Semalt: Tools To Help You Get Better Keyword Data For Content Marketing

Keyword research tools are great sources of insight every professional must use. They can easily gather and sort through data making our Job a lot easier. With the rising demand for better audience understanding and the rise in competition, we need these tools now more than ever. 

When it comes to SEO, keyword research is one of the foundational elements. Skipping keyword research to focus on "creating content" can be catastrophic. We cannot emphasize enough how important keyword research is to any content. 

When you rush to create content, you fail to account for the different stages of your targets audience buyers' journey. Keyword research shows which keywords to use in the beginning phases and which keywords to use when the target audience is closer to buying. 

As professionals who hope to deliver the very best service, we need to know what it is your audience wants to see. We need to know how and what they search so we can meet these needs. 

As a buyer approaches the final stages in the buyer's journey, the nature of the keywords, we use changes. It is at that point we use keywords like flash sales, discounts, local stores, online stores more often. We do this because our readers are ready to make their final purchase, so we prompt them to do so. 

Google's Ads Keyword Planner is probably the first keyword researching tool you came across. That is because it is owned by the biggest and probably the most influential, Google. However, Google is also careful on how much useful keyword data it gives away, which makes this tool limited. The results we get from it are mostly vague and insufficient to take strategic action. 

Some keyword research tools give keyword data reports that are in many ways irrelevant in organic search. But there are still amazing tools that provide sufficient data, which we use in creating successful marketing campaigns. 

In this article, we have gathered a list of top-class SEO keyword researching tools as alternatives you can try. 

Doing proper research usually means analyzing your competition's contents. While we have tools like Semrush and Ahrefs at our disposal, they usually come with a hefty price tag. At their cheapest, some of these popular tools can charge as much as $100 / monthly. 

If you aren't planning on becoming a full-time SEO expert, spending that much on a tool isn't logical. As experts, we also need some free tools to reduce costs, and TagCrowd is one tool that has our interest. 

TagCrowd is a simple tool that visually represents word frequency by creating text/tag clouds and words. The ability to see what your competitor is trying to rank for gives us a better chance at understanding their keyword strategy. And in this case, no expensive tools are required. 

TagCrowd has a simple interface, and first-time users should struggle to understand how it works. There are multiple ways to add and analyze content. Users can:

Keyword.guru is another amazing tool that collates its results from top search engines like Yahoo, Google, Bing. It also gathers data from e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay. 

Keyword Guru delivers real-time results based on what people are searching for at that moment. Rather than giving data on search volume, Keyword Guru displays data on the searches with the most frequency for any seed keyword. 

Using real-time search results makes it easier for us to deduce the most common keyword phrases are the most common, which gives us an advantage over your competition. 

AlsoAsked is a free keyword research tool that collects its data from Google's People also ask. It suggests the connections between topics and helpful visuals. Like AnsweThePublic, AlsoAsked provides additional content to Google data. 

Whether or not you know, this tool depends on your level of awareness regarding free keyword research tools. Unlike many other tools you will find on this list, Google Search Data is quite popular. 

Even without leaving google, there is a wealth of data you can collect. There are three search features that can help you discover new topics and article structures that will improve your SEO performance. 

Autocomplete: Google's Autocomplete is their way of making things easier for online searchers. As SEO experts, we see it as a tool to figure out which keywords are currently trending. 

Google's auto-complete shares search suggestions that include long-tail keywords you should be optimizing for based on actual user data. 

People Also Ask: it has a lot in common with Autocomplete, but instead of focusing on long-tail keywords, it shares the most common questions searchers ask relating to your keywords. The data gathered from here gives great subheadings and snippet ideas. You can also answer some of these questions on your FAQ pages. 

Related Searches: this is used to find other similar keywords that don't necessarily involve the exact same words as the keyword. They make sense because they suggest other related topics that should be mentioned in your content. It shows similar topics that your target audience is interested in. 

Story Base is a premium keyword research tool that focuses on the details around a searcher's intent and characteristics. This is the perfect tool for brands who want to connect to their audience on a deeper level. If you want to connect with your most ideal target audience in search, you will need this tool. 

Story Base maps out various data points together so we can find a pattern and make sense of a trend quickly. The paid plan also grants us access to other useful analysis tools to track keyword performance and heatmaps. 

Merchant Words is the perfect tool for Amazon store owners. As a research tool, merchant words collect data from over 1 billion Amazon searches across the globe. This means you have direct access to what searchers are in need of. 

Merchant words calculate volume using a proprietary algorithm that considers Amazon traffic, search ranking, and search trends (both current and historical). 

From its name, it isn't difficult to deduce what this tool does. It sweeps out keywords for a living. The tool works by sorting through Google Autocomplete for search queries. At first glance, it catches too many keywords. But, we can activate filters to reduce the keywords and get more relevant keywords. 

Keyworddit is simply the Reddit keyword research tool. It offers another opportunity for SEO marketers to optimize their keyword research by finding better ways to connect with their audience. 

Diving into Reddit marketing may not be as difficult as many may assume, but it does require some experience as a user. Your strategies wouldn't be effective until you've played around as a user and understand how it really works. Once you do, you will understand how Reddit provides unique audience insights. 

Keyworddit is a goldmine for ideas. 

Any good SEO strategy must include keyword research.

It is no longer possible to say you've done keyword research using only the data gotten from the Google Ads Keyword Planner. The good news is that there are many other tools that do an excellent job at finding and analyzing keyword data. Both free and paid tools are available for users to choose from. 

While popular paid keyword research tools offer the most useful and robust data, free tools can still be quite useful. Considering that they are free, it wouldn't hurt to try them out.