Top Free Keyword research tools to Check the Competition of a Keyword
Keyword research should be considered business-critical, and thus you should have a budget for it, but I realize that many small businesses need to aim for growth hacks and free tools to get off the ground before they can really invest in the top-tier software.
1. SEOBook
SEOBook actually has a handful of excellent tools, and they’re all available for free. They have paid accounts, but registration is currently closed, and the primary benefit you get from it is personal consulting, not tool access.
The SEOBook keyword tool is a keyword scraper that allows you to generate keyword lists and clean up existing keyword lists. When you plug in a list, you can scan various metrics for each keyword, including monthly search volume, daily search volume, ranking in Google and Bing.
2. SEMRush
SEMRush is generally a paid tool, but they have a free search on a limited basis that can show you a lot of information, right on their homepage. Start by plugging in a keyword and seeing the data it can bring. It has organic search volume and raw results, paid search CPC and competition, phrase match and related keywords lists and their volume and CPC, and a read of the top 100 organic search results.
Another primarily paid tool that has some data available for free, this works as a general teaser for one of the many Moz services. You plug in a keyword and it will give you keyword volume, difficulty, opportunity metrics, potential analysis, as well as SERP analysis and keyword suggestions. Below all of that is a set of mentions with the authority and date of the mention, so you can look at recent competition.
4. KWFinder
Keyword Finder is another excellent tool for keyword research, and of course it’s another paid tool with a limited free search. The free search allows you to plug in a keyword, a location, and a language, and it will give you keyword suggestions, trends, search volume, CPC, PPC, and a difficulty estimate.
This is sort of similar to the above, but with a few more advanced options and more data. Plug in a keyword. Plug in a domain if you want to filter for that domain, or leave it blank to get a listing of 250 results. Chose between Google and Yahoo, desktop and mobile, and a location if you want (right down to zip code).
6. Alexa
Alexa is generally know for their web ranking list and their generally inaccurate metrics, but they have a lot of good data these days if you know where to look for it. In this case, it’s excellent for a little competitor keyword research. You can plug in a site name and, as long as there’s data for the site, get more information. Click on the “get details” button, then the search analytics tab, and you will see a list of search queries and data about the traffic the website gets from those queries. Some of it will be overly broad, but a lot of it will be nice and useful.
7. Keyword Spy
Another competition spy tool, it works just as well for your own site, and has a keyword search as well. Plug in a domain to see the number of keywords it ranks for, the number of competitors it has, the organic keywords, and more. You can click on the organic keywords tab to get a list of the keywords, the position of the site, the volume, CPC, traffic, ads, results, and URL.
8.Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest provides you with keywords that are not available through the Google Keyword Planner.
With this in mind, I suggest that you always run a Ubersuggest search, after checking your keywords through the Google Keyword Planner.
9.Keyword.Guru
Keyword.Guru collates results from top search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and ecommerce sites (Amazon, eBay).
Once you start typing, it delivers results based on what people are searching for in real-time.
Keyword.Guru does not display information regarding keyword search volume, but it does show you the most common searches for a seed keyword.
10.Keyword Shitter
It does not take a genius to figure out what Keyword Shitter does: it spews out keywords like no tomorrow!
The program works by mining Google Autocomplete for queries.
Realistically, if you don’t want that many keyword suggestions, you can narrow down the results by adding positive and/or negative filters.
