Free Tools For Competitor Keyword Research

1.Open Site Explorer also falls under the SEOmoz tools umbrella, so once you’re logged in to SEOmoz, you have access to this as well. To use this tool for keyword ideas, enter the competitor’s URL and go to the Anchor Text Distribution tab.

2. Google AdWords Keyword Tool
I know, I know, we all know about Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Usually I use the type in a word and let it make suggestions for me aspect, but for this exercise, I entered a domain to see what would happen.The key is to go to the Columns, and check Extracted From Webpage.

3. SEMRush
SEMRush allows you to enter a domain and view ten of the top keywords that the website ranks for organically, showing the keyword, position in search results, traffic percentage, and other useful information, especially if you are going to use CPC for your website.It also shows what URL on the site ranks for the specific keyword, but I removed that column to make the image fit in the space above.

4. Alexa
Aside from just giving you your traffic score, Alexa also gives you the chance to see keyword queries that bring a high percent of traffic to a particular URL. Just go to the Site Info tab and enter your competitor’s URL. Once you Get Details, go to the Search Analytics tab to see top queries driving traffic to the site, and keywords that are on the rise / decline.

 

An important thing to keep in mind is that just because your competitor(s) are bidding on given keywords or showing up high for them, does not necessarily mean those are the best keywords or the right keywords for your business.

Sure, as a rule of thumb, when using the Google AdWords planner, the more folks are bidding on a keyword, the more popular it is. But that doesn't always mean those keywords convert well. In fact, more so, it means that they are simply high volume terms. They may also drive conversions, but not necessarily at a rate that will fit your budget.

For example, a company with deep pockets may be willing to spend up to $35 per conversion on a product they sell directly. But their affiliates may only be able to afford up to $7 per conversion when they are buying traffic. So if they were trying to compete with the bigger company on AdWords by mimicking their PPC bids and keywords, they would likely blow through their budget and not meet their ROI goals.

The other issue is these competitors of yours may not know what they are doing, and could be bidding aggressively and or targeting terms that don't perform well. Then when you and other competitors see one company doing this, everyone else starts copying each other and it becomes a bit of an echo chamber.

 

One pretty cool free keyword research tool that I came across a while back is http://www.keywordrevealer.com/

Unfortunately, it only allows you to search about 5 times a day, when I first found it, it was unlimited, but I guess the owner decided that they wanted to make some bucks.

 

I just signed up for this tool (not the paid version) to see what its all about. Although the pricing is very reasonable, honestly, you could do everything the tool offers for free in Excel with the Google Keyword Tool. The couple keywords I searched for produced results almost identical to what I am getting from Google's Keyword Tool. The only additional value they are bringing to the table is calculating a competition score for each keyword. That calculation is usually just something like the Avg. CPC for the term times the number of monthly searches or clicks, or some variation on that.

The Brainstorming and Rank Checker sections were off limits to me since I'm not a paying subscriber. But the brainstorming part can also be easily done in Excel by simply appending word lists to your existing keyword list, such as state names, cities, or question phrases. The rank checker I suspect is only limited to a small number of keywords - which again, you could do with a tool such as SEOTools for Excel.

 

Which tool are you talking about? Are you talking about the tool that I posted, or the one that the OP posted?

 

I am giving the prefer for SEM Rush. This is the best tool for competitor keyword research.

 

I was referring to the link that you posted.

The other issue I am noticing is by using this tool, which I'm assuming is pulling from Google's keyword planner, you are missing out on all the filtering options that Google offers which are not presented here, such as geographic filtering if you only want estimates from US traffic instead of worldwide, or time of day filtering, filtering for people only on specific devices, etc...

It's an interesting tool, but it needs to be more robust imo. The data it's currently presenting is either already freely available, or it's stuff you can simply calculate in Excel on your own. For example, you can do a word count in Excel by using the Substitute and Len functions. First do a Substitute to replace all spaces in the keyword phrase with nothing to remove the spaces, then do a Len on this minus the Len on the keyword phrase with the spaces, and add 1 to give you your word count. So in other words the length of "pet supplies online" minus the length of "petsuppliesonline" + 1 gives you 3, or 3 words.

Some other keyword services that came to mind would be Wordtracker, which has been around for over 10 years now and they have a great tool for drilling down on keyword phrases to find related ones. Some other ones would be Trellian's keyword tool, and Wordstream.

 

When I am looking at this, I see one tool that is overlooked that can be free if you limit your searches. Traffic Travis I found is a great way to get additional traffic to your website for keywords. Not only that this tool appears to be a complete tool because it provides market research as well.

 

How about Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools (for page indexing) and Bing Webmaster Tools and SEO Analyzer? All these tools are equally important when you're doing SEO for your websites. I also recommend SEO Book for checking keyword density and page rank per keyword (download their tool if you must).

 

Interesting read. Thanks for sharing awesome advice to us!

 

To size up my competition for a particular keyword, i simply use the search engine . If there are a sizable number of Google adwords at the right side of the resulting search, it would mean competition is heavy so i would continue my search for those narrower keyword phrase that have less competition.

 

Alexa is one of the best tools. It provides the competitor linking strategy. SEM rush is good one but for newbies to SEO I think alexa is a good start

 

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Google keyword planner is the best and effective tools for keyword research.

 

In my point of view semrush, alexa and keyword planner tools are potential.

 

Great thread Thanks for sharing superb advice to us!

 

Some of the best free tools to check competitor backlinks are:

Moz SEO tools
Majestic SEO tools

 

Google Keyword Planner tool.