In this article, I am going to share a free tool for keyword research. We have a lot of tools in the market like Ahref, Semrush, etc which are good at keyword research but they are expensive. So, we have the Google’s own keyword research tool called Keyword Planner.
Free Tool For Keyword Research – Keyword Planner
To access this tool, we need to create a free Google Ads account. Once we sign up for a Google Ads account, you will redirected to its dashboard. There you will find a tab called Tools.
When you click on it, you will get two options.
- Discover New Keywords
- Get Search Volume and Forecasts.
We need to select the first option to discover new keywords. When you click on it, it opens a page like this.
Here we have two options.
- Start with keywords.
- Start with a website.
Start With Keywords
Let’s start with the first option. Here, you can see a text box that takes the keyword as an input. Let’s type the keyword washing machine and simply click Get Results.
Once we click on the Get Results, we will get the results like this.
As you can see, we have the top keyword which we have entered “washing machine” on top. Then we have a list of keywords which includes washing machine.
When we scroll down a little, we will see a total of 771 keywords that are related to our keyword “washing machine”.
We can download those keywords in a CSV file and do research on those keywords for our blog. If we notice the keyword results, we have a column called competition. This is a competition for running ads for these keywords. We can consider this as well to know the competition on that particular keyword.
Start with a website
Now, if we go to the second option, starting with a website, we need to enter our website which is linked to this account. This gives us the list of keywords our website holds across all the published posts. This will help us to get more ideas about what articles we can write on our website so that we can get more views.
In this way, we can use Keyword Planner to understand and find more keywords for our website.
Using Google Auto-Suggest for Keyword Research
Another way of finding keywords for our website which is also completely free is Google Autosuggest. You might have already seen this before. Let’s open Google and type something like a smartwatch, you can see Google is suggesting other keywords that are related to the keyword “smartwatch” we typed in.
We experiment it by typing one letter at a time after our keyword and see what results Google Autosuggest giving us.
Not only this, once we do a Google search for our keyword for example smartwatch, You will see search results in Google. But at the end of the results, you will see the Related Searches section which gives us the keywords that are similar to our keyword.
Another Free Tool For Keyword Research
There’s another tool we can use for completely free keyword research is keywordtool.io This uses Google’s autocomplete feature and gives us a list of results based on that.
In our case, let’s open the link keywordtool.io and search for our keyword “smartwatch” with a location you wanted to search for. You will the list of results.
As you see, we have a total of 697 keywords relevant to the keyword we entered and it is giving the list but it is providing other information like volume and difficulty for a few keywords. If we want to know all the information about all the keywords, we need to go for their pro plan.
Validating Keywords Using Google Trends
Now, we have the list of keywords using the above methods. If we want to discover more details related to keywords, we are going to use Google’s other product Google Trends.
Open the Google Trends website and go to its Explore tab. There you can see a search box with filters like country, time, category, and other search filters. Let’s try with the keyword “smart watches for men” and see the results.
You will see a graph that shows the spikes in the traffic on Google in different time frames. Along with it, you will more information like related topics and related queries regarding our keyword in Google Trends. We can download this information by exporting the CSV files and doing our research according to the needs of our website.