How to do Keyword Research for Free - Free keyword tools for SEO

So now that we understand keywords a little bit better, let's talk about how we can do Keyword Research for free in 2023. Before we dive deep into that we also want to cover what makes a good keyword and what makes it.

What makes a good keyword?

 We're basically after three main things, the first one being volume: 

Volume

So this is just a fancy way of saying how often people are looking for that specific keyword, so obviously, the more people searching for that specific keyword, the more business you will get. But on the flip side, the higher the search volume, the more competitive it is since there's gonna be more people trying to fight for that traffic. So if we're starting at, we're ideally looking for keywords that still have a decent number in volume.

Competition

What does it mean when a keyword is competitive or not if you guys are new? Yes, your space, you're gonna be hearing about this a lot. And this is actually the second thing that we're looking at when we're looking at a good keyword and we're trying to find a cure that has low competition.

The term competition inside of this is a bit more complex topic, but it basically has to do with how much authority your competitors have for that specific keyword and we determine authority in SEO with this idea of backlinks.

We're going to be talking a little bit about backlinks later in this mini. Of course. But all we need to know for now is that the more competitive keyword is all it means is that your competitors have more high-quality backlinks pointing to their website, which means that they have more authority inside of Google's eyes, which means that it's going to be harder for you to rank against them, especially if you have a brand new website.

So if we have a brand new website, we are looking for keywords. They have a huge difficulty of between zero to 10, right? We consider this term of competitiveness with this metric of keyword difficulty.

Content

The third thing that we're looking after for a great keyword is the content. So once we've passed the first two checks, there's decent search volume and it isn't too competitive. We just want to scan the content of our competitors, the people that are ranking for that keyword, see what angles they're taking, see the type of content they're creating, and see if there's a space.

If there's something that they missed that we can provide it to the search engine, Once we have all those three things, that makes a perfect keyword where we can perform and get traffic to our website.

How do we find these keywords? 

For starters, those initial keywords should be pretty easy. They should be the keywords that are closest to your main business, The main service, the main product, and the main software that you're offering.

You obviously gonna have more services that you offer. If that's the case, then each of those services will have its own type of keyword research and specific keywords that we want to target with our content. 

We're going to be talking about content a little bit later as well, but if you aren't too sure about the main keyword that you want to target, I recommend checking out your competitors.

If you know who your competitors are, scan their content. See what patterns of keywords you find on their content to be pretty easy. To see what they're trying to rank for and what those main keywords are.

3 Free Keyword Research Tools

 3 free tools that can give you quite a completely free keyword research process: 

For keyword ideation - Answer the public 

The first one I like to use in the ideation phase, so when I'm not even sure what keyword I want to target, I go to this specific tool. And this tool is called Answer the Public here.

Where do get a bunch of different ideas here, which is gonna help us define all the possible keywords that we could be targeting? So there's gonna be a lot of questions that we can target.

A lot of data here and it is completely free. So I'd recommend this tool in the ideation phase. After that, we found a couple of keywords that were interesting.

Search volumes - Surfer keyword extension 

After that, once we found a couple of keywords that were interested in, I then recommend installing this Chrome extension right here. Keyword surfer. With that we're going to be able to do. Is if I type in divorce lawyer in New York City, we're going to be able to see that search volume, which we can see right here.

So estimated search volume around 2000 monthly searches. We can also change countries here if we'd like if we're talking a different country and we get some keyword ideas, which is quite neat. The one thing that we're missing here is how competitive this keyword is. We do get a pretty good idea here by taking a look at the CPC. So this is how much people are willing to pay inside of the Google ads auction for this specific keyword $24.00. So definitely a very competitive keyword. 

 Ahrefs free competition checker - Keyword Difficulty Checker

And the last tool that I recommend to have a more complete keyword research process is the keyword difficulty checker. This is a free tool by HF so if I type in divorce lawyer New York. Let's just say that we're gonna get pretty neat summary of this keyword, how difficult it is.

So again we're taking a look at that keyword difficulty score where I was recommending at least starting from zero to a 10 and we also get the top ten results for this specific keyword. With these three free tools we can have a really complete keyword research process, and now we know more or less what we're looking for.

In the next episode of this mini SEO course, we're going to be talking about content, how that fits in with keywords, and what type of content we should be creating learn more to Click here.