So, AI has officially disrupted SEO. It has become even harder to compete. We’ll need all the help we can get from different SEO tools.
To start in SEO, you of course will need some keyword research tools. But if you look at the plans of well-known tools like Ahrefs or SurferSEO, not every beginner can afford those monthly fees!
So in this blog post, I will review the top FREE keyword research tools we can add to our arsenal this year
SurferSEO Chrome Extention
This neat tool is called Keyword Surfer Chrome extension. It’s a part of Surfer SEO and gives you cool keyword ideas and volumes right there in your Google search results.
For example, if you search for “best fireplace tools”, this extension will show you related keywords and their search volumes. So you will quickly find that your original keyword idea wasn’t great because there is another related keyword “fireplace tool set” that has 22k search volume vs just 480 in the first keyword idea you had.
It also adds to the search results a lot of information about the competitor’s pages that rank high here – like the estimated traffic volume to each page, the word count on each page, and how many times the exact keyword was used on them.
Google Trends
Then, there’s Google Trends – totally free and super helpful. Just make sure you have the right country settings. For example, I want to target US-based audience with my content, so I’ve set this to the United States. Now, you can spot new and rising keywords in your niche, like if you’re into fashion, type that here as the initial keyword.
I would suggest one more setting here. By default, it will show you the growth for the past day but to see a trend you need a bigger timeframe. I would change this at least to the past 12 months.
If you scroll down the page, Google Trends will show you the Related Topics and Related Queries, which give a lot more keyword ideas and you can see how trendy they are.
You won’t get the exact keyword search volume in Google Trends but it’s a good place to start your research on topics that people currently care about.
Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics is another awesome tool. It’s free and lets you see what’s buzzing in different niches. So, your research will start with pulling up these categories.
Say you selected “ecommerce”, then you can spot trends like AI generators that are picking up steam, especially since last year. Super useful for finding fresh topics that aren’t too competitive yet.
Blog Ideas Generator
The next FREE tool is the Blog Ideas Generator from Hubspot. Start by adding what your blog is about, and this free tool will create title ideas and suggested SEO keywords for you in seconds. If you don’t have a HubSpot free account, you’ll be prompted to create one. It is totally free, and you don’t have to add a credit card.
After my input, it gave me a list of titles and SEO keyword ideas based on what my blog is about. You can check which one you like the most, generate more options based on your preferred one, and then you can even create an outline for the blog post.
On top of that, you can generate a draft of your blog post with a template, and initial AI-generated sections for you to edit, and add your unique ideas and perspective. This is a great and free tool to make your blog writing process faster and easier.
