Free Keyword Research Tools

I’m a loud proponent of the phrase “you get what you pay for.”  I extend that to tools I use to help my clients and myself with online marketing.  Now - I’m not saying you CANNOT optimize a page or set up a pay per click campaign without a paid-tool, I’m saying it’s a bit tougher.

There are some tools you can use to formulate a list of searched-for keywords and their approximate search volume, but is that enough data to base some time intensive work upon?  Well sometimes it has to be.

I’m going to talk about the free tools you can use, and some other tools that can help you see a bit more data about the keywords you’re thinking about using for or organic and paid search campaigns.

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool - Aaron Wall

This tool is powered by Wordtracker’s API - but it offers some value added links and info that Wordtracker’s free tool doesn’t provide.  The tool at SEOBook does a few things:

• delivers rough daily search numbers from the big 3 - Wordtracker gives 1 number
• incorporates links to the cost estimate tool from Google AdWords.  This will tell you the approximate amount of money you’d need to spend in AdWords to rank #1 for that phrase in 85% of queries - it will also give you a rough traffic estimate
• Links to Google Insights for each term - this gives you a way to compare some like terms to see which generate the most interest. 
• Links to some social sites like Topix and Del.icio.us so you can see if there is any buzz available to support your keyword choice.

KeywordDiscovery Free Tool

This tool is really designed to get you to buy an annual subscription.  If you do a lot of SEO or PPC tweaking, it might be worth it.  The free tool will show you the number of searches for any given keyword phrase over the last 12 months.  Pairing this number with the Google Insights or Trends numbers could be valuable for optimizing your SEO or PPC campaigns for seasonal business.

Once you’ve generated your list with SEOBook or Keyword Discovery - you should really see which terms are going to work best for your situation.  I recommend using Google Insights and Google Trends to see search data over time.

Google Insights

This tool will compare search volume patterns across regions, by city, over specific periods of time and in various categories.  You can change and narrow your criteria to accommodate different categories, seasonality issues and geographic distribution.  For our example I used the term “Denver Hotel” and looked at insights for:

• The whole U.S.
• The Last 12 Months
• In the Travel Category

Insights gave me the following data for our keyword:

• Search terms related to “Denver Hotel”
• Rising Searches related to “Denver Hotel”
• Regional Interest for “Denver Hotel”
• Interest Level over the Last Year
• Total Searches over the last year

Google Trends

Trends in keyword search volumes are generally affected by events and news that relates to that keyword.  Google Trends tells us the world’s interest in your keyword phrase and can compare multiple keyword phrases.  Just enter your phrases separated by commas to see Google search volume indices.  Unfortunately - this doesn’t directly translate into search volume , but you can see which keyword has a higher volume of traffic, you can also see news stories that relate to traffic spikes.  Here’s the graphic for a comparison of “Denver Hotel” and “Denver Lodging”

Here are the news stories that correspond to the spikes in traffic

 Overall the data available from free tools is good, but compiling and researching takes time - and keeping track of that research can be a bit cumbersome.  I DO use Insights and Trends in combination with my paid keyword research tools to make keyword choices when I find terms have the same number of searches or the same amount of competition.