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Getting the right people to visit your charity’s website is important to spreading your message. This is where keyword research comes in. Using the right keywords for your Google Ad Grants campaigns can add a boost to organic searches and have your website rank higher on the Google Search page, for the right people to see.
While it’s possible to do keyword research for your campaigns manually, doing it right can be time consuming and may keep you from other tasks that require your attention. Below are 10 of the best keyword research tools that can help simplify the keyword research process for you while providing you with insights and analysis of keywords that are relevant to your organisation.
10 Keyword Research Tools for you to try:
Google Keyword Planner
ads.google.com/aw/keywordplanner (built into Google Ads)
Free to use.
Keyword Planner is Google Ads’ free and official tool that helps you find and optimise your keywords to help your ads reach the right audience.
To get started, you have the option to start with keywords or with a website. By choosing the former you just have to enter words or phrases relevant to your organisation in the search box and click ‘Get Results’.
This Google Ads built-in keyword research tool shows you keyword ideas based on your given keyword. It also gives you a variety of helpful data: search volume trends, average monthly searches per keyword, historical stats, top of page bid estimate, and more. Think of a keyword forecast to help you get a better idea of your keyword performance. This will help you determine the right keywords that perform the best.
Google’s Keyword Planner also shows you suggested competitive bids for your keywords to give you better insight to your advertising budget. Planning your advertising budget ahead of time is crucial to the success of your ad campaign.
Remember, choosing the right keywords for your ad campaign is helpful to getting your organisation’s message across to the right people - don’t forget to weed out irrelevant keywords!
Google Trends
Free to use.
Google Trends is another powerful tool you can use to get a sense of what people are searching for or talking about. By randomly sampling time and geography-based data, Google Trends gives insights to top and rising AKA “trending” searches at a given time and region or city.
This gives a unique and normalised insight into Google users’ interest in particular topics or search terms and put them in context with related keywords. It’s important to note, however, that datasets from Google Trends don’t perfectly mirror search activity. Topics, queries, and locations are instead given a score on a scale from 0-100, where 100 is the most searched related query or the location with the most searches of the given topic.
It’s important to note that Google Trends’ sole focus is to provide data for popular terms and not search terms with low volume. The tool also filters out duplicate searches and Google searches that include special characters.
Google Search Console
Free to use.
While Google’s Search Console tool isn’t exclusively for keywords research or analysis, the tool shows you which search results and sites bring people to your organisation’s site, as well as analyze your site’s impressions, clicks, and ranking on Google Search. Basically, Search Console helps you see how your site is viewed by Google. These are all important if you would like to track and monitor how your ad campaign is performing!
In addition to that, the Search Console also lets you monitor, test, and track AMP pages, as well as test and improve your site’s compatibility and usability on mobile.
Keyword Tool
Free & Paid Subscription.
While not an official Google tool, Keyword Tool is a free online keyword research that uses Google’s Autocomplete feature to generate up to 750+ relevant keywords, in a matter of seconds. Basically, Keyword Tool extracts keyword suggestions from Google and gives it to you in a more digestible and user-friendly interface.
The free version doesn’t require you to create an account. Just type in your ‘seed keyword’ (or the keyword where you want to start off) and select the country and language you would like to get results for.
You will be given keyword ideas, questions, and prepositions using data from Google Suggest.
If you want to take your keyword research further, you can opt for Keyword Tool Pro’s monthly subscription. The paid version of the tool gives you an estimate of twice the amount of keywords generated by the free version, allows you to use more than 5 negative keywords, and presents you with data to sort and rank the keyword suggestions by search volume, trend, competition level, and cost-per-click (CPC), along with historical statistics over the last 12 months.
Keywords Everywhere
Paid Subscription required.
Keywords Everywhere is an easy-to-install paid extension available to Chrome and Firefox browser users.
This convenient tool supplies you with all the vital data you need to know in doing keyword research like average search volume, cost-per-click, and competitor data for both single keywords and long-tail phrases.
What sets Keywords Everywhere from other keyword research tool is its pay-as-you-go system. There’s no monthly subscription, you can purchase 100,000 credits for only $10 and start getting search volume data right under your Google Search bar.
On top of that, Keywords Everywhere also provides key metrics of “People Also Search For” and “Related” keywords from both Google and Bing’s search engines.
Just don’t forget to turn off the extension when you don’t need it to save your credits!
AnswerThePublic
Free Version: max of 3 searches a day
Paid Subscription: unlimited searches and users
AnswerThePublic uses data from Google (and other search engines) Autocomplete to show you useful phrases and questions that users search for in relation to your keyword. This gives you insight into how real people look up topics and questions relevant to your keywords that may be less common, to help you select better and more optimized keywords for your ad campaign.
Just like the Keyword Tool, just enter your seed keyword, click ‘Search’ and you’ll be presented with keywords ideas from search engine autocomplete data. You can even choose to have your data visualised through a correlation wheel.
PRO-TIP: You can actually use AnswerThePublic along with Keywords Everywhere to get instant search volume for all your keyword ideas. Just turn on your Keywords Everywhere extension before you enter your seed keywords in AnswerThePublic.
Ubersuggest
Free to use.
Ubersuggest is a free all-around SEO marketing tool. Among its many features, it has a Keyword Suggestions feature that provides you with suggestions as well as data on volume, competition, and CPC per keyword.
The tool also generates a list of keywords relevant to yours based on your competitors’ keywords performance and people’s Google searches.
To help you create content for your site, Ubersuggest provides an estimated competition score for both paid and organic searches along with content ideas by giving you insight into top-performing content pieces for the keywords of your choice to ensure you create content that people are interested in.
Ahrefs
Paid Subscription required.
Ahrefs is another tool with features such as backlink and content research, rank tracking, and keyword research. The tool provides you with insight to keywords that your competitors rank for in organic search, as well as traffic driven by said keywords.
screengrab from https://ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer
With a basic monthly subscription of $99/month, Ahrefs boasts data of 150 million keywords in the US and even more for 150+ other countries for increased coverage, as well as a fast development cycle.
SEMrush
Paid Subscription required.
SEMrush is an online marketing toolkit that comes with a Keyword Research tool that provides you with keywords used by your competitors and industry leaders to rank their sites in Google’s top results.
CPC, search volume, and other metrics are still shown but what sets this tool apart from others is the addition of top ad copies that appear for your analysed keyword.
For multilingual sites, SEMrush also offers keyword research for 16 languages. This should help any global organisation better reach their target audience.
Moz
Free Version: limited searches a day
Paid Subscription: up to 5,000 keywords per month
Although Moz is mainly used for SEO solutions, their Keyword Explorer can help you you a great deal in figuring out which keywords to best prioritise and target. The Keyword Explorer Tool can further supplement your SEO strategy with its in-depth SERP analysis of keywords which lets you focus on relevant long-tail keywords and assess your target keyword’s strength against existing competition.
