Five Keyword Tools to Help Online Marketing

The most successful online marketing campaigns are the ones that best anticipate the keywords and phrases that potential customers are typing into their search engine. Without the right keywords, there’s no search engine optimization, or SEO, and your campaign isn’t going to get off the ground.

If you’re a small business owner who wants to expand your online marketing efforts, but you’re not sure how to optimize keywords for SEO, don’t worry. There are several online tools to help you refine your terms and boost your traffic. Here’s a look at a few of the most common ones.

KeywordTool.io (http://keywordtool.io)

This free site provides relevant keywords in the language of your choosing from Google, YouTube, Bing or the App Store. Even better, if offers the option of displaying questions as well as keywords, giving you a better idea of how people are searching for specific things. For instance, if you’re a bike shop owner and you type in the keywords ‘hybrid bicycle,’ you can see people asking such queries as ‘How much are hybrid bicycles?’ ‘What hybrid bike is best?’ and ‘Which hybrid bicycle is the best value?’ Upgrade to the pro version to get stats on search frequency and competition level between keywords.

Soovle (http://soovle.com)

Soovle is a free site that displays keyword results from a multitude of different websites and search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia and YouTube. You can add or remove sites to make the results more tailored to your specific business. As you type and refine your search terms, Soovle updates the results from each of the different sites you’ve chosen to display. At any time, you can toggle between the results to make a different set display in the centre of the screen. You can also save searches to check later. All the results are also clickable, including the ‘Soovled Link’ right below the search box, the first link likely to display on your main site of choice. On a separate page, you can check daily results of the most-searched terms, sorted alphabetically. This site is especially helpful if you’re trying to brainstorm ideas for a new ad campaign or content strategy.

Ubersuggest (http://ubersuggest.org)

Another free site, Ubersuggest bills itself as ‘Suggest on steroids,’ and it certainly does a lot of heavy lifting. Type your search term into the box, choose your language and desired location, then choose what type of results you’d like (such as web, news, shopping and video). Click to bring up an alphabetized and numerical list of related terms. For example, search ‘Local organic food,” and it will display ‘Local organic food Alberta,’ ‘Local organic food bulk,’ and ‘Local organic food co-op’ under each letter grouping, a great way to find useful related results. Click on the green plus sign next to any keyword you’d like to keep, and it’ll be added to a list at the top right of the page where you can cut and paste your favourites for use elsewhere.

Google AdWords Keyword Planner (https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner)

The big, bad, granddaddy of keyword tools is the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. You’ll need an AdWords account to get the most out of it, but it doesn’t have to cost you any anything unless you choose to bid on specific words to try and promote your content within Google’s search results. Your searches can be sorted into matches that are broad, exact, or a phrase match that includes all the words from your search term. Results are also broken down by competition, either high, medium or low, as well as by global and local monthly searches, giving you a rough idea of how frequently people are looking for specific keywords. You can also multiply lists of keywords together, such as services and locations, to give you even more suggestions of relevant search terms.

Social Media Sites

Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Google Plus might not provide all the same fancy data breakdowns or related suggestions as the other keyword tools, but they do offer one feature that makes them especially worthwhile: they’re current. See what’s trending in your city, country or around the world, and you’ll instantly know exactly what people are talking about at that instant. From there, you can use hashtags and a little creativity to find keywords related to hot, relevant topics, and tailor your marketing content accordingly.