Finding the right amount and type of keywords is a delicate balance. As a site owner, you need to choose relevant keywords that are both frequently searched for and in high demand. At the same time, these keywords shouldn’t be already used by several other websites and competitors. Thus, these keywords need to have low competition.

Indeed, there are a number of keyword research tools to help you find them.

Check out these free keyword research tools below to help you start or continue optimizing your site and gain better search rankings with search engines.

Keyword Surfer

Keyword Surfer is a free Chrome extension that allows you to easily see estimated global and monthly search volumes for any query searched on Google. You can view and analyze search volume estimates and related keywords for 70 countries, which offers a wide range of keyword research data.

To conduct keyword research, you simply type your target keywords on Google and press enter. Keyword Surfer will provide a variety of information, such as search volumes, keyword suggestions, related terms, visibility metrics, and even on-page data. If the word you searched for is not a common search term, you will not get any search volume results.

For example, if you search for “wilmington nc apple harvest,” this will yield a monthly search volume of 0. This means that very few people have searched for that phrase during the past month. However, if you search for “wilmington nc web design,” this will yield a monthly search volume of 170, which means it’s a more popular phrase to search.

Google Keyword Tool

Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. This tool helps you locate specific keywords that are important and useful to your business. The statistics are useful for understanding how often keywords are searched for and how these keywords change with time. Google offers this resource for free and only requires you to have a Google account to get started.

Features of this tool include:

  • Sorting the results of your desired keyword search by popularity, past performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position.
  • Easy keyword manipulation where you can select a few keywords or add them all at once.
  • Searches for keywords present in any webpage URL specified by your search. This tool can expand your keyword search even further to include those pages that are linked to or from the original URL page.
  • More keyword results are generated based on a regularly updated usage statistics database. This helps you to get new keywords or phrases.

Keyword Tool

Keyword Tool is another free research tool that generates over 750 long-tail keyword suggestions for each keyword or phrase that you search. If you need to quickly research keywords, Keyword Tool lets you get started without creating an account. This tool uses Google Autocomplete to find keywords that people search for. With Google Autocomplete, users are automatically shown relevant keyword suggestions when they type something in the Google search box. Indeed, this tool uses data to provide easy and effective keyword suggestions for users.

After overviewing these three keyword research tools, you can see how useful they are for researching how people search the web. Once you have your keyword research, you can use this to help optimize your own web pages, so that more people will find your website.