Three Great Keyword Research Ideas for SEO and PPC

Finding the right keywords to target is an important part of any brand’s search marketing strategy. Whether you’re focused on SEO, or PPC, conducting keyword research is essential. In this article, we’ll show you some quick ways you can find keywords to use for PPC and SEO.

Keyword idea generation is one part of keyword research. And, while mapping target keywords to pages or campaigns is important and essential, this post is focused on helping you find ways to quickly generate keywords for your consideration.

We’ll cover three tools that can help you quickly find keywords for evaluation. These are all free tools, but some do require an account. Paid keyword research tools do offer benefits and should be considered as well, but for this article, we wanted to focus on free offerings that can be used by anyone.

AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a free service and website that lets you better understand what people are interested in on the web (keep in mind, without an account, your free searches are limited by the day). It’s simple: you put in a keyword, select the country, and language, and execute your search. AnswerThePublic will then display questions and variations of your inputted keyword for your consideration. It saves you time by generating a set of keywords you could or could not leverage for your website content. Download the CSV it provides, as we’ll use this file later.

Moz Keyword Planner

Moz’s Keyword Explorer is also free to use with a Moz account. Like AnswerThePublic, without a paid subscription, free usage is limited. Keyword Explorer can also be used to understand more details around keywords you’re interested in targeting. Go to the tool, input your seed keyword, and you can find keywords to consider along with monthly volume metrics, difficulty ratings, and more. There’s also an export function and should you use Keyword Explorer to gather keyword ideas, you should export keyword ideas that you think might be a good fit for your content.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is another tool you can use to both get keyword ideas, along with metrics associated with those keywords. Keep in mind, Google Keyword Planner is part of the Google Ads platform, so if you haven’t signed up for Google Ads yet, you’ll need to do that first. If you already have a Google account, use that to complete the sign-up process. To use the tool without having to create a Google Ads campaign, use the option to create an account with a campaign. This way you can bypass having to spend money to access Google Keyword Planner.

Google Keyword Planner lets you input seed keywords and get ideas, but it can also provide helpful insights on ideas you already have before you load up the tool. Because Google Keyword Planner offers both functions, it’s both insightful and powerful.

As mentioned above, Google Keyword Planner can provide insights with keywords that already have your interest. To get those insights, you can upload CSVs into Google Keyword Planner and review the historical metrics. Doing so enables you to make better decisions around what keywords you want to target with your content.

Wrap-up

Finding the right keywords can take time, effort, and multiple tools. There are no shortcuts with keyword research. However, qualified SEO professionals can help speed up the process. Here at Hammer Marketing our team of digital marketing experts can help do the heavy lifting and research keywords your business can leverage. Start showing up in search for relevant queries that your customers are using. Give us a shout to get started.