Top Tools for Free or Budget-Friendly Keyword Research Ep. 591

Howdy, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, the best SEO podcast. My name is Matt Bertram, your host. Today I thought it would be really good to go through keyword research and the different tools out there due to the fact that AHRF just recently changed their payment structure and I know a lot of people were using AHRFs and now they're on the free plan and they had to change some things so we're going to see how that affects it. I think a lot of people out there don't want to pay the increase and are looking at other tools and I've used a lot of different tools so I thought I would share with you what's going on out there. It was also a topic based on Google Trends as well as our past podcasts, a topic that a lot of people seem to be interested in. Also my kids are home for the holidays so if they run in here, we'll just kind of see how this goes. I will try to pause it but yeah, we might have some kids running in here so we'll just see what happens. All right, well let's first jump into why keyword research is important and also I want to caveat the fact that Google Keyword Planner is a fantastic tool that Google provides if you have a Google ads account set up. That would be the first go to I would recommend. The reason I wouldn't recommend it completely or as your sole tool is because Google's only going to show you what is going on in the paid world so they are only going to show you the paid keywords and a lot of times there are keywords that people are not bidding on but are high converting, I call them little honey holes, little great opportunities to rank also 75% of all keywords that are searched for in Google or search terms are brand new to Google and so really qualifying for the long tail key phrases and then

focusing in on those long tail key phrases is how you are going to compete ranking against the big boys is going after less competitive terms and to do that, to find that, to get those leads because we know we need to be in the top couple positions in Google to even get any leads. I would also tell you if you are getting a lot of spam, you are kind of fighting through it. You are almost there. You are probably bottom of the first page. You are on people's radar and mainly sales people and people trying to, well, spam you to get your business and then you got to fight through that to the good leads. I would also tell you when you are looking at SEO and PPC, just a good rule of thumb, I think it is good to share, there is a lot of data out there that suggests different people search for organic traffic versus paid traffic. I have found that paid traffic and LSA ads are fantastic because, well, you get your money back because the market is pretty saturated on the AdWords side of things, but people look for ads for, well, emergencies, right? You have an air conditioning problem and it is very hot. You have a plumbing problem and there is water leaking everywhere. Maybe you just got a DWI or something like that and you are looking for a lawyer. I think that there are different, well, and there are some issues there, I guess, on restricted markets, but you get the idea, right? You have something that you emergency need to address. Also, coupon hunters, people that are searching for deals, that is why AdWords says, yes, you always need to have some kind of offer. You want to run them to a landing page. I see a lot of people running ads to just a homepage and if that homepage is not optimized for cold traffic, you lose out a lot of conversions. Certainly, you can use AdWords to help with SEO and that is

something we might go into on a different podcast. I think that there is a lot of opportunity to help give Google better data to understand what your pages are about. In general, AdWords is coupon hunters and emergency services, right? There is small overlap and think about yourself, how many of you are ads people and how many of you are organic people? Well, the overwhelming majority of people are organic people. There's not a lot of crossover and that's why Google makes their ads look a lot like organic and they've been working on different kinds of programs to add those ads in there and maybe more people are using ads if the taglines are good, but the reality is the deeper research people are really digging down trying to find the right solution to their problem. You're trying to answer it as best you can through SEO and so understanding how people are searching, what people are searching for along that customer journey and that target persona, that's why that work is so important on the front end. So you need a really good keyword research tool to better understand what people might be searching for. I would also tell you very low volume searches but have high intent and the longer they are typically those long tail key phrases typically convert better. So depending on your basket price or what you're selling, the longer keyword terms with lower volume that are less competitive are good targets for SEO and you should have a strategy. You shouldn't just be trying to rank for the core or seed or whatever you want to call it, keywords because well, everybody else is trying to go after that and that's going to be the common target for the bigger brands. If you're a bigger brand too, you're spending a lot of money competing at the top of the funnel where you might want to be spending more time in the middle or the lower end of the funnel to get those conversions. I see that happening a lot as well.

So let's jump into it and talk about the different keyword research tools that would give you insights into the keywords that are outside of what Google keyword planner would show you. So I used, well, two different articles here that I'm going to pull over, one from Zapier and then one from of course Backlinko because he likes to build these skyscraper articles and we're going to kind of go through this and I'll highlight some things. I'm not going to read the full articles, I'm just going to try to distill for you what I think is important. There are tons of tools out there and the big boy or the big boys, Moz, Ahrefs and SEMrush. Certainly Moz was one of the beginning, more of the older school SEOs are all on Moz and you can, by submitting content, rank higher and if you're ranked higher on Moz, you're a top SEO. So that's one place that people can go look for people out there is Moz and that's kind of the old guard. In my opinion, I think SEMrush and Ahrefs came later and you can see SEMrush has raised their prices, Ahrefs has now started to raise their price here. I think it was the 16th was the changeover. So I think there's a lot of people out there looking for new keyword tools. Also there's SEO clarity, there's bright edge when you start getting into the enterprise level side of things and we're talking thousands of dollars a month, which might be out of the reach for a lot of freelancers or smaller agencies. I know that search console is a great source for actually real accurate data because a lot of these tools don't provide that for you when we're talking about analytics. But this podcast specifically is about free keyword research tools and I would tell you Moz, Ahrefs and SEMrush do have a free option. Also I would even throw into it SE Ranking, which has also been a sponsor of the podcast. They have some free options out there. They

don't show you everything, but it gives you an idea. There's usually a limited number of searches, but these big tools, there is still a free option. So do you remember that? So this Zapier article is talking about, okay, well, these free plans. So I wonder how old this was written, but it's basically 10 queries per tool per month with a thousand words suggestion and a hundred SERP analysis per query for Moz. Ten queries per month, certainly you could use this in addition to some other things, but that's going to be pretty, pretty limited. Ahrefs, free keyword generator up to 150 keyword suggestions, keyword difficulty checker, difficulty score, SERP analysis for the top 10 results. Again very, very limited, SEMrush 10 analytic reports per day, better and 10 track keywords. So from this, besides Google keyword planner, SEMrush looks pretty good. I'm going to jump over to the next article because I think most of you understand how these free plans work and it's a limited number of searches. And I think that there are some free tools as well as very, very affordable tools. I would tell you SE Ranking, if you listen to some old podcasts, they actually had come over with their Ukrainian pricing and then quickly they increased that market or the cost per tool based on the U.S. market and I'm happy for them. But that also is a great tool that I think still kind of is now starting to fit that slot of maybe where Ahrefs and SEMrush were. So I would encourage you to look at that. They continue to add a lot of new tools. I would even tell you SpyFu is great when you're looking at the crossover of paid, but they do have an organic session. Again, they've been sponsors as well, but let's go through some of these other tools here. Okay. So this is the Backlinko article, keyword research tools. Okay. Um, you know, they have all this, so they say SEMrush is number one. We're going to go ahead and, and skip

them. Uh, S-O-O-V-L-E, Suvle, I don't know how to say that right, uh, gives you suggestion keyword ideas from Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, and Amazon and more. So I know that there's a lot of e-commerce people that listen to this podcast, um, Amazon, Amazon keywords, great functionality. Don't talk about it a lot. All these tools have an option to search on the different search engines. And I would tell you all these different search engines rank things very, very differently. So you've got to really think what you're trying to go after and, and make sure you, you tool everything appropriately. But this looks like an aggregator. This pulls them all together, um, save suggestions. So you can search for a word, it'll show you all these different suggestions. You can pull over and save it in a CFE file. Um, again, that's something that I'm not doing that I'm going to look into. Topic ranker. So since semantic SEO has really come onto the scene, Bert, et cetera, um, semantic keywords, what we're finding is even if you don't have the keyword anywhere on the page, in the slug, in the title, in the meta description, anywhere, uh, you can still rank for words that are in association with it. And what you're trying to do is make sure that that semantic cloud of those different keywords you're talking about, these different topics, um, or different keywords inside a topic. And, and I know, uh, a previous podcast, we're talking about topical authority, uh, same concept. So we're trying to be an expert or talk about all these different things in this, let's call it a keyword cluster or a topic cluster. And it works really well by linking this stuff together and talking about these different things. So, um, this, uh, topic ranker discover keywords based on problems and weaknesses on the search engine results, uh, would be pretty interesting. Again, this is not something that I'm using. Um, so this looks like a great tool to play around with, uh, to really kind of open,

open it up. It looks like there's a lot of interesting features in here as far as, uh, easy to rank keywords, ensuring relevancy in your niche by giving you search volume and specific problems to identify on the search rods with actionable, uh, ranking strategies. So this topic ranker looks super interesting that I'll have to check out. Uh, it also has, uh, expanded like opportunities like mismatch titles, thin content, old content, poor readability, poor load speeds, uh, forum sites, Quora, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera, high spam score. So I would tell you right now with age refs, uh, changing their payment structure, certainly a lot of people are going to move forward and the familiarity of a new tool. There's absolute value in that and having to retrain on a new tool is tough. But I would tell you that there's a lot of, um, new ranking tools that have come up that are doing some fantastic things and now might be another great time, maybe through this holiday season to test out some other things and expand your SEO knowledge. Uh, this looks like Jazzy, maybe J A A X Y get thousands of related keyword ideas within seconds. This is a straightforward yet powerful tool. First off, it gives you lots of different keyword ideas, right? Um, plus you get helpful data on every keyword it generates, including competition, search volume and potential traffic. Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty straightforward. Um, quoted search results. QSR is one of Brian Dean's favorite. Search it like a search features. Um, I have not used this tool either. See, I need to expand my knowledge. Okay. Number five is Google search console. I would tell you guys it's free. It's accurate. It's probably the best thing that you should look for. Also, a lot of how we use Google search console is if you look at the impressions that it's showing, it's telling you what more kind of content it's looking for from your site or the site you're trying to rank. And if there's no clicks for

something that it continues to increase, uh, impressions for, it's trying to get those clicks to see how people interact. And this is a little bit of the wave or oscillation theory with SEO and why you wonder why your rankings go up and down. And that's another, uh, podcast that I need to do soon is analytics and analytic tools. And it's somewhat maddening to a lot of SEOs that are working with clients. Uh, if you're looking at a small window, um, maybe you have a 300% increase, right? And so you get all these positive scores and then maybe the next week, or if you're doing it over a 30 day period, then of course there's going to be a drop down. It's not going to go as low as it was before, and then there'll be a jump up. But every time someone sees bad, uh, keyword down rankings, you need to understand where is that baseline and where's that starting from? Because there are going to be ups and downs. And, uh, if someone looks at a report that's down, they're like, Hey, well, why isn't this, you know, straight up to the moon all the time? And you know, that comes into this oscillation theory and, and typically Google's going to show those keywords and then pull them back and show some other keywords and see how people are interacting with the page. So, uh, it's kind of the waves of the ocean. Um, and what you want to see is a general trend up. Right. Um, but a lot of times when there's updates or they're, they're redoing the, the indexing, uh, things can drop, or if you've added a bunch of content, or if you've changed the page, uh, or a lot of the, the meta over about 20%. It'll typically reset it. And I'm using that as a rule of thumb. I don't know what the exact metric is, but I can tell you if you just go in and change everything all at once, it will reset Google look at

as a different page or different content, et cetera. You want to optimize what you're doing. Okay. Hold on a second. Hold on. All right. And I'm back. Sorry about that. Um, Google search console, I just want you to know is really what you should be using because the data is factual. Also the difference a lot of times between, um, Search console and Google analytics is that pixel and Google analytics has not fired yet. So if you have a lot more data in search console than you have in Google analytics, it means probably core web vitals. The page is slow. The pixel hasn't fired or people go there and they jump and leave. And, and so you're not capturing all that data. Um, but certainly search console should be part of your, um, daily, weekly, monthly, whatever you're reviewing is where you should go first. Uh, he goes in the age rest, which we already talked about SC cockpit. Okay. This is a Swiss army knife of tools. Um, this is not to be confused with SE ranking. Um, a lot of in-depth search trends, organic competition and traffic estimates. Sure. Newbies get a lot of value out of this tool, but there's no doubt that SC cockpit is targeted for people that sleep, eat and breathe SEO. I like that. If you're brand new to SEO, the share number of features in this tool might be overwhelming for you. But if you're looking for lots and lots of depth, you should probably, you'll probably get your money's worth with that. This is how it works. Okay. The user interface looks a little bit programming. Um, they might've redone it by now. Uh, Swiss made marketing is I think what it stands for. And, uh, it just looks like a great SEO tool and there's a lot of thought put in it, but the user interface, at least from this article looks like it's a little bit dated. Um, so again, uh, if you're a programmer and you're really strategic, um, about your, your SEO, uh,

exporting things to Excel documents, et cetera, um, might be something to look at. Cause you're going to be able to pull a ton of data out of here. Hmm. This looks like one. We got to look at ourselves here. All right. Uh, eight, they said Google keyword planner. All right. Hold on one second. Again, I got, all right, so we'll see how this goes. Uh, also there's something called priority of service. Uh, if you have kids at home, you really should look at, cause if they are watching the TV or streaming, it's going to slow down your network. And so we may be experiencing some of this and I might not know about it till after the podcast, but I'm going to try to knock this out fast. All right. Number nine, keyword tool.io. Um, just like super Uber suggest, which we haven't talked about. That is a Neil Patel tool, um, that he bought. I think Uber suggest is fantastic. I think the, uh, cost of it is very low. Uh, keyword tool.io is a great tool. Gives you a lot of keyword suggestions. Um, he just says not bad. Um, this is one that's been around a long time. 10 is Moz keyword planner. Again, Moz is kind of gold standard keywords everywhere. It's a plugin. I think it's fantastic, uh, paid keyword tool that displays keyword data on top of 10 websites, including eBay, Amazon, and answer the public. And it's the public's great for FAQ questions. Um, I think also Neil Patel might've bought that one too. I may be mistaken, but keyword everywhere is a great little plugin. Love using it. Uh, use that for years and it just gives you a lot of great data at your fingertips. You can export it and, uh, manipulate that data all kinds of ways. Keyword snatcher number 12, um, have not used this one. Uh, looks like you can do all the different tools. Again, all these are very similar. Um, I want to get to some more that I've used myself

a lot. It says this tool is great for long tail keywords. So keyword snatcher might want to look into for, um, long tail keywords, Google trends, another free tool. I use Google trends to figure out maybe the topic for this podcast. It looked like a lot of people were searching for keyword research tools. Again, I wonder why. Um, so I thought it'd be a good topic. I like looking at Google trends overall to look at kind of broad to see what kind of things are spiking. It's very, uh, high level data. So it's, it's great for that initial research, but not great for the nitty gritty long tail key phrases. Uh, K W finder K W finder is another tool that I have used. Uh, unlike most other tools, keyword finder is very intuitive, right? So if you're looking for a tool that can help you point you in the right direction. I do like, uh, K W finder question. DB question. DB pulls tool focuses from threads on Reddit. I am not the expert in Reddit. Um, not yet at least. Uh, but I do think that Reddit is a fantastic source of data. If you're doing a lot of forum SEO, if you're really, um, trying to ingrain from an influencer standpoint, understanding what people are talking about in the community. I think social media, you can leverage this stuff very effectively. Also creating those signals for SEO. Again, it all kind of ties together. I have not used this tool question DB. Uh, my favorite feature popularity sorts, the results by popularity. That way you can create content that answers burning questions, right? So this is great for FAQs SERP stat. I have, I believe I have used this tool before. I haven't used it in a long time. Is it SEO software suite with all kinds of tools? Um, I have seen them around. They've been around for a long time. His favorite feature is the competitor graph. You know, a lot of these tools have the competitor graph. What's important

about these competitor graphs is it a lot of times clients, or if you have your own business, you go, these guys are my competitors in real life. Right? These are who you think your competitors are. Your competitors online are much times. Much oftentimes, I can't even say that right, but oftentimes much different than in real life, based on the links, based on the keywords you're ranking for, um, based on the traffic, all that sort of thing. This is something to be really, really keenly aware of. Also, a lot of these tools will show you how much you moved in, say a 30 day period, uh, up, back down, left, right. From usually a volume as well as a value of traffic. So, you know, SEO, one of the great indicators is value of traffic in paid search. So here's how much your site would rank if you were buying this traffic and these would be the keywords that would produce that value for you. So looking at a, uh, a competitor graph, the size of it, right? How many different keywords are in your universe versus your competitors where you place, uh, based on, uh, different terms, this looks on their competitor graph, uh, recall, uh, versus precision. So, uh, a little bit different metrics. Very, very interesting. Uh, Brian says, uh, is keyword stat one of the best tools on the market? No, but at $19 a month, you get a lot of pro features for your money. So, um, yeah, SERP stats, really a great option. There's a lot of SEOs out there that just do manual searches. Um, maybe they don't have the budget for some of these bigger tools. I would encourage you to at least have one or two of these tools. Again, none of them are a hundred percent accurate, but it helps you triangulate whatever you're trying to do. They're all using kind of different metrics. A lot of them, if you can plug into search console, I would absolutely do that. Um, I would even tell you,

I don't know if we're going to cover it on this, but we use rank math and rank math has a lot of fantastic features associated. And it's even when you log in on the backend of a WordPress website, it gives you a lot of that great data there. Uh, we can go into that more maybe in a later podcast. All right. Number 17 also asked a fantastic tool for topic cluster research. The key here is the research guys. If you're just blindly trying to rank for keywords or blindly trying to produce blogs without a data-driven perspective, you're, you're really going to be missing some huge opportunities. So I would just encourage you to, to use some of these tools. I would tell you, even for some, uh, customer journeys or, uh, target personas, a lot of times when we bring clients in for workshops, uh, or even audits, we uncover a lot of things that they never really knew, right? There might be, I've done this for the same way for X amount of years, and they don't understand maybe how people are searching online or not all of the ways people are searching online. And this uncovers a new path of new traffic, uh, potentially a new lead source for you. So a lot of what the research is meant to do. Is to uncover new opportunities, more kind of a blue ocean strategy for you. So also ask, uh, content clustering season SEOs and send the best way to rank for head terms or core terms is to create a content clusters, multiple pages that talk about a topic in length from a different perspective. Uh, also as helps you map out the clusters, visualize how people ask questions on the topic. I think that this is fantastic. He uses example of home security cameras. Uh, he said that there's an API coming soon with affordable pricing, et cetera. So, uh, I even like how, um, Brian's formatting this kind of list here. All right. 18 is keyword tool. Great domain. I've probably

got it a long time ago. Rounding up rounding up our list is keyword tool. It's a great app. Okay. So it's an app for bulk keyword research, although the free plan is somewhat limited, uh, plugging a generic keyword. And the tool gives you a massive list of keyword suggestions sorted by search volume trend and competition. Bottom line generates a lot of relevant keywords by using this tool. However, the tool needs complimentary insights to get the most out of its inputs, plus the integration data from other search engines besides Google. Thus opens up more ranking opportunities. I would also tell you really think about how different people are using these platforms. Uh, slowly, but surely people are chipping away at Google's leads. I think Google laid off like 12,000 people or something last week. Um, I think that there's a lot of, um, shakeup that's coming in the marketplace as we move towards the future. And I would encourage you, uh, even in like local to set up being places, a pro tip, uh, set up, uh, Apple maps, um, incorporate that into maybe your local strategy. There's, there's other platforms that are out there that are on the rise. Um, even there's some crypto, uh, platforms as well that will pay you and tokens to search on their platform. Um, brave, for example, uh, I am going to be starting a kind of speaker series or, um, the guest series. I think the cadence is going to be every other podcast. I have a fantastic cybersecurity, um, heavy into blockchain technology. Um, really interesting background, uh, guy that I'm going to be interviewing a buddy of mine that, uh, we're going to do that interview this week, it should come out probably next week, and then we'll be alternating. I think back and forth is a good cadence of me going into topics that I think you should be paying attention to right now with the way the algorithms are moving. As well as, uh, other, uh, important insights as we move into the future.

I think one of the key things you can do as an SEO, as a digital marketer, as a digital strategist, as a business owner, unfortunately. Doing marketing as your second job is somewhat a priority as far as being online, uh, certainly refills are referrals are a great way to generate business, but man, Google is powerful. Search engines are powerful because the people that are looking for your product or service are searching for it. I would also even tell you, um, even some of the other platforms, if we're talking about paid social, for example, Pinterest, a lot of people are under using Pinterest, Pinterest has people going on an all day pinning what they like, like say you're selling some kind of e-commerce solution. Think about it. I like black shoes and people are pending all day, different types of black shoes. They like that is training the algorithm to tell you exactly what they serve. So basically you say, Hey, I'm selling these black shoes that I have, for example, and it will show it to all the people that are looking for different kinds of black shoes, that shoes are similar to the shoes you're showing them. I mean, how powerful is that? It connects people directly in to, to what they're buying. So, um, hopefully that gives you, uh, a greater kind of perspective. There are actually a couple different tools on this list that I was looking at for our team, um, and I will add them to the next podcast that we're looking at that didn't make this list, but maybe made my list. And so, um, hopefully though, this was helpful to just give you an idea more than anything else that it might be time to go look at some other great tools on the market, see what other people are doing. There is, uh, a, a, a cost to learning a new tool and where things are and how they're used, uh, but there's a lot of great features that are being added and a lot of great

people that are doing things that I would encourage you to, to check out, uh, and, you know, there are also some great enterprise tools out there as well, but the market does not consist of just a few platforms. And that's what I want the takeaway message to be. Hopefully you found this podcast helpful. Um, please, if you liked the podcast and the content we're producing, please support us, um, there's a support link in the show notes. Also, uh, if you want a particular topic, uh, leave us a comment, please review, uh, on apple or, uh, other platforms, that would be fantastic. Uh, just like to hear back from you. So it's not just a one-way conversation until the next time. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.