Are you ready to buy-in to the SEO game and finally realized that search traffic needs to be a part of your online success strategy? Good. Now do you know how to find out which keywords you should be aiming to rank for? Probably not. Unless you’re an online marketer or an SEO specialist.
Here I’m going to show you the three tools you can use, for free, to get started at targeting keywords for your SEO campaign.
Find Out What Keywords Your Competition Is Ranking For
To get started, let’s take a look at your competition. Particularly, your successful competition.
Who cares what your competitors are doing if it’s not working. Except of course to just make sure you’re not doing the same thing.
Free SEO Tool #1: SEMRush
While SEMRush is offered as a minimal usage tool without creating a paid account, you can still get some very valuable information out of it without having to pay. Head over there and enter your competitors website address.
SEMRush will spit out a bunch of useful information, but we’re focused here just on what keywords they are ranking for (while you’re here you can see who they consider other competitors and do some spying on them as well). In the left sidebar underneath “Organic Research”, you’ll be able to see where the website you entered ranks in the top 200 and what their search engine ranking positions are. The video below is a more detailed look from the SEMRush team at using this organic research tool to spy on your competitors.
Free SEO Tool #2: Ubersuggest
I mention Ubersuggest among the 5 quick, easy and free keyword research tools article I wrote for Business2Community (along with four other great tools you should check out).
You know when you start typing into the Google search bar and it shows the drop down with automatically generated ideas based on what you are typing? Well instead of trying to remember what is popping up there and using that for your keyword ideas, Ubersuggest will spew out a giant list based on this Google search term ideas list.
Now that you have a list of keywords that your competitors are ranking for, head over to Ubersuggest and put in each keyword. When Ubersuggest gives you the giant list back, scroll through the page and star the ones that you are interested in learning more about. Then scroll back up the top of the page and on the right you’ll see those selected words listed and a button that says “Generate”. Click that button and copy your list of keywords into a text file. After you’ve done that for all of your competitors’ keywords and saved all of your keyword ideas in a text file, it’s time for the final tool in the Keyword Campaign process we’re creating today.
Free SEO Tool #3: Google Keyword Tool
Using the Google Keyword Tool, you’ll be able to find out exactly how many people are searching for your desired keywords every month.
Sometimes this process can be a real dream crusher as I’ve had plenty of clients in the past request that they rank on the first page of Google for something and then I have to tell them that only 4 people are searching for that term per month 🙁 Sorry, guys, you don’t know your customers as well as you thought you did.
Go back to that text file with all of your keyword ideas, select all and copy.
In the Google Keyword Tool, paste in your list of keywords. Look in the left sidebar for “Match Types” and deselect Broad and select Exact. This way you’ll get the number of people searching for the exact phrase you are researching, not phrases that are related to it and use some of the same words.
Click search and you will get a list of how many people are searching for those specified keywords every month. By clicking on the top header of the table “Local Monthly Searches” (local means your country, not your state or city), you can sort the list by most searched keyword terms.
Generating Your Targeted Keywords List
Here you can scroll through the list and click the star next to the keywords that you want to target and they will all go into the “Saved Ideas” list on the bottom left of the browser. When you’re done, you can highlight and copy that list for safe keeping.
What Keyword Research Tools Do You Use?
Are you using any of the tools listed here? What other tools would you recommend? Have you found success by spying on your competitors and targeting similar keywords? Leave your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!