My 5 Favorite Free Keyword Research Tools (and Tips)
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If you search my site for “keywords” or “search engines,” you’ll quickly see a common theme. When it comes to keywords, guessing or surmising isn’t good enough. You need to conduct research and due diligence to effectively target your market.
What are your potential customers using to find your products/services/business? Do you know? For sure?
Research Customer Keywords
Most people think of SEO as “keywords.” That’s just one piece of the SEO puzzle, but we’ll start there. Instead, you should think of keyword phrases. You’ll never rank for one word; even two- to three-word competitive phrases are difficult. More on that later.
Keyword phrase research should be part of your site development from the start and is an ongoing effort. It is a never-ending process as you grow your site and add new content.
By constantly reviewing your keyword phrase pool, you’ll uncover nuggets that may not be as competitive and, even better, more targeted. That means more potential site visitors for you.
Forget One-word “Keywords”
Many online businesses create a list of terms off the top of their head. They all start with one word, “keywords,” for which they want to rank—that’s not going to happen. In addition, these are usually the words they “think,” not know, customers will use to find their website—big diff.
What would surprise these same site owners is that their target market may be using an entirely different set of keyword phrases when searching for their products or services. Add tags, typos, and misspellings to the mix, and you will be surprised at the number of keyword phrases used in searches that you probably never even considered.
SEO is Not Set and Forget
How can you expect to get found if you are not actively thinking about SEO in everything you do on your website? SEO must be considered for every piece of content created for your site.
That’s why I use and recommend the Yoast SEO plugin to help you with this effort. My favorite feature is the Readability score, which, combined with Grammarly, enables you to become a better web writer over time.
How can you begin adding content to your site to target your market proactively? First, integrate the terms used to find what you have to offer.
Getting found in search engines, which means getting ranked, doesn’t happen by osmosis. Every site owner needs to do their homework to increase their site’s “findability.”
The reality is that ignoring or disregarding SEO efforts is simply a lost opportunity. Pin in a haystack kind of stuff.
Here’s a handful of online tools you can use to investigate what your potential customers may be using to find what you have to offer.
Keyword Research Tools That I Use
FREE: Find new keywords for your market…
Create Your Lists
Use the above tools, and you’ll have a pretty comprehensive list, probably overwhelming, of keyword phrases that you can potentially use.
You’ll want to create two lists.
Don’t forget to include common misspellings, typos, and plural versions. Now that you have your lists, you know what phrases to feature in everything you do: page titles, image alt tags, meta descriptions, and headlines.
What is your next step? Check out my bullseye marketing tips to establish your core terms on your website.
At your service,
*Some of the links on this page are to companies with which I have a professional affiliation.
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