Free Keyword Research Tools

Well, you’ve heard me go on and on about keyword research, and I’ve showed you the tools I use for my research, along with my reasons for using them. But today I wanted to share with you some free
tools for keyword research.

These tools are powerful, but very cumbersome. While I like the data that they spit out, they require far too much time and their results are far less actionable than the ones I get with Micro Niche Finder and Keyword Elite. However, depending on your needs, and the volume of keyword research that you do, you might find them helpful.

So here they are, in no particular order. Try them out on a niche that you’re investigating — they’re all free:

Google Keyword Metrics Tool

Searches for PPC maximum bid, search volume, competition, sample ads, and expected AdSense revenues for a niche keyword. This is one of my favorite free keyword tools, but I find that the data tend to be misleading.

http://www.technobloggie.com/keyword-tool/index.php

Google Sets

This is a neat tool from Google Labs that creates sets of keywords revolving around a main keyword. No search or competition data is made available, so you wouldn’t use this for keyword research; rather, you’d use it to make sure your latent semantic indexing was optimized (advanced search topic).

http://labs.google.com/sets

Google Trends

This is a tool I frequently use when validating a chosen niche that I’ve found through keyword research. It shows you search trends over time, so that you can tell if your niche popularity is on the upswing or if you’re too late to capitalize on it, or if your niche receives more search traffic during certain times of the year.

http://google.com/trends

SEO Keyword Density Tool

You can use this tool to analyze your pages and posts to determine their keyword density. A “natural” density tends to be around 1 percent, but for an optimized post or site, you’ll want to shoot for 2 percent or more.

http://websitetips.com/seo/tools/keywords/#freekeywordanalysis

Keyword Spy

If you are targeting a niche, type your keywords in here to see who your largest paid competitors are (those using AdWords).

http://www.keywordspy.com/

Blogging in Action’s Keyword Sheriff

“Wait, you guys have your own keyword tool, but you still use Keyword Elite?” Yes, that’s right! The biggest problem with our keyword research tool is that it doesn’t paint a complete picture. But it might provide you with just the information you need to move forward.

http://www.BloggingInAction.com/files/Keyword-Sheriff.zip

I hope you find these tools helpful. They’re certainly no replacement for a proper keyword research tool, but they can give you some additional information that you can use for research or validation.