Stop! Before you even begin writing content for your website—in fact, before you buy your domain name—you need to do some keyword research. If you continue without it, you risk derailing the entire SEO campaign from the get-go. Keyword research is utterly imperative for SEO. Why? Because you need to know the search queries potential visitors are inputting so that your pages can rank well and draw in organic traffic. We’ve compiled a list of some of the best free resources for keyword research. These tools are indispensable.

Adwords Keyword Planner

Now, to be clear, the Google Adwords Keyword Planner is meant for creating Adwords campaigns. But I use it to get an idea of traffic. Here’s how it works. There are four categories to choose from. The first, “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas” is pretty awesome. It comes in handy when you’re at a loss for keyword ideas by presenting some of the most searched-for keyword combinations that relate to whatever keyword base you type in.
The second category is “Get search volume for a list of keywords”. This option helps you visualize total search volume for a group of keywords. But more pertinent to our needs is the third category, “Get traffic forecasts for a list of keywords”. Here, you type in a bunch of keywords and combinations that you have in mind, and the system returns figures including their search frequency and rate of competition. You can save lists of keywords to later use the fourth category, “Multiply keyword lists to get new keyword ideas” to go all-out in the search for ideas.

Soovle.com

This free tool is not as comprehensive as Adwords’ Keyword Planner, but its simple function serves a very important purpose. Basically, it’s a tool to test the autocomplete functions on a number of different search engines including Wikipedia, Answers.com, YouTube, Google, Bing, Yahoo and Amazon.com. As you type in a search query, you’ll see the different engines’ autocomplete script working. As you modify your query, the autocomplete lists modify. What you’re seeing is the most-searched-for content with those keywords, in the order in which you introduce them.
Soovle is an excellent tool that allows you to see, for example, that after “pizza”, “pizza hut” is the most searched for term on Google, while “pizza challenge” is the most searched for on YouTube. With Soovle, you can really narrow down the best keyword combo to target.

Ubersuggest

In the same vein as Soovle is Ubersuggest, a keyword research tool that takes what Soovle does live and gives you a huge, alphabetical lineup of possibilities in a results list. For example, if you type in “travel”, Ubersuggest returns a list of the top searches for “travel + a”, “travel + b”, “travel + c”, “travel + 2” and so on. What is great about Ubersuggest is that it reduces the time it takes to type in all those search queries. In the end, there is no better tool between Ubersuggest and Soovle—they’re both useful for different purposes and tastes.

Screaming Frog

Finally, I present to you the Screaming Frog. It is not in fact a keyword research tool. It’s a free piece of fabulous software that you can use to crawl your entire website. This is particularly useful if and when you decide that you had forgone keyword research in the beginning, and now would be a good time to implement it.
What Screaming Frog does is crawl your site and create a pretty excel sheet of all your pages. It will provide you with the meta descriptions, titles, keywords, and also the H1 and H2 titles. It’ll give you the length of these elements and the word count of each individual page. How does this fall into an article about keyword research resources? It’s the software you will use in order to organize how you will implement keywords. It is also useful if you just want to manage what you already have.

With these tools in stow, you will have little trouble figuring out how best to align your keyword strategy. Of course, there are many other tools out there, so if you have a suggestion that you just can’t live without, please add it to the mix in our comments section below!