to take a look. Cheers Micky!
The Keyword Planner is the last resort for looking at long-tail keywords for SEO. _my personal opinion
Hey Didik, I agree. GKP is not a great tool for unearthing long tail variations. I like to go old school and use Google’s autosuggest and related search features. I’ll also look at SEMrush related searches, ubersuggest and possibly Scrapebox.
Robbie,
I came across such a good tools to try them out. Surpised to see, no one suggested a windows software called “Keywordxtreme”. Quite a old tool but it does extracts the data from the related keywords in tier level.
One base keyword we can get huge keywords.
Thanks Again.
Happy Holidays, Robbie.
I’ll check it out Suresh! Thanks for the heads up 🙂
You’re welcome, Robbie.
The same thing we can see in the “Scrapebox keyword scraper” too.
How about KeywordXP? I’ve just downloaded its trial version.. Looks good to me.
I haven’t tried that one. I’ll have to check it out 🙂
Any thoughts on the HubSpot keyword tool? That is what I’m using now, but I always like to be aware of what’s available.
Hey Liz, TBH I haven’t used the Hubspot KW tool much.
Hi Robbie,
First of all thank you for sharing all these experts favorite keyword research tool with us. It is very helpful for me and also for the newbie bloggers to know that which keyword research tool is use pro bloggers.
Personally, I like Long Tail Pro, Semrush and Google Keyword Planner.
Thanks for the feedback, Rupesh!
I think Long tail pro is the best for competitor analysis.
I will try all the link above. Thanks for share
Loving this post, The way I am going to rank up this music site desiblock.com. The two which I liked and the ones that I am going to use are.
Semrush
Moz (They have a toolbar which is free)
Hoping to see what else worked for people.
Hey Ramo, let me know if you have any questions about Semrush. I use the tool every day 🙂
Mozbar is definitely a handy little tool.
This list is such amazing! Most of them are really useful. Thank you!
Keep with the good work, Robbie.
What is your favorite tool, Netgott?
Thanks for Best information…………
Great article, my favorite SEO “spy tool” is OpenSiteExplorer, but I always check other tools like Market Samurai and SEMrush and than I have a broad idea about the SEO competition. Again, great article. There are tools that I never heard about and I’m looking to check it out. Thanks
Cheers David!
I wonder which of the tool(s) people consider to be the best at predicting keyword difficulty?
I have tried quite a few but have not come across to one that seems to both give accurate prediction and at the same time scalable.
Great point, Tony! I think this would be a good topic for an upcoming blog post 🙂
Tools help, but I lean heavily on manual review (not real scalable, I know). But, once I have found a decent opportunity using a tool like SEMrush, I’ll run the query through Google and analyze the first page results by MOzbar domain authority. Not the most accurate metric, but a solid directional cue.
Man, glad I came across this. I’ve been looking to compare different tools, and thought I had a good grasp on everything that was out there.
1 year after this blog post, I didn’t know much about keywordtool.io or SERPwoo.
Me personally, I like long tail pro, SEMrush, and one of my favorites but never talked about is answerthepublic. It’s like ubersuggest but imo better.
Sweet, thanks Nathan! I’ll have to check out Answerthepublic 🙂
FYI – another monster SEO roundup going live next week. Keep an eye out!
Thanks For Sharing… Good info
You forgot RankBrain.me gives thousands of Google suggestions with SEO attributes for free.
This is an awesome list…Thanks!
It’s a shame that Keywordtool.io needs a premium membership to access certain data though. I think RankBrain.me actually offers all of the same information but for free.
Long tail pro is a great tool, however a bit slow”ish” in my opinion…
Thanks for the share!
Nice suggestions from expert. But for me “Google Keyword Planner” and “Uber Suggest” ROCKS!
They definitely have a place 🙂
Yeah Semrush & google kw planer is best. & Always use this tools.
Now i am using ahref. But i want to know about other things.Through this i found them.Thank you for sharing this article with us. I hope you update us like to this
Anuja, I’m using Ahrefs now more and more as well. They’ve made some great improvements to the tool, especially from a keyword research standpoint.
I always use longtailpro for keyword analysis, combined with the GKT itself. SEM rush is also good, I used it 2 years ago but have to unsubscribe since I use longtailpro.
I use LTP too. But, to be honest, if I had to choose between it and SEMRush, I’d go with the latter.
Good suggestion but can you tell me the free version of any keyword tool to find long tail keyword.
thank you!
Prateek,
Check out Ubersuggest. I really like that tool. Favorite good long tail options, download as text and re-upload into Google Keyword Explorer. Look for new keyword ideas with the ad group themes.
Great coverage!
But few points missing!
(I’ll be talking about actual SEO tools for actual work, so copywriters can go for smoke and don’t comment)
Now, since you can’t use Moz KWE tool (yet) for it’s poor accuracy, your choice is a tool that a) updates regularly, and b) user-friendly.
That’s why Serpstat + Semrush + Google Planner is my top choice.
Thanks for the input, George!
This is good study. But there are more tools for 2016 .Google Keyword planner, Ahref works for me.
This post is really useful for beginners like me. Thank you
I tried this tool rankbrain.me, long tail keyword tool. They have everything in 1 place and it’s cheap. You can search long tail suggested keywords for free. It also supports more languages.
Thanks for the input Andrew!
That was a great article.I learn lot of new things about keyword research tools.Thanks for sharing.
Great post, thanx a lot!
SEMRush – for spying ccompetitors
Ahrefs – for managing backlinks
Screaming Frog – for audit
Similarweb – for traffic figures
Serpstat – for URL analysis
Cheers George! Appreciate the insights.
Surprised to see Moz tools not enlisted, but you have an amazing set of tools still. Keyword IO and SERPstat are handy. Can’t say much about Keyword Eye – haven’t used it yet.
Really an Awesome List to go through. Thanks for sharing awesome article.
Thanks Virender!
Hey Robbie,
Great list. Do you also do reviews on separate SEO tools and platforms? I like your blog and though we could reach some agreement. Email me, thanks)
Hey Michael,
I do review select tools. But, only the ones I personally use to run my sites.
Looks like SEMrush wins it big time. I personally love the tool myself. Won’t call it crystal accurate as I do see some discrepancies in the rankings as well as some traffic figures. For advertiser research it works like a charm.
Farhan, I’m with you. It’s my #1 tool when it comes to competitor PPC analysis.
Wow it’s just a awesome article. I really love it man. Thanks for such a valuable post.
My pleasure Rohan!
I don’t this any point remains in this amazing guide of long tail keywords tools. Thanks for sharing. I’ve to bookmark to check it again and again
Very informative and Best article as always.Robbie you are genius.
Thanks
Hi really interesting your info, hope i can implement with success greetings from Mexico.
Very good list.
I use:
Google Keyword Planner
google Trends
Ubersuggest
simply economy, and because I’m freelance.
thanks for sharing.
regards
Andres from Chile
Most of these are still very useful today. Awesome post!
Following all Tools are Great But i use Google Keyword Planner.
Thanks for sharing this information
Just Google Keyword Planner?
Would you recommend hiring a pro to do the link exchanges, or would you do
it personally?
Added a post on my Facebook, hope you dont mind!
I don’t usually do link exchanges.
Thanks for this article Robbie. As someone who has only been doing SEO for a short time, I really learned a lot from this and will be coming back again and again to this post for reference. Great stuff man
Cheers Matt! I’m planning to ramp up the content production more in the near future with a closer focus on SEO.
Wow so much great stuff, going to start getting familiar with semrush today!
Awesome, let me know what you think VT.
Thanks for sharing this informative articles.
Hi there Robbie,
This is what I call an expert roundup, you have added here everything about kw research that we do not have to look another article again.
Cheers,
Clay Smith
Glad it was helpful Clay!
SEOCockpit , KWFINDER, LONGTAIL PRO and SEMRUSH are the best tool for keyword research and find profitable long tail keywords in any niche
Hi, I’d like to point out a new tool called supersuggest.com (disclaimer: I made it).
It features 200+ Million keywords. Give it a try.
@Robbie: Interested in writing a review?
Cheers
Really great article, well written and well explained. Very much helpful for newbies like me.
Many many thanks for sharing.
hi
great article
i want seo tool online that can give accurate results to find what my competitor rank for ?
no proplem if it is paid or free
SEMrush or Ahrefs 🙂 ^
Nice collections of tools with detailed information.
keyword tool io is the best for me , kwfinder is other good solution.
Excellent list. I read many post for the keyword research tool. but you are sharing many tools for the keyword research. good sharing.
Good article! Which tools do you use on daily basis for optimization?
I use SEMrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog most often.
Hi there Robbie,
I’m just updating my old post about seo techniques and I’ll be sure to give you a credit for a method that I’m going to add there. This post is just so awesome that I couldn’t go without commenting.
Regards,
Clay Smith.
Cheers Clay! Let me know when it goes live and I’ll check it out.
I am using Kwfinder for planning the low competition keywords. I want to add another layer for finding keywords. Please tell me about LongtailPRO & Jaaxy which one should I go for
I’ve heard good things about KWFinder. Haven’t used it much myself. As for Jaaxy, never used it. However, I do Longtail PRO https://www.robbierichards.com/review/long-tail-pro/ 🙂
Thanks Robbie
I will also read your review about Long Tail Pro.
Let me know if you have any questions 🙂
Awesome article! Won’t the latest Rankbrain update in Google Search throw off these exact keyword matching tools a bit? Just a thought…
Interesting thought. How do you think this will affect the tools?
i am using web master keyword tool but this is amazing
keyword planner is a best tool ever
Good, but not the best ever 🙂 Agree to disagree.
Hi Robbie
I havent seen anyone mentioning “keywords shitter” 😀 ….. yeah I know it sounds funny but it is a very helpful tool and it’s free 🙂
Cheers Henry! Checked out the tool. Definitely a little gem 🙂
The Google Keyword Planner one of the best tools for keyword research and it’s integrated with many more features. that is Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website.
Agreed 🙂
That one massive list of tools. Thanks for sharing, Robbie
I prefer google keyword planner
Superb post and awesome research. i appreciate your work. Thanks by the way
Began using Semrush just recently. It is so useful. Thanks for the list. Will help me a lot!
Awesome! Great tool. I use it every day.
Thanks for sharing helpful tools. I really liked all the tools and are really helpful.
Thanks for this useful article on keyword research tools. I use “Market Samurai” free version.
Once again thanks for this article.
A nice collection of keyword research tools there. One you must check out is the new ahrefs keyword explorer. It’s my goto tool at the moment and along with semrush, you can find some juicy winnable keywords to use on your projects.
Thanks for the post Robbie
Cheers Peter! Yeah – I use both tools in tandem every day for keyword research.
I always use and recommend Ahrefs and semrush for my keyword research, well long tail pro is also a best alternative.If you can’t buy semrush or pro research tools, you could do the basicresearch with google keyword planner.Well Thanks for the article.
Cheers Manish! Good old Google suggest works ok too 🙂 Ubersuggest, Keyword tool.io are ok too.
Thanks Robbie for Sharing Very Useful Article. I think Google Keyword Planner and Semrush is one of the best Keyword Research Tool and I always used. It gives me a great result. Thanks again. I already talk about in my blog about popular Keyword Research Tools.
Thanks for great information. I have Arabic affiliate website and these information will help.
Ahrefs has been my favorite for a long time. Surprised it didn’t make the top 10. The only thing I’m not confident in is their keyword difficulty ratings. I’ve seen a number that just don’t make any sense have a 0 ranking meanwhile other tools like SEMrush and KW Finder say difficulty is 25 for example. Otherwise the tool is great.
Hey Alex – I agree Ahrefs has come a loooong way in the last couple years. I use the tool (with SEMRush) pretty much every day now.
Thank you so much for sharing this wonderfull article.Now i can figure out wich is best keyword research tools. All this experts tips are very helpfull for me. Once again thank you so much robbie.
Hey Robbie,
First thing first – great post. I had a doubt about kwfinder.com as very few people know about it. so, i am glad that it is in top 10.
I am using google keyword tool and kwfinder.com. I like and prefer kwfinder as their UI is easy. I have also used ahrefs.
Issue is KD in both tools vary a LOT. So i am now confused about which one to use or follow. any suggestion ?
Hey Alex – this is a good question. No tool is going to be spot on. My advice is to not look too much into the accuracy of the metrics, but look at it more as a relative measure. I’m finding Ahrefs to be a good barometer for keyword competitiveness, but I’ve also heard great things about KW Finder lately. I think it’ll more come to personal preference. Both are solid options.
Good point in regards to looking at all the tools as a relative measure. From my experience, Ahrefs has been a great tool to use. Thanks for sharing!
Wow… that is a long list of professional people giving their suggestion on one blog post 😀
Pretty neat idea and very well researched to make it easier for us amateur bloggers 😀
Thank you so much for this effort and making it available for us to learn from it !!!
You’re welcome, Arun! Glad you found the article interesting 🙂
Thank you so much for this inspirational post.
Can you please suggest me a free keyword research tool that has powerful features?
Yasar,
Hey Yasar,
Google Autosuggest, Ubersuggest and KeywordTool.io are good ones to check out.
I use market samurai, its great and I also tested LTP and Semrush
Haven’t done with MS. But – I use SEMrush and LT 🙂
I use market samurai and thanks for sharing this excellent article.
Google Keyword Planner is really helpful to start SEO project sir. Thanks for this review.
I use Google Keyword Planner, SERPStat and Longtail pro for SEO purpose.
Google Keyword Planner is still the best keyword finder tool.
Hey Shaikh! Have to respectfully disagree about Google Keyword Planner 🙂 Solid, but not the best for organic KW research.
Hi,
For free keyword research tool with no premium offer. I prefer using KEYWORD EVERYWHERE browsers extension. It’s support Chrome, Firefox and Mozilla browser.
You just have to check it out.
In addition, Spyful is also a good research too just like keyword finder (kwfinder).
Hi Robbie,
First of all, I would like to thank you for providing me such a great valuable information about keyword analysis tool.
The best part, it’s directly comes from experts and i am getting whole information from this one place.
Thank you for sharing…
Thanks Rajat!
My number 1 choice is Google keyword planner, it’s free and I like the features. I’ve also used SEMrush but you need the paid account to have its full features.
AHREFS and SEMRUSH are my favorite keyword research tool to manage my PPC campaigns. I also prefer uber suggest as it gives me a considerable amount of LSI keywords idea which sometimes proves profitable for my business.
Agreed, Ajay! I use both tools pretty much every day 🙂
Nice thing that you added what other experts prefer and I’ve seen that my top 2 are mostly used by them. I have been using SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner.
Thanks Anna! Yes – always better to get a sample and see which tools rise to the top 🙂
Great article, my favorite SEO “spy tool” is OpenSiteExplorer, but I always check other tools like Market Samurai and SEMrush and than I have a broad idea about the SEO competition. Again, great article. There are tools that I never heard about and I’m looking to check it out. Thanks
Cheers Dave!
I have used semrush, majestic, keywords reveler, ahrefs and some other tools as well. But no doubt ahref is the best.
Actually, I am using KWfinder to search for low competition keywords but it gives only 2 trials per day, could you suggest me other free trial tools.
Thank you.
Hey Adam,
Checkout out:
SEMrush
Ahrefs
Keywordtoolio.io
AnswerThePublic
All offer some form of free variation.
Very interesting list and all these tools are very powerful beginners. Am so happy read this list learn about other authority bloggers and their supportive tools. Thanks a lot for creating very powerful guide.
hi
great article
i want seo tool online that can give accurate results to find what my competitor rank for ?
no proplem if it is paid or free
Ahmed, my 2 favorites are SEMrush and Ahrefs. Either is great.
Thanks Robbie for recommendation
but , which one are better for non-USA data ? because i target Middle East so i need data for this area not USA or Europe
Thanks, Dude, for the comprehensive list of best Keyword Research tools.
I use GKP, Moz Keyword Research & SEMRush keyword tool and I think these are something that are enough for me to find long-tail, high-volume and less competitive keywords in minutes.
Thanks again.
Yasar
Thanks Yasar! SEMrush and Ahrefs for me 🙂
Working in the Netherlands i use:
Semrush: an all in tool with lots of european databases
Screaming Frog: for a quick check on everything
Seo Power Suite: dutch language version (thanks)
and coffe, lots of coffee
Haha thanks Bob!
This round-up of SEO tools is pure gold! Thank you Robbie!
hi to all,
my favorites tools
SEMrush
Ahrefs
Moz
Woorank
Excellent Article from Robbie ! Really appreciate work,
And, Almost all the blogging Experts recommended by one of my favourite Tool Semrush. It is perfect for all kinds of Keyword and Traffic analysis
Thanks again! I follow your site and learnt a lot here.
Thanks mate! Appreciate it.
A great roundup you have done Robbie. I have checked some of the leader websites did not open or some of already moved the domain. you can update it or recheck.
I have done the list that will help you to quickly update them.
1>
#4: Ana Hoffman (Traffic Generation Cafe)
2>
#19. Nick Eubanks (seonick.net)
1. Term Explorer
3>
#51. Joshua Hardwick (The SEO Project)
2) Term Explorer
4>
#78. Chris Dyson (Triple SEO)
5>
#84. Paulo Barroso (Digital Altitude)
My Suggested 3 tools are:
1> KWFinder
2> SEMRush
3> Ubbersuggest
Additionally:
Google Keyword Planner
Google trends
Google search related
Google Suggest
Google webmaster tools
Thanks mate! Appreciate the heads up on the broken links.
Thank You for the long list of tools. Great insights on the tools as discussed above. Gonna be of great help while working on my private blog. Thank You for the lovely written article as it has helped me a lot on the insights discussed as above.
Thanks Liam!
The fact that “Google Keyword Planner” hit the #2 spot makes me question the expertise of this list. GKP sucks for keyword research, especially after the updates.
Bill,
Agree with that GKP is not great for keyword research. At the bottom of my list. I think a lot of people are still using, especially if they are running paid ad campaigns as they can get access to volume data.
Sometimes the ad group ideas tab can give some helpful groupings. But, for the most part is extremely limited and biased.
Always a pleasure being part of your round-up! Grazie mille ?
Thanks for contributing, Gabriella!
Hello from Ukraine 🙂
My favorite tools is:
Ahrefs
Key Collector
SerpStat
True @Dmitry as well here most of the keyword tools have used are:
Ahrefs
Key Collector and
SerpStat
Great article, I personally try to use variations of different back link checkers in order to get more accurate picture, it seems they all pick them up differently as the number always varies. SEM Rush is still my favourite though, cant beat the level of detail that tool provides. I’m only a beginner but I’m starting to learn so much!
Great article and thanks for your sharing. But the main problem is that I am a beginner and most of the tool are paid. As a beginner, it is difficult to manage this types of tool.
Check out Ubersuggest. Neil Patel has opened up the data there a lot more now.
For me it has always been Semrush, but lately I am getting addicted to Kw finder as well.
Thanks for the article as It confirms that I am using the correct tools.
Ahrefs and kwfinder work best for me.Btw thanx really helpful article 🙂
Hi there,
Our favourite tools are –
1: Ahrefs
2: Moz
3: Spyfu
I recently decided to go with ahrefs after using spyfu for a couple years and trialing secockpit. I was a moz client for awhile too about a year ago. I found spyfu data to be sketchy (or just plain wrong) fairly often, and moz, I don’t know, just didn’t seem like they were really into supporting what I wanted to know. secockpit was achingly slow for a trickle of data. ahrefs isn’t nearly so graph-y as spyfu, but they are so blazing fast and the data is so deep. I enjoy it a great deal, even if it is spendy.
The site mentioned by Ian Cleary “Inbound Writer” is gone. Someone has put a blog on that. So, kindly remove or replace the link if you find something good of similar kind.
Thanks for the heads up, Amy!
Hello Robbie, You Nailed it.
After reading this whole post, I got to know about semrush and when I start using this tool, Obviously free trial. I think this the best SEO Tool.
Thank you! For this Valuable post.
Thanks a lot. This is a great list of keyword research tools. I found Google Keyword Planner the best to find niche keywords and KWFinder for getting some good LSI keywords for long tail keywords searches.
Interesting! I personally can’t stand Keyword Planner anymore. I never use it for organic KW research anymore.
I think Ahrefs is best for seo keywords tool. other tools are also best but are too much costly. I am also using free keywords tool like keyword.io, neil petail and google keyword planner.
Thanks a lot for your information.Personally I like to use Ahrefs and Moz.
Good sharing, among all backlink checkers I like ahrefs the most. I think it’s the best and the most powerful among it’s competitors 🙂
Thanks for sharing the information.I like the semrush for keyword research most for finding organic keywords. I like its ranking difficulty function.KWfinder is my next favorite tool.
Great article, i usually like to use Ahrefs and Moz to do this sort of thing 🙂
I personally use Ubersuggest and Google’s keyword planner for my research. Keywordtool is also good one but I’ve seen glitching fluctuations in the results. Anyways, great post!
Thanks Rajan!
Thank you for these information, I think ahrefs is the best.
Keep up the good work.
Informative article, i currently use ‘ahrefs’ and it is one of the best tool. Thanks for sharing this.
Thanks Hanna!
I’m I fun of Joshua Hardwick, read all his articles! It was interesting to know about his fav tools.
Thank you for your great work, this is a really huge and helpful experts poll.
Great list. Like others have mentioned here, we use:
– ahrefs (amazing tool!)
– google keyword planner
– uber suggest
– majestic
I have to say that Ahrefs pretty much changed the way I’m doing business. Also saw Tim Soulo speak on CMSEO, cool guy.
Also, Google Search Console is a valuable source of keywords that you already rank for or can rank better for with improved SEO tactics.
Extensive round-up provided, thanks for that.
Cheers Zino!
Hello Robbie,
Keyword research is the most important part of digital marketing. Nice discussion, but how can I keywords research without registration using free online keyword research tools to get the effective results? Thanks to all expert for attending this session.
Thanks, Robbie Richards.
Hey Kevin! If you’re looking for a decent free alternative, check out Ubersuggest and/or AnswerThePublic.
Thumbs up for the share! I only use Ahref keyword explorer as i am friendly with that tool. Will try out these tools, still I guess I am gonna stick with Ahrefs.
Thanks Helen!
Hey Robbie, Really amazing and helpful information about Best keyword research. Thanks for sharing this content with us. i follow your all information and apply in my website. My Fev Tools
#1. KWFinder
#2. SEMRush
#3. Ahrefs
Thanks for sharing, Saayed!
Hi Robbie, thank you for putting together such a great list. Very useful for figuring out what everyone out there is using and finding useful.
I mostly use
#1. Ahrefs
#2. Ubersuggest
#3. AntRanks
Thanks Flujo!
Hi Robbie
Awesome Post and Amazing Keyword Research Tools List.
Really appreciate the way you have written and explained.
I Preferred:
1. Google Keyword Planner Tool
2. Ubersuggest
3. Google Keyword Suggestion Box
Thanks for sharing it with us. Worth reading it.
Good work..!!
Thanks for weighing in on the topic, Lisa!
Little disappointed that KWfinder only received 8 votes, definitely my go to tool
Thanks Dennis. It definitely seems to be gaining popularity. Maybe in the next revision it’ll jump up more 🙂
Thanks for sharing this informative article with us.
Thanks Sehaj!
Thanks for sharing, its very helpful
Thanks Abdur!
Hey Robbie,
I am very lazy boy to research keywords. And I was still searching for best keyword finder on the internet.
I used google planner, Ahrefs and many more but I found every tools are giving different data.
I listened more about KWfinder. I planned to use this in next month.
Thanks,
Thanks Vikas! Each tool is essentially running off a different index/ data, so the results will be different. All the top ranked tools will serve you well. Just a matter of preference. I personally use SEMrush and Ahrefs.
Thanks a lot Robbie for sharing this blog with us. SEO majorly depends on these two major factors- Keywords and Backlinks. For thorough keyword research and competitor analysis, use of accurate and easy-to-use keywords research tools and essential in order to grow your business or generate traffic to your website.
Thanks Shruti!
Hello!
Thank you for the article. Robbie, which tool is better for you at this moment? Ahrefs or Semrush?
Ahrefs seems to have a lot more keywords data. Don’t you think so?
I use both tools for different use cases. Are you doing link building?
Thanks for the answer!
No, I do not work with link building. I need a tool for working with keywords data.
Do you think I should get a subscription to Semrush or Ahrefs?
If you’re doing KW analysis for SEO and PPC, I’d prob go with SEMrush. If just SEO, and maybe the need for link building, probably Ahrefs.
Nice thing that you added what other experts prefer and I’ve seen that my top 2 are mostly used by them. I have been using SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner.
What a great article Robbie – must have taken ages to write!
I personally use Ahrefs BUT I must admit that Ubersuggest, which you have in your article, is an amazing tool to use if you are starting out.
The are thousands of free SEO tools available to us online, however, most of them are total rubbish or are so restrictive that you have to upgrade to the paid version in order to get any benefit from it at all.
Well done to Neil Patel and his Ubersuggest and thanks for this informative article.
Hi Caelan! Thanks for weighing in. Agreed – Ubersuggest is a handy free resource.
whoah, this blog is excellent I really like reading your posts.
Thanks Amit!
Thanks Robbie for sharing the keyword research tools.
I have started to use the ubersuggest for keyword research, as google keyword planner work for them, they are managing the ppc campaign on google adword.
Cheers Jenny!
Thanks for you article. In Poland we can use only ahrefs. Semrush have low database.
Thanks for the insight, Tom!
It is an Extremely very very good article and it will help people who want to make their career in Digital Marketing. But you know that Semrush and Ahref tools are very Expensive.
Anyway, I like your writing Skill. Good Job!
Thanks Robbie. Sharing useful detail keyword research tools. Great resource that will be bookmarked and referenced I am sure of that.
Thanks Rishi!
thanks, Buddy,,,such a great post I found on your site.its my first time on your site but i bookmarked you.same as your experts i also like
1. SEMRush
2. Ahrefs
Ubersuggest is also a good tool. I have been using this for a long time. Thanks for this awesome list.
Thanks Mohammad!
Thanks for This useful article. I use only ahrefs and keyword planner
Your blog is excellent I really like your post man
Thanks Karan!
Hello, Alexey!
I download your free ebook Semrush Playbook guide.
But I see that the ebook was written in 2017. Please, tell me. Information in book actual for 2019?
Or an ebook is old and don’t relevant for 2019?
And sorry sir for my bad English. I’m still learning.
Hi Alexey! It is a bit outdated now, but I’m currently working on a new updated versions that should be live soon. The tactics outlined in the ebook should still be actionable for the most part.
Thanks for the list. is there a tool you recommend for seeing how many words of content the top 10 competitors are using?
Webpage word counter 🙂
Thanks for the great post. I used ahref before, but now I think I have more reference to use.
I’m actually using this whole list. But best of all google keyword planner
Nice article, i am a big fan of your blog and articles.
If my website is 4-5 page of google, than how i can rank my website in google first page without getting clicking, because most users click for the first page 1-5 results.
Check out this post for some ideas 🙂 https://www.robbierichards.com/seo/first-page-of-google/
Good article! Semrush, Ahref, Moz and good old search console are my top favorite tools.
Thanks for weighing in, Sachin!
Took me about 3 hours to read and check them out. Super guide.
Thanks Daniel!
Checked your detailed, it’s super helpful. Good Job Buddy
Thanks Rohit!
Great List and glad to discover the tools used by SEO professionals.
Unfortunately the list contains very few FREE tools and most of them are paid.
Would love to see a dedicated article on the FREE SEO tools.
Good feedback. Thanks Sam!
Nice post! I have been using also Ahrefs that the best one to me. its better than Moz and semrush.
Thank you for doing all the research and sharing it with us Robbie!
Thanks for sharing, Sagar!
Good article! Semrush, Ahref, Alexa and good old search console are my top favorite tools.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing, Helena!
Thanks for sharing articles
My favorite:
Ahrefs is incredible keyword research tool. I preferred and using it everyday.
And, I also like
SEMrush: this is a great tool. You can get all the info related to organic search…
Thanks for sharing, Tim!
Hi Robbie!
Thank you for this massive piece of content. Weird I`ve never seen this article before.
Personally I prefer Serpstat and SEMrush. Our agency has switched to both of them from MOZ Pro.
Moz Pro was an amazing tool but get outdated and at the moment seems useless if you compare against their competitors.
It would be nice to see comparison of the best rank trackers.
Hey Matthew! Thanks for weighing in. I don’t have a direct comparison, but SEMrush was voted the top rank tracker too: https://www.robbierichards.com/seo/best-rank-tracker/
I don’t think anyone can beat semrush. It is my all-time favorite.
Great article:
My choice is ahrefs when you do research international but we have also in Polan Senuto.com . In my opinion best tools for keyword research in Poland
My favorites are SERanking, SEM Rush, SerpStats, and Moz. I bounce between those for different clients.
Thanks for weighing in, Judd!
I think SEMrush is hands down the best. However, I am a little surprised nobody mentioned Keywordseverywhere in this really comprehensive post.
Keywords Everywhere is definitely a handy little tool 🙂
Keywords Everywhere is definitely a handy little tool 🙂
100% Great little tool 🙂
What is your opinion on the group buy SEO tools because my budget is low? DO you think it is worth to buy group buy SEO tools?
What do you mean by group buy tools?
One of the most interesting posts I’ve seen in a wee while. I’ll need to keep coming back because there is a lot I want to be nosey at. Thanks for posting, nice work.
Cheers Gregory!
Hey Robbie!
That’s a well-detailed post. I have been using Ahref for few months and it turns out to be a nice one but now I want to explore SEMrush and others after reading this.
Thanks Gautam! Both are solid tools. It really comes down to preference. Each tool has its strengths.
Hey Robie,
Thanks for writing this detailed post and views from industry leaders. I have been using SEMrush and SEO Screaming Frog Spider but haven’t explored such feature of Screaming Frog. I will surely give it a try if that works from me1
Thanks
Alina
Hi Robbie, I see most of you are in the top 3 (ahrefs, semrush and google trends)
maybe we could add
similarweb to find related sites to send them an email to get a guest post 🙂
Took me some time to read the full post 🙂 Thank you for your efforts!
I like KWFinder, even though it has only 10 votes. Google Kwd Planner is my first choice, though.
Thanks for weighing in, Stephen!
Hi Robbie!
I have been using ahrefs tool from the last 3 4 months and it seems good. but I have a doubt between Moz and Semrush and ahrefs. I am confused between these three. can you suggest which one should I use for better results?
Are you doing both SEO and PPC?
I prefere Ahref or Moz is very good compare to other keyword tools. Ahref and moz also gives multiple tools like back link search, domain internal links and top keyword ranking on website.
Thanks for weighing in, Syed!
I am using google keyword tool and kwfinder.com. I like and prefer kwfinder as their UI is easy. I have also used ahrefs.
I would like to suggest two tools …one is paid and the other one is free.
1) Ahrefs
2) Keywordseverywhere
Thanks for weighing in, Varun!
Great port, I’m using ahref since 2017 which relly satisfied with it. Lately I tried SEMrush which really got me interested to consider it my first option.
keywordtool.io also good tool for keywords.
Thanks
Keywords everywhere used to be my favorite until recently when the developer decided to take it from a free to a pay-as-you-go model. However, SEMRUSH still with its free plan is just sufficient for me right now.
My favorites are SERanking, SEM Rush, SerpStats, and Moz. I bounce between those for different clients.
I’ve been using Ahrefs primarily now for the last one and half year and I’m pretty much satisfied. Apart from that I prefer Google Search Console. Very reliable. You’d know what users are actually searching with.
Agreed with Ilan Shabad.. I feel personally Google keyword, Ahref and semrush are best order should be 1st ahref, 2nd semrush and google keyword. (Uber suggest also works better).
google keyword planner, ahref, semrush,Ubersuggest, MOZ are the best tools for SEO
For me, it has always been Ahrefs and Semrush, but lately, I am getting addicted to Kw finder as well.
Thanks for the article as It confirms that I am using the correct tools.
KWFinder is a solid keyword research tool! Thanks for weighing in, Emily.
All time favourite is to use Ahrefs ( Keep the KD column intact) & Use Vlookpup function to get the somewhat accurate volume from Keyword Planner for respective countries
Nice Article on Keyword Tools
My Top 3 would be
Google Search Console : It helps in analysing your existing Keywords which your brand is able to rank and accordingly plan your back link activities
Google Keyword Planner : It shows up relevant Keywords to your theme and as its a Google Tool you can expect the stats in terms of volume to be correct as most of the users use Google.
Ahrefs – If you are planning to have a FAQ section, Question answer section then ahrefs is a great tool. Also it provides the Ranking competitiveness of each Keyword which helps in determining which Keyword should you target.
You’ve compiled a big list and a lot of good advice from different people for us! Thanks very much. I’m another person who uses Google Search Console and find it very useful.
Thanks for weight in here, Rohan!