If you’ve ever launched a website, published content, or sold something online, you know search engine optimization is key to getting eyes on what you build. And keyword research is a core part of optimizing your site.

This is an important process to improve your site’s rankings and grow your search traffic. By researching keywords, you can learn about the terms mostly used by search engine users and then strategically include them in your content to boost SEO.

When done right, the best SEO keyword research tools simplify and streamline your SEO workflow. They make it easier to find the right keywords to target and give you the data you need to actually rank for them. When done poorly, they can complicate your search and slow you down.

In this article, we’ll share the very best keyword research tools that experts use to grow their website traffic.

Moz Keyword Explorer (Web)

Moz‘s SEO platform offers several different tools designed for keyword research. While Moz doesn’t include as many data points as some of the other full-featured SEO tools (like SERP position history or the total number of keywords a competing result ranks for), we consider that a benefit. It makes for a less overwhelming user experience for those who aren’t professional search marketers, without skimping on the metrics you really want.

SEMrush (Paid)

SEMrush is the best keyword research tool for SEO. It has different toolkits like SEO toolkit, content marketing toolkit, competitive research toolkit, etc. So, you can do SEO, content marketing, competitor research, and social media marketing all from this single tool.

Using SEMrush, you can conduct keyword research. You get access to six different tools like keyword overview, organic research, keyword magic tool, keyword gap, keyword manager, and organic traffic insight. Using these tools, you can find out any keywords value, analyze the list of your competitor’s keywords, etc. 

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a free tool from Neil Patel that offers search volume data, keyword suggestions, an idea of how difficult your keyword will be to rank for (keyword difficulty), and more.

As well as seeing lots of suggestions for related keywords, you can view a table of the top 100 Google results for that keyword, with estimated visits, number of backlinks, a domain score, and a total number of social shares.

Soovle

Soovle is a tool that provides suggestion services from Bing, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, etc. It suggests the trending keywords sorted in alphabetical order. This program helps you to save your keyword suggestions.

Features:

• You can easily switch from one search engine to another.
• It allows you to customize searching options.
• You can know suggestions by performing a search on the given search engine.
• You can reuse saved items in the future.

Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is really designed for use by advertisers who want to run their ads on Google. However it’s still a useful tool for SEO, and unlike other paid tools, this is free to use.

To access it, you’ll need a Google Ads account. If you don’t already have one, then you’ll need to create one and enter your payment details, but you don’t need to run an active campaign or pay for anything.