Building a profitable niche website is a difficult task and takes time and effort. There are dozens of factors that play a big role when it comes to ranking in search engine results. And one such factor is the use of keywords while generating content for the website. Although search giants like Google discourage excessive use of keywords in content, moderate and strategic use of the same can help you get more visibility on search engines. But, how to find the right keywords for the piece of content you're writing? That's where specialized keyword research tools come into play. Let's learn about them.
The keyword research tools come in two versions, i.e., the free one and the premium one. Obviously, the latter one is the version that gives you the raw power to find really good keywords for your content.
No matter which keyword research tool you select, it takes some time and experience before you fully understand its usage. So, give it some time, and do not be afraid in experimenting a bit.
1. Google Keyword Planner
Although Google Keyword Planner is made for Google Ads users, it can be used for regular content too. It's free to use and offers a clutter-free interface.
It lets you find keywords in two different ways. Either you can provide your own set of keywords to start with or you can mine a website for the keywords.
While shortlisting keywords to be used in your post, pay attention to the Avg. Monthly Searches, and the Competition attributes. One can also refine the keyword search based on several attributes. It'll help you get more targeted results to match your content's goal.
2. Semrush Keyword Magic Tool
Semrush Keyword Magic Tool is one of the most popular tools to enhance your content's SEO by finding the relevant keywords in a few easy steps.
It has one of the best interfaces with easy-to-understand data fields—which—even a layman can understand without much effort. The primary keyword you're searching against can be fine-tuned through various types of filters applied to the result set.
This tool gives you the latest and fresh data to help you get more out of your search engine optimization efforts. It also has a keyword manager which saves all of your searched keywords for research.
3. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
The Ahrefs Keywords Explorer is in no way less than its competitors. It can give you thousands of targeted keywords from its huge database of billions of keywords.
It's not just Google, but it processes data from up to 10 popular social media platforms to present you with the right keywords for your content. This gives you more opportunities to get a better presence on these social media outlets.
It gives you all the advanced SEO metrics associated with keywords to enable you to handpick the ones suitable for your content. Do once give it a try!
4. Moz Keyword Explorer
Moz is a reputable name when it comes to using the best SEO tools available for a website. The Moz Keyword Explorer is packed with all the features to help your content rank high in the search results.
This tool enables you to perform detailed keyword and SERP analysis to easily pick the keywords. It also provides multiple export formats for offline analysis of the data.
It also gives you the difficulty score to assess how hard it is to rank for a specific keyword. It's best for analyzing your competitor's website. It also allows you to save your filtered keywords list to help you use them quickly in your editorial calendar with upcoming articles or posts.
5. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is yet another keyword research tool worth mentioning. Like other similar types of tools, this one too is free and gives you detailed keyword data for your research.
You can easily reverse engineer your competitor's SEO strategy by providing its domain name to this excellent tool. Apart from keyword suggestions, it also gives you a report about the top-performing pages of your competitor's website. It helps you in deciding your content strategy.
Its free plan gives you 3 keyword searches per day which is good enough for small to medium websites. If you want to go premium, it offers one of the most affordable plans for professionals.
6. KWFinder
KWFinder is one of the best tools to find keywords you can easily rank for. It has a nice interface with all the bells and whistles to do professional-grade keyword research.
Through domain-based keyword research, one can easily find out which keywords your competitor is ranking for. Through its historical data and keywords trending on specific occasions and seasons, one can easily create content to target potential customers and readers.
A location-specific (local) keyword analysis is also possible through this tool. That's what niche websites targeting customers of a specific geolocation—need—to get a better presence in local searches.
7. Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool is probably the only tool that can give you up to 750+ long-tail keywords for a search term. You don't even need to create an account for that.
For keyword suggestions, this tool uses the Google autocomplete feature. The extracted keyword data is presented in a simple way so that even a layman can understand it easily.
Whether you're using this keyword research tool for PPC or for content creation, it gives you the right kind of data to fulfill your SEO goals. Premium plans also have an API for fetching relevant keyword data—programmatically. You can also do keyword analysis for various popular social media platforms.
8. Serpstat
Serpstat is best suited for niche bloggers who want to create content targeting their blog's niche. Through it, you can easily find out the most successful keywords your competing website is using within its content. For every keyword, you get all the major attributes associated with it.
It has a huge database of more than 7 billion keywords. You can do keyword research for both paid and organic traffic to find the best ones for your blog posts and landing page copies.
It also has a batch analysis feature that enables you to do keyword research against a large set of data. If you're looking for an affordable yet powerful keyword research tool, this one is worth giving a try.
9. Long Tail Pro
As the name suggests, Long Tail Pro is all about doing research for long-tail keywords. You can harness the gigantic volume of traffic that remains untapped coming from these less competitive keywords. Professional blogs churning out content on a regular basis can benefit from this tool—the most.
It also has a SERP analysis and a rank tracker tool to compete with similar websites in your niche. With backlink analysis and site audit facility, you get a complete SEO toolkit.
For serious content creators, they also have different types of courses—in their academy—to equip you with all the SEO knowledge required to rule the SERPs.
10. Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is one of the most affordable keyword research tools. You can use it through flexible and handy web browser extensions available for both Firefox and Chrome.
For every keyword, you get search volume, CPC, competition, and trend data for up to 12 months. You can get historical search data from 2004 onwards to get a larger picture with ease.
It can also provide you with the traffic metrics of the websites. You need both an API key and the credits for using its browser extensions. This tool also provides you with the domain authority (DA) and the spam score while analyzing a competitor's website. I found it very convenient to use.