With all the options on the Internet these days there are quite a lot of Google Adwords keyword tools available which are free. As a search marketer I’ve tested over 20 keyword research tools throughout my career – if you can believe it.
As were all short on time let’s talk about my favorite Google Adwords keyword tools which I use today to perform keyword research.
I’ll include the top 5 free keyword research tools followed by a free trial to the #1 paid keyword research tool.
What is keyword research?
Research to find out what language your target audience is using.
To take a quick step back let’s discuss what exactly keyword research is. Keyword research is the act of researching for potential words or groups of words that your target market maybe using in their day today. As marketers, it is primarily our job to understand our target market and then determine how we will reach them. The important bit to keep in mind is that your target market is likely not searching for your exact product or service they are actually searching for a solution or an answer to their problem.
So let’s say you’re a freelance Google Adwords manager. You’re performing some keyword research to target potential people that might be interested in your service. You wouldn’t necessarily want to target ‘freelance Google Adwords manager’ as a keyword. You would want to target the keyword ‘Google Adwords management’ or even ‘search advertising manager’ or ‘management’.
Right? So it’s not always clear to us what keywords we need to target just simply by knowing our product or service. So what we need to do is keyword research to find out what our potential target audience is calling our product or service or what words they are using to search for our product or service. In the previous example, keyword research actually showed us that those looking for someone to manage their Google ads don’t necessarily use the word ‘freelance.’
How often should you perform keyword research?
Start with a solid foundation, then determine the frequency.
When we think frequency keyword research it’s really up to you as the advertiser or brand marketer. When you are first building your Google Adwords account it’s really important to spend a few hours on keyword research to really build a solid foundation in your Adwords account. From there perhaps you decide you’ll perform new keyword research every quarter or every six months depending on how much time you’ve got available.
Google Adwords keyword research tools
Now that we’ve briefly chatted about what keyword research is, why we do keyword research, and how often you should perform keyword research let’s get into the actual tools we’ll use.
First let’s chat through Google Adwords keyword tools that are free. I would always recommend exhausting all of the free keyword research tools prior to paying for one. If you use all of these free research tools that I’m going to go through you should not need to spend any money on a paid keyword research tool. So let’s get straight into them.
In my opinion, the top Google Adwords keyword research tool is Google’s very own Google keyword planner. In order to access the Google keyword planner, you will click the link here sign into any Google Adwords account, in the top navigation bar you will select tools and settings and then under planner you will select keyword planner.
At the next screen, you will select discover new keywords. You will then have two options to begin performing your Google keyword research. The first option would be to start with keywords. Go ahead and type in a few keywords that are closely related to the product or service that you offer. So if you are a Hairstylist you can type in things like beautician, hair cutting, hair styling, etc. Make sure that you have selected the correct country you are intending to target as well as the language. You’ll then click get results and Google will give you all of the keywords that you typed in plus some more suggestions that they have come up with that might also be relevant to your brand.
I’ll do another post for Google keyword research, but on this page, you are likely going to want to look for keywords that have low competition but high average search volume. In the Google keyword planner results you will see both competition and average search volume columns so pay particular attention to these when you’re determining what keywords to use.
If you remember there was also the option to start with a website. So go ahead and hit back or navigate again to the Google keyword planner and select start with a website which is right next to start with keywords option.
Now all you’ll do is type in your domain so that simply is your website URL so it’ll start with https:// followed by www. this will give you all of the keywords that Google can currently find on your website. If you type in your domain and you find that Google can’t find any keywords on your site then go ahead and choose your top local competitor, grab their domain name and enter it into this box. You’ll click get results and Google will show you all of the keywords that it can find on your competitor’s site.
If this gets you going check out my blog article on how to spy on your competition for free.
Export all the good keywords into an excel document where you will add more keywords as we use different tools
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Keywords everywhere is my second favourite Google Adwords keyword tool because it’s so simple to use and it gets me so excited to see all of the keyword possibilities right there in front of me. So go ahead and navigate to the keywords everywhere website by clicking here and download the extension based on what browser you are using.
Once you’ve downloaded the extension and added it to Chrome (for example) I would highly recommend having this present in your bookmark bar or somewhere where you can easily access it. You’ll then click on the extension and flip the on/off button in the top left corner to on. You’ll then select the country that you’d like to target, keep in mind that this extension is only applicable with a handful of countries so if your country isn’t listed you’ll need to opt for the global option.
With the extension on go ahead and navigate to google.com and perform a manual Google search using one of your main keywords that describes your product or service. Let’s say, for example, you are a dog groomer. Go ahead and manually type in dog grooming in your Google search and scroll down and look at the right side of the results page. You should see the keywords everywhere extension show three separate boxes. These boxes include related keywords, people also searched for, trending keywords and my personal favourite longtail keywords.
So now we’ve taken our keyword dog grooming, and in the long tail keywords box, we can see the keywords dog grooming near me, dog grooming courses, dog grooming kit, mobile dog grooming near me. So now we’ve found upwards of 50 additional keywords that are highly relevant to our business that we could also target.
Grab all of the relevant keywords and throw them into that excel document that we started in #1.
Google trends is another completely free Google keyword research tool go ahead and click here to access the tool now. As its name suggests, Google trends will give us the overall trend of a search term or a topic over time. This isn’t going to give you specific keyword data however it is valuable information when you’re trying to determine how your industry is trending.
Now that you’re at the website go ahead and type in a keyword that is closely related to the product or service that you offer. Let’s say you are a Google Adwords manager and you want to see how the Google Adwords topic is trending. Go ahead and type in Google Adwords and hit enter. On the second screen, you want to make sure that you update the country and the time period based on the information you’re intending to evaluate. Personally, I’ll change the country to Australia and I’m just going to keep the date range to the past 12 months, to get an idea of seasonality over the year. If you just wanted to look at recent trends you could just select the last few months or the last quarter.
The main chart will give you the interest over time rounded as a number. You can scroll down further and you’ll see the interest by subregion on a really beautiful map. You’ll also see related topics which are closely related topics to the term that you’ve typed in. Feel free to click into these boxes if you’d like to check them out further. Lastly, you will see related queries so this will generally be based on what people are typing into the search box which are closely related to the search term that you’ve typed in.
Make sure that especially with Google trends that you really take this with a grain of salt. I generally just use Google trends to see the rise of a particular keyword or industry which will help me formulate what sort of blog articles I will write, or even what industries to target. This is also helpful if you see a client’s account performance dropped last month, you can take a look into Google trends and see if the industry as a whole has actually dropped as well. So this is a tool that you could use to back up the story you’re telling.
Ready to level up your keyword research?
Sign up for Semrush free trial today.
The number four free Google Adwords keyword tool that I use is Ubersuggest by Neil Patel. If you’ve not heard of Neil Patel he is an absolute legend in all things search so go ahead and take a peek at his YouTube channel if you want to be inspired.
Let’s click this link here to navigate to the ubersuggest keyword research tool. On the main page you will go ahead and either enter your domain, so your website starting with https://www. or a keyword that closely embodies your product or service. Make sure that you’ve selected the correct language and country and hit search.
For this example, we are going to pretend that we are a freelance Facebook marketer so we will type in Facebook advertising into the box, select English as the language, and Australia as the country. You will need to register in order to use this tool so just keep that in mind I generally choose to sign in with my Google account.
With the free version once you do sign in you will get three free daily searches so also keep this in mind before you got too excited and start typing in a million keywords.
So back to it, we’ve typed in Facebook advertising and we’re going to navigate in the left panel to keywords and then keyword ideas. Much like the Google keyword planner, you will see a lot of stats on this page like volume, CPC which is cost per click, paid difficulty and SEO difficulty. Again here we want to go for keywords that have a low difficulty so that just means that a lot of other advertisers aren’t advertising on that keyword.
If you are looking for keywords to potentially write blog topics on then, of course, you would go for a keyword with an SEO difficulty that is less than 40 but still a high volume number.
Grab and good keyword that you like from this tool and go ahead and paste into your master keyword excel document.
The last Google Adwords keyword tool that is completely free is answer the public. this tool is quite powerful because it will give you all of the questions that people are typing in on a daily basis. You as the marketer should be thinking about how your product or service will answer a question or potential problem that a user is having.
So go ahead and click this link here and navigate to the answer the public website. Go ahead and type in the keyword that is closely related to your product or service into the search box, and make sure the country and language align with your brand. For this example, let’s pretend that we are a google ads expert and we’re looking for topics that we can create content around. So we will type in google ads, select Australia as the country and English as the language. We can now see the visualisation graph of all of the questions, users have typed in, over the last day that have pertained to Google ads.
Here we can see 67 questions in total and at any time we can switch from visualisation to data to simply see a list of all of the questions. If you scroll down you will also see prepositions, comparisons and questions that are related. This is my absolute jam because I love seeing all of the questions, or problems rather that people are having with Google ads. If you’re creative like me your mind starts to go into a million different directions thinking of all the blog articles you can write to speak directly to these questions, or solutions you can provide.
If you’re ready to dip your toes into a paid keyword research tool then Semrush is for you. This platform is the best opportunity to get ahead of your competitors.
Ready to level up your keyword research?
Sign up for Semrush free trial today.
In Summary
Looking for keywords with high search volume but low competition.
Google keyword research is the act of researching for new keywords that your potential customer is typing into the search box in their day-to-day. There are five Google Adwords keyword tools that are completely free that I went over today. These include Google keyword planner, Keywords Everywhere, Google Trends, Ubersuggest, and Answer The Public.
Keep in mind that it’s all about looking for keywords that have high search volume, or people are actually searching for them, and those that have low competition so not a lot of other advertisers are advertising on them.
What other Google keyword research tools do you love to use? Let me know in the comments.