By Jay Bemis | Advertising Systems Inc.
Choosing the right keywords that people use when they search online for a new product or service long has been crucial for any business that’s starting a content-management campaign.
Whether you’re a start-up trying to market yourself on your own or with a small staff, or you’ve decided to outsource your marketing campaign to a professional agency, it’s important to understand what keywords are and how they work to get your company’s name atop search results — and in front of potential customers.
There are literally dozens of keyword tools in cyberspace, many of them free, that help B2B and B2C companies find and understand the right keywords to use in their search marketing.
In today’s blog, we present five such tools.
We’ve identified these tools by simply typing the phrase “popular keyword tools” into a Google browser and finding which tools appear more often in stories and blogs in Google’s first-page results. (And, no, we didn’t use those results that were branded with a tag of “ad,” or those who might have bought their way into the results.)
Here’s our list of five tools:
Google Keyword Planner
The most popular search engine, Google also is home to one of the most used keyword tools for search engine optimization (SEO): Keyword Planner.
Once you’ve studied and learned the Keyword Planner basics, you can also discover new keywords that are related to your business, research how often those keywords are used and uncover which keywords your competitors have been using to get their names atop such results.
“How can we get our name on the first page of Google searches” is a question often asked in business meetings, so “using Google’s Keyword Planner” would be a perfect answer for your superiors sitting around the conference table. Knowing which keywords are most relevant to your company can provide good secondary answers that might arise from that table as well.
Soovle
Keyword tools can be uniquely named, and “Soovle” is certainly one of them. (Sort of rhymes with Google?) Unique tool names not on our brief list here today, but also arising often in our search results as more popular, include such titles as Ubersuggest, SpyFu and Answer the Public.
Soovle’s Keywords Everywhere delivers such findings as monthly search volume for your words, cost per click and data from the competition for your list of keywords.
One reason Soovle is popular is that it also shows you “people also search” queries from several major search engines, including Google but also the likes of YouTube, Amazon, Bing and Yahoo.
Moz’s Keyword Explorer
Not only can you analyze keywords by search volume with the Moz Keyword Explorer, but, particularly after you’ve learned how keywords work, you can perform SERP (Search Engine Results Page) analysis on the top web pages that rank for a specific keyword or topic with this tool.
Moz offers a free trial for the tool for 30 days, but then you or your company must pay to continue its use. However, once you’ve learned your way around the product and decide to buy in, you can perform such tasks as generating and saving keyword lists, finding questions in keywords format, and performing competitive keyword analysis on “those other guys” and girls.
SEMrush
This tool also comes at a cost, but once you start using its “SEO toolkit,” you can impress the boss with such comprehensive analytics as organic research, keyword gaps that are giving the competition more results, backlink gaps you’ve found, and position rankings for desktop, mobile and tablets.
The 11-year-old, Boston-based enterprise claims that marketers from such big companies as Philips, Forbes, PayPal and Hyatt now use the SEMrush suite of SEO tools.
Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool, the most simply and aptly named product on this list o’ five, focuses heavily on long-tail keywords, or those that are more specific and less common than other keywords but tend to bring more conversion results to your products and services. It also is free, but it offers a “Keyword Tool Pro” version for those who are ready to go beyond wading into the keyword cyberspace.
Both the free and pro versions of Keyword Tool use such Google features as Autocomplete and Suggest to help you and your company in such vital areas as content creation, SEO and pay-per click advertising.
So, are you ready to become an SEO and keywords pro? Surf the tools we’ve presented here to determine which you might like. Or, if you outsource your marketing to an agency with expertise, ask one of its consultants what might be the best tool to brandish on your competition.
