Top 10 Free Keyword Research Tools

[Potatoe]

Shoutout to the BuSo Marketplace's very own Keyword Sheeter for having the number 1 ranked free KW research tool that isn't Google Trends, per Ahrefs.

1. Google Trends
2. Keyword Sheeter
3. AnswerThePublic
4. Keyword Surfer
5. Keyworddit
6. KeywordTool
7. Google Search Console
8. Questiondb
9. Bulk Keyword Generator
10. Google

https://twitter.com/x/status/1252643550124290049

I saw this Tweet posted today, I guess the article isn't new tho, either way I hadn't seen it before. There's a few on here I haven't heard of either, and was surprised to see UberSuggest missing. Someone on Twitter mentioned that it's paid now, but it still seems to have a free version / other tools on here are also free with paid versions so I'm not sure.

Questiondb looks cool too, kind of a less flashy AnswerThePublic? I've been trying to include Q+A sections at the bottom of a lot of articles lately, especially after learning that it's all good to use an accordion and it won't hamper that content being crawled and indexed.

Anything you guys would add / remove from this list?

 

[secretagentdad]

That was super nice of Ahrefs. Should help the long march to rank for keyword tool.


Add bing webmaster tools it is very worth using.

I really like search console and google tools in general atm.
Been getting my best long tail ideas that worked from them.
I think as a whole they're number 1 by a largest margin they have ever had post forcing people to buy adwords for data.
Lately its been getting harder to get value out of the search operator queries.
For some reason they've decided to start limiting access and effectiveness of a lot of them.

 

[nottheusual]

QuestionDB is my tool, but posts like these are kind of screwing me up my use/conversion data.

While it has some use for marketers, it's not really an SEO tool. It has the most value for freelance writers who need to generate a lot of ideas, particularly for clients that promote on social media.

 

[Potatoe]

QuestionDB is my tool, but posts like these are kind of screwing me up my use/conversion data.

While it has some use for marketers, it's not really an SEO tool. It has the most value for freelance writers who need to generate a lot of ideas, particularly for clients that promote on social media.

Ohh cool - hey! That sucks about it making your data janky, tho.

I'm not sure if I clearly understand the distinction between somebody using it as an SEO tool to come up with ideas for content vs a freelancer writer using it to come up with ideas for content and why that muddies the data, could you elaborate on that? Are we talking about people using it en masse for SEO and doing boatloads of queries, vs someone using it on a smaller scale and hand-picking stuff?

 

[nottheusual]

Ohh cool - hey! That sucks about it making your data janky, tho.

I'm not sure if I clearly understand the distinction between somebody using it as an SEO tool to come up with ideas for content vs a freelancer writer using it to come up with ideas for content and why that muddies the data, could you elaborate on that? Are we talking about people using it en masse for SEO and doing boatloads of queries, vs someone using it on a smaller scale and hand-picking stuff?

Nothing to do with how much they're using it. They're welcome to use the tool as much as they'd like, it's just from a business perspective, marketers/SEOs are not the target market, and convert dreadfully.

As you noted yourself, it's nice to get a few questions for Q+A style sections, or to learn a bit about the intent behind certain topics. Understandably, the free version is sufficient for that.

When I say it adds noise to data, I'm talking more in the sense that 90% of referral traffic comes from articles like this AHrefs one, or Backlinko, etc., so it makes it harder to nail down actual conversion rates on my target market.

 

[Potatoe]

@nottheusual Gotcha, thanks for explaining. I just signed up for a paid account. It's so quick!

Did your target audience change since launching? I noticed that you posted about this tool in BigSeo initially, and your blog post on the homepage uses "SEO" as the example keyword. Did you notice over time that SEO people don't convert as well, so you decided to pivot away from that?

I wonder if there's a way to make the paid version slightly more appealing to your SEO/marketer audience to capitalize on being featured in some of the biggest SEO blogs, instead of shying away from it, without having to compromise your core vision? SEO's seem to get value from it since they're recommending it, maybe there's some little tweak that could convince them to pay at a higher clip, whether that ends up being related to functionality, or landing page copy.

I also wonder if the dreadful conversions have more to do with the traffic coming from lists of free tools as opposed to the fact that they're marketers/SEOs? I'm surprised that freelancers writers would convert significantly better than marketers.

I imagine anyone looking for free stuff is going to convert poorly, so maybe that's muddying the waters to make it seem like SEO's convert worse, when it might have more to do with freebie-seekers in general converting worse?

 

[nottheusual]

Did your target audience change since launching? I noticed that you posted about this tool in BigSeo initially, and your blog post on the homepage uses "SEO" as the example keyword. Did you notice over time that SEO people don't convert as well, so you decided to pivot away from that?

At first I think I just wanted to see if anyone would use it. It's just a small side project.

I wonder if there's a way to make the paid version slightly more appealing to your SEO/marketer audience to capitalize on being featured in some of the biggest SEO blogs, instead of shying away from it, without having to compromise your core vision? SEO's seem to get value from it since they're recommending it, maybe there's some little tweak that could convince them to pay at a higher clip, whether that ends up being related to functionality, or landing page copy.

I've tried to come up with a way over time to do this.

My best idea is to search each question in Google and scrape the related terms - these all have at least some search volume.

I haven't gone ahead with it because it's a relatively big investment, and scraping Google at that scale isn't something I've done. I would need to think of a way to validate the demand first.

I also wonder if the dreadful conversions have more to do with the traffic coming from lists of free tools as opposed to the fact that they're marketers/SEOs? I'm surprised that freelancers writers would convert significantly better than marketers.

That's definitely possible.

The reason I'm focused on freelance writers (they don't seem to convert great either as a side note) is because I built this tool initially to solve my own problem.

I had a few high volume clients who paid well, but coming up with so many ideas was killing me. I would have instantly paid $100+ for a tool like this at the time. But obviously not many freelance writers are in this situation, and it's tough to identify them and get them aware of the tool.

I imagine anyone looking for free stuff is going to convert poorly, so maybe that's muddying the waters to make it seem like SEO's convert worse, when it might have more to do with freebie-seekers in general converting worse?

Certainly, it's a drawback of freemium monetization, but I also think it's the correct choice for this sort of thing.

 

[secretagentdad]

I would be happy to take any free stuff list, or seo traffic you do not want.
Just message the writers and tell them to link to shitter instead.