Over the last few years, the SEO landscape has continued to evolve. Various trends—and global events—have come and gone, forcing digital marketers and business owners to adapt at every turn.
The fundamentals of SEO are still the same, though, and effective keyword research remains the core building block of any successful strategy. This is why it’s so important to use the right keyword research tool for your business.
At Semrush, we consider this our bread and butter.
But a wide variety of other tools are also available that can enhance your workflow and help you generate impressive organic and paid results.
To point you in the right direction and highlight some of these amazing tools, we created a handy “best of” compilation, highlighting the key benefits and pricing information of each tool.
To see our breakdown of all 12, check out our full list. In the meantime, here’s a sample of our selections.
QuestionDB
Question keywords are a great source of content ideas and work especially well at the top of the marketing funnel. Short of putting in the time and effort to browse forums and community pages, though, it can be difficult to know what kinds of questions your target audience is actually asking.
Which is where QuestionDB comes in. Using your seed keyword, the tool scours forums like Reddit and StackExchange to find related questions. The end result is a wealth of topic ideas that you can use to connect with your audience.
TubeBuddy
If you create a lot of video content, then this browser extension can help you optimize, promote, and grow your video channel. TubeBuddy allows you to find short- and long-tail keywords (and trending tags) specifically for YouTube, and then test and apply these keywords to your channel.
Beyond keyword research, the tool also offers a range of other useful features such as results summaries, individual video SEO analytics, and location-specific SEO data.
Google Trends
This popular, 100%-free Google tool is highly useful for exploring current and historical search trends, making it fertile ground for new content ideas. Use it to explore specific keyword data, or to dig deeper into broader topics.
As well as providing key insights into what your audience is searching for, Trends enables you to segment data based on location, topic, and time period. This helps ensure that you are targeting the right audience at the right time with your keywords.
Semrush Keyword Magic Tool
Built on an international database of over 20B keywords, Keyword Magic Tool enables you to filter your searches based on intent, question type, SERP features, and more. You can also leverage the highly useful Keyword Difficulty metric to target low hanging fruit.
These features allow you to uncover potentially golden opportunities, explore niche topics, and create content with significant ranking potential right off the bat.
Semrush Keyword Gap
Competitor analysis is a crucial part of any digital marketing niche, and keyword research is no exception. The Keyword Gap tool provides a side-by-side comparison of your keyword profile against your rivals’, including a highly useful breakdown of the keywords you’re missing out on.
This data can be a game-changer, enabling you to benchmark yourself against the competition, cover any gaps, and—most importantly—build a more competitive and well-rounded keyword strategy.
Remember: If you don’t know what your potential users are searching for, then it’s going to be an uphill struggle to connect with them. An effective keyword research tool should be a core part of any digital marketer’s tool box—and these five suggestions are just the tip of the iceberg.
To see our full list of the best keyword tools, read the full article now.