27 Keyword Research Tools To Dig Up More Conversions (Prt 1 of 3)

Having a good PPC campaign isn’t just about trying to out-bid your competitors on the keywords they’re bidding on.

And having a good content strategy isn’t just about finding tiny traffic pools based off low-competition keywords.

That’s only scratching the surface.

It can help, sure, but neglecting to do your own keyword research for PPC means you could very well be missing out on golden opportunities to optimize your budget.

Let’s chat before we reach this point – GIF source

You gotta dig a little deeper to discover those keywords you haven’t even thought of.

For example, uncovering long-tail versions of shorter keyword phrases that are frequently bidded on means that you’ve found a less competitive (and likely lower-priced) phrase to bid on.

Keyword research can also help you make sure you’re not leaving out important keyword sets:

“I recently did some [keyword research] models for a company spending $20+ million on paid and 40% of their products were not represented in the keyword set,”

said Bill Hunt in an interview with Search Engine Watch.

You know you don’t want to be the company spending millions (or even thousands) on ads only to be missing out on traffic for nearly half of your products. Proper keyword research helps you avoid that.

Why Keyword Research Matters for Content, Too

SEO and content marketing via search rankings are two sides of the same keyword research coin.

If your blog posts and landing page copy aren’t in line with the keywords you’re trying to rank for, your efforts won’t be nearly as effective as they could be.

Plus, there’s a huge difference in content that’s adored and shared by your existing audience and content that’s adored and shared by your existing audience and adored and shared by people who found it in a web search.

And once you’ve got a list of solid keywords you want to rank for, the actual work of making sure your pages are SEO optimized for those keywords isn’t that hard.

The key is simply finding those keywords… and ones that can help you blow past your competition.

“80% of SEOs and marketers do keyword research wrong. They plug in a main keyword to Google’s Keyword Planner, download the results, and then start sorting through them in a spreadsheet. But here’s the thing: literally thousands of other marketers have already searched the exact same keyword.” -- Neil Patel.

So the important thing is to do what no one else is taking the time or effort to do… and that’s digging through multiple tools to uncover uncommon keywords that can still provide a huge benefit.

27 Keyword Research Tools That’ll Help You Dominate the Competition… Fast

So now that we’re all in agreement that we should research our keywords for your company SEM and content plans, let’s explore some different keyword research tools.

AdWords Reports: Search Terms 

This one’s the big one.

We’ve already discussed a bit on the importance of uncovering search terms for the sake of improving your SEO-focused content offerings, but this is the place where you actually go to find those things.

Basically, a search term is what people type in to both trigger your ads to get displayed and for them to be subsequently clicked on. Costing you money, but hopefully sending you a qualified, buy-ready visitor.

To find these search terms, go into the “Campaigns” section of your company AdWords accountand click on the “Keywords” tab.

Click on “Keywords” then on “Search Terms” to see what phrases people are using to get to your site.

Now you’ll see a list of all the terms people typed into Google’s search box to get your ads to trigger and prompt a click out of them.

You might find some totally irrelevant things, in which you’d want to add those phrases to your negative keyword list, but you may also uncover phrases you haven’t thought about bidding on before or realize there’s a gaping hole in your on-site content that you need to fill to better lead prospects through your funnel and into leads.

Hint: To see search terms, you will have to set your keywords to broad match rather than phrase match or exact match.

It might reduce the ROI of your budget in the meantime, but if you pay close attention to the search queries and act on them properly, that short loss in ROI could be a good investment in and of itself.

Google Keyword Planner

Remember back in the day when the Google Keyword Tool was available to anyone and everyone to look up keywords, see search volumes, and get an idea of the competition?

Google decided to revoke that privilege to the internet as a whole, but in its place, they have created the Google Keyword Planner, which is easily accessible via any AdWords account.

Click on the “Tools” option of the Google AdWords main menu bar… it’s the last option on the right. Select “Keyword Planner” in the drop-down menu that pops up.

Here’s where you can access Keyword Planner from within your AdWords account.

To find new keywords, enter a generic term for what you want to advertise for, pick your location if it’s relevant, along with your product category.

Google helps you narrow down which keywords to include by guiding you with things like category and location.

Google will give you data on the average monthly searches, ad group ideas that you could implement into your AdWords campaigns, along with single keyword ideas.

Get an idea of average monthly searches, competition, and how much you should bid and spend on a PPC campaign.

Using this tool is a great way to get a jump start if you’re adding keywords for a new product or service.

For a more in-depth guide to this tool, check out Backlinko’s chapter dedicated specifically to using the Keyword Planner.

FreshKey

This tool lets you toggle between searches from all kinds of sites: Google, Amazon, Bing, Etsy, Ebay, YouTube, and so on, helping you identify purchase-based trends from sites (like Amazon and Etsy) focused on purchasing, as well as overall trends.

The top searches for each search engine render alphabetically, helping you keep your keyword record-keeping sorted and organized in comparison with the keywords already on your list.

The search engine trends aspect helps you identify brand new or upcoming trends to help you stay ahead of your competition as far as offering keywords to serve people making buy-based searches based on those trends.

Armed with the information FreshKey provides, you’ll know what kind of keyword-based lead magnets you should be creating, and, if needed, how to modify your product names and descriptions to better fit what people are looking for.

This image on FreshKey’s site shows you all the info you have access to in its dashboard.

UberSuggest

This is one of the best tools out there to help you build a truly exhaustive list of potential keywords to work with. (And to help you identify a fairly exhaustive list of negative keywords that you need to employ.)

That, and it couldn’t be easier to use.

When you get to the UberSuggest page, you’ll see a box in the center of it asking for your keyword, the language you want to search in, and what search type you’re interested in.

UberSuggest’s search is easy and straightforward to use.

Then you see a looooong list.

First you see the most popular phrases including your keyword, and then the most popular phrases including your keyword + something, and then UberSuggest goes through the entire alphabet and single-number set for key phrase add-ons.

A LONG list of keywords to sort through.

What’s more, you can click the little plus sign next to each work to expand for even more in-depth searches and specific search queries.

So if I’m interested in getting more SEO traffic for yoga mats sold at Target, I’ll know that adding the word “store” could be important as well as parents looking for yoga mats for their kids at Target.

Even deeper suggestions for longer-tail versions.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog post to get insight on more tools...