At the core of any successful SEO campaign lies a plethora of target keywords that are relevant to your company’s niche. Keywords live and breathe in the search query box on your favorite search engine. However, keywords and their purpose go far beyond this. The keywords typed into a search box reveal certain details about a company’s demographic and how to properly place your content and services in the midst of their searching.

Developing an SEO toolbox of different keyword analysis tools is perfect to ensure no niche is out of reach. With these tools, we believe you can get into the heads of searchers and learn how they search the web for what they’re looking for.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a key tool in any SEO arsenal. SEMrush is a piece of digital marketing software with multiple features necessary for any SEO campaign. As a keyword analysis tool, we use SEMrush to utilize four of their major features – organic search, organic keyword rankings, related keywords, and the keyword difficulty tool.

The software is great for getting valuable, up-to-date data for organic keyword rankings and a proper gauge of the volume of a keyword. SEMrush works well when determining the direction of an SEO campaign. You can use their keyword analysis metrics to see which specific keywords are driving organic traffic to a competitor, allowing you to execute keyword research effectively. SEMrush’s Related Keywords feature gives insight into related keywords to find searched terms to target and out compete your competitors.

When conducting our thematic keyword research, the Keyword Difficulty Tool is a favorite for optimizing our process. You can drop a large quantity of keywords in at a time and receive the data of each in one list.

Google Keyword Planner

The Google Keyword Planner coins their service as a way to “reach the right competitors with the right keywords” and it does just that. The platform uses a seed keyword related to a company’s product or service, and generates the most relevant keywords for your product and business. The interface streamlines the process but allows the user to easily add the keywords they want into their plan.

After snagging the relevant keywords you want to target in your SEO efforts, you can conduct keyword research to find the competition surrounding that keyword and the monthly volume in which that keyword is searched. Google Keyword Planner offers organization of budget and targeted keywords, ensuring you are hitting the right keywords to reach your desired audience.

Lastly, since Google hosts this keyword planner, it’s a breeze to create and share this plan with others on your team, keeping everyone in the loop.

 

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a great keyword analysis tool that we use in our Thematic Keyword Research. With Ahrefs, we can identify the top page visits on a site and which keywords drive traffic to that page. Using this in the beginning of our keyword research helps us dial in on the best opportunities to increase organic traffic to a site and further helps us to redirect our efforts to provide clients with the KPI’s they’re looking for.

In some instances, Ahrefs can be a helpful resource in setting up an SEO campaign in regards to a site’s competitors. Ahrefs provides the organic keywords, their rankings, and the URL they rank from which is key for us to ensure our campaign is competing properly with competitor’s sites and their ranking keywords.

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KeywordTool.io

KeywordTool.io is a time-saving tool to find out what Google would autocomplete a search query with. Since we’re always trying to put valuable content on the screens of users, ensuring we target what users are searching for is key. Using KeywordTool.io to grab some relevant long-tail keywords is perfect to beef up your keyword bank.

 

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a keyword generator that is great for giving topically relevant keywords to add into your SEO campaign. Often times, there are a few keywords that slip under the cracks and Ubersuggest brings them to light. Free of charge, Ubersuggest is a nice tool to have on hand to keep the creative juices flowing when building out keyword research.

 

LSIgraph

LSIgraph is similar to UberSuggest, but plays a bigger role in building out possible latent semantic indexing keywords. When doing keyword analysis or building out thematic keywords to reach other search engine niches, LSIgraph offers a list of around 20+ keyword offerings related to your targeted keywords.

Forums, Quora, and Yahoo Answers

You may not know, or believe it, but internet forums and FAQ pages are an effective way to find relevant niche keywords. Longtail keywords offer more context into what your target audience is asking search engines and how they’re asking it. Getting into the minds of your target audience is crucial to perform goodkeyword analysis and keyword research.

Search for a forum related to your niche, such as “on-page SEO forum”. When you find a forum revolving around your target theme, begin looking into the questions, topics, or repeated phrases used throughout. Those users that are active on forums are often times the exact audience to target in your keyword research and marketing efforts.

Same with FAQ pages. Searching something like “what is white hat linkbuilding” can bring you to a page full of the words that users are searching with. Forums and FAQ pages are perfect ways to simplify the way to reach certain demographics by seeing exactly what users are searching for and the words they’re using to search for those things.


If you’re looking to streamline the way you or your company does keyword analysis and keyword research, take the time to utilize the tools out. Using everytool isn’t the key. The best way to use these tools is to utilize the best features of each and implement them into your own keyword analysis processes.

SEO best practices are all connected. On-site SEO is driven by the optimization of page titles and meta descriptions, and page titles and meta descriptions are created using the thematic keyword research done at the start of an SEO campaign.