The 5 Best Free Keyword Tools

If you want to be successful with SEO you need to know which keywords are easy to rank on and write articles that target these keywords.

However, how can you find such keywords? The goal is to find keywords that are easy to rank (low competition) and still have enough traffic so it is worth to work on.

To easily find these keywords it is wise to use a keyword tool. I’m sure there are much more than the five I mention. However, these are the tools that I use and I can recommend.

The title says that the keywords are all free and that is correct. However, there are usually paid plans for each keyword tool. With the paid membership you get usually more keywords, more searches or more data.

Should I pay for a keyword tool?

I wouldn’t see it as cost and more as an investment. Because if you find keywords that your competitor doesn’t you can easily rank faster and higher than your competitor and have a big advantage.

That’s why I am paying for some keyword tools and I can recommend to you to do the same!

So here is my list of my favorite keyword tools 🙂

Jaaxy

Jaaxy is one of my favorite tools when it comes to keywords research. You enter a keyword and within seconds you can see whether a keyword is easy to rank on or not.

What really helps are the “traffic lights” that show you if a keyword is good (green), average (yellow) or poor (red). However, the disadvantage of Jaaxy is that they don’t have any information about paid traffic.

If you are only interested in free traffic than this tool is great but if you are searching for good keywords for your PPC campaign I would use another keyword tool.

Keyword.io

When I need new ideas I’m using Keyword.io. You enter a keyword and you get a huge list of long tail keywords.

That has two advantages. On the one side, it is much easier to rank on long tail keywords as it is on short keywords. So, for example, it is much easier to rank on “how to do affiliate marketing for beginners” than on “affiliate marketing beginners”.

On the other side, it is easy to find new ideas. So, for example, if you enter “affiliate marketing” you get a list of 450 keywords. I’m sure you’ll find at least one new keyword you have an idea you could write about.

SemRush

SemRush is also a great keyword tool to get a lot of information about a specific keyword. The functionality is very similar to Jaaxy.

However, the advantage of SemRush is that they also offer information about PPC campaigns. That means you get information about how much you need to pay for a specific keyword, ect..

SpyFu

SpyFu is another great tool with a lot of functionality. One the one side SpyFu is a great tool to spy on your competitors’ website. You can easily see the keywords they are ranking on and for what keywords they are paying.

On the other side, you can get a lot of information about specific keywords. You get information about traffic volumes, competitors, cost per click (PPC), and the ranking history.

Google’s Keyword Planner

If you have been working with Google Adwords I’m sure you already know the keyword planner from Google.

It is not as detailed as the other tools, but you can still get data about the search volume and the competitors. However, the data is only very rough data. For example, for the keyword “affiliate marketing” you get a search volume of 10,000 to 100,000 searches per month and the competition is medium.

Of course, you can use that data but I would recommend using the other tools to find specific data. However, this tool is also great to find ideas. You can use the function “find similar keywords” to find new ideas for new posts.

Conclusion

As you can see there are many very good keyword tools out there. Together with these tools, I can always find new keywords and ideas I can realize.

Now I want to hear more from you! What is your favorite keyword tool and why?