In this post, I’ll share the best free keyword research tools for these tasks.
Google Keyword Planner is a keyword research tool for advertisers. But you can also use it to find keywords for SEO. It’s particularly useful for finding related keywords that don’t contain your seed keyword.
Google Trends visualizes the relative search popularity of a keyword over time. It also shows related rising and breakout searches. This is useful for finding trending keywords.
SERP Checker shows the top-ranking pages for (almost) any keyword, plus useful SEO metrics for the top three pages. It’s particularly useful for understanding a keyword’s traffic potential.
Because of this, the estimated search traffic to the top-ranking pages is usually a better proxy of a keyword’s true traffic potential than search volume. So it’s worth plugging promising keyword ideas into SERP Checker to better understand how much traffic you can get by ranking.
Keyword Difficulty (KD) Checker estimates how hard it will be to rank in the top 10.
Because of this, a high KD score just means you’ll likely need lots of backlinks to compete. You should always investigate ranking difficulty further before going after a keyword.
Gemini is Google’s AI assistant, similar to ChatGPT.
But, unlike ChatGPT, it can pull Google search results and use them to answer questions. This makes it super useful for finding what searchers are looking for when they search for a keyword, otherwise known as their search intent.
Here’s the prompt you can use:
Going a step further, we can ask Gemini to visit the top 10 results and tell us the top features they mention.
Free keyword research tools are super useful when you’re just starting out. Still, the number of keyword ideas and data they show will always pale compared to paid tools.
This is because paid keyword tools give you more data and allow for more efficient workflows, so you can find better keyword ideas in less time.
Looking to learn more about keyword research? Read our beginner’s guide to keyword research, or watch this video: