11 Best free keyword research tools for SEO in 2016

Keyword research does not require a big budget and there are plenty of free tools out there, that you can use to find great keywords for seo.

Although most free tools are quite limited in features, they are still very useful. With some experience and practice you can learn to extract valuable keywords out of these free tools.

Later on you can switch to some of the paid tools like SeoStack, when you need to save time in exchange for money.

Here is a list of the most popular free keyword research tools, that you can start using today to find great keywords and content ideas.

1. Google Keyword Planner

Google keyword planner is the first tool to start keyword research with. It finds keyword ideas around a seed keyword and provides search volume data along with that.

However, on its own, the Keyword Planner shows a very limited number of keywords. For every seed keyword it shows around 800 related keyword ideas whereas there are a lot many more keywords waiting to be discovered. To overcome this constraint use keyword suggestion tools to generate more keywords.

Another important feature of keyword planner is that it allows users to add their own keywords generated elsewhere, and get the search volume and cpc data for those keywords.

2. SeoStack Chrome extension

Seostack keyword tool Chrome extension

The SeoStack Chrome extension is a tool that generates keyword suggestions from Google and Youtube using a seed keyword. Its absolutely free.

It modifies the original keyword by adding alphabets and numbers and then uses it to generate keyword suggestions. This way, it is able to generate upto 400 keyword suggestions around each seed keyword.
It also supports specifying multiple seed keywords at once.

3. Google Trends

Google Trends is used to determine the popularity of keywords and discover new keywords that have been trending recently.

As a keyword research tool, Google Trends can reveal new keywords that only few of your competitors would be knowing about. Such keywords can often have low competition since they are new and few or no one is targeting them yet.

4. AnswerThePublic

answerthepublic.com keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic is a simple keyword suggestion tool that generates keywords from Google autocomplete. Similar to SeoStack, it adds modifiers to the original seed keyword including alphabets, numbers and query terms and then generates hundreds of keyword suggestions around each seed keyword.

5. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is another very simple keyword suggestion tool that generates keywords from Google. It is a free web based tool and is quite old and popular too.

It can generate upto around 300-400 keyword suggestions per seed keyword. Then each of the resulting keyword can be further expanded to produce more keywords under it.

6. Hypersuggest

Hypersuggest is similar to Ubersuggest but along with Google it fetches keywords from Youtube too. Web based and very simple to use. Hypersuggest supports adding modifiers to the seed keyword both by prefixing and suffixing. This allows it to produce it more keywords than Ubersuggest.

It also has predefined templates for adding question based modifiers like “who, what, when, where, why, how”. This allows users to quickly search for question-style keywords around seed keywords.

7. Soovle

Soovle is yet another keyword suggestion utility. It is web based and supports lots of engine including google, bing, yahoo, amazon, ebay, youtube and more.

However it is limited in the amount of keywords generated. It does not use any modifiers with original keyword and therefore fetches only about 8-10 keyword suggestions around the seed keyword as it is.

8. SeoChat keyword suggestion tool

This tool generates keywords from Google, Bing, Youtube and Amazon. Uses alphabets a-z to modify the original keyword and generates keyword suggestions using them. Expect upto 300 keywords from each search engine which makes it over 1000 keywords.

9. SeoChat related keywords tool

This is another useful tool from SeoChat. It provides upto 8-10 related keyword phrases for a given keyword phrase. It then allows to dig further to get related keywords for each of the related keywords retrieved in the first step.

Related keywords are those keywords that appear at the bottom in google search results marked as “Related”. These are another great source of finding keyword ideas.

10. Bing webmasters tool

The Bing webmaster tool is similar to Keyword planner and it shows keywords related to a seed keyword, along with search volume data. However this data comes from the Bing search engine. The searches are those that were made on bing.com

11. Google webmasters

The Google webmasters tool is used to find what keywords your website is ranking for. It often reveals many keywords that you did not target in your content, but Google sees those related to your content.

In this way, Google itself tells you the related keywords for your site and these keywords give you opportunities to write more unique content to further boost seo.

Conclusion

Each keyword tool has different features in terms of where it fetches keywords from, and what additional data is made available.

Keyword Planner and Bing Webmasters Tool allow users to directly access keyword data along with search volumes. Whereas the rest of the keyword suggestion tools just find similar keywords.

So go ahead and use all those keyword tools to do some great keyword research and then write great content for SEO.