Do you want to get free traffic to your website?
One of the best ways to build a stream of steady free traffic that will lead to a sustainable income stream is through blogging.
But there is blogging and then there is blogging while doing keyword research using effective keyword tools.
In many ways, blogging without doing keyword research is like driving with your eyes closed.
You’ll get some traffic, but where and when are you going to end up (on Google)?
If you have no specific search terms where you want your website to appear, you basically have no plan for your business.
If you want to find the perfect keywords to target, you’re going to need to do keyword research.
In order to do keyword research properly, you’re going to need advanced keyword tools.
Here are five amazing keyword tools every blogger should know about.
Table of Contents
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is actually a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.
Whenever you search for something in Google, three important search metrics will appear under the Google search bar.
These metrics are:
1. Average searches per month
2. Average cost for PPC
3. Competition for PPC on a scale between 0 and 1
Not only that, but when you scroll down to the bottom of the search results where Google gives you related search terms, these three metrics will appear beside each and every result!
This is a great way to find profitable keywords straight from Google.
Keywords Everywhere has another cool feature: You can highlight and right-click on any word and there will be an option of getting search metrics for that word or group of words.
Keywords Everywhere was made by the same people who created Keyword Keg, an online based keyword tool. It really uses the same data.
The advantage of using Keywords Everywhere is that you can do your keyword research straight from Google.com!
The disadvantage of using Keywords Everywhere is that there is no competition data for SEO, only for PPC.
However, it’s still very useful and since it’s free, there’s no reason not to use it.
Traffic Travis
Traffic Travis was created by Mark Ling, super affiliate millionaire and owner of Affilorama, Learn Build Earn, Salehoo, and many other successful Clickbank products in various niches, such as Total Money Magnetism, Manifestation Miracle, Meet Your Sweet, and more.
Traffic Travis has some really cool features. For every keyword, it will give you a score (easy, medium, hard etc) of how hard it is to rank for that keyword.
This is based on various SEO factors such as domain authority of the competing websites.
You’ll also get metrics such as the average domain authority and Alexa score of the top three or 10 websites for any keyword, or how many backlinks each website has on average.
Traffic Travis is free to use, although there is a professional version that costs $97 a year.
The free version is limited in how many keywords you can track your own rankings for in the keyword tracking tool.
There are some disadvantages of Traffic Travis. First of all, it pulls the average searches per month from Google’s Keyword Planner.
We all know that the Google Keyword Planner is far from accurate; it puts keywords into rounded up buckets and can be hundreds or even thousands of searches off.
In addition, Traffic Travis is a Windows desktop application. There is no way to get it on a Mac or Chromebook.
For the most part, however, Traffic Travis is an amazing tool.
Long Tail Pro
Long Tail Pro is a web-based keyword tool and is one of the most popular Clickbank products in the internet marketing niche.
It will give you the average searches per month for every keyword, along with the average bid in Google Adwords.
This data is also pulled from the Google Keyword Planner, as in Traffic Travis.
The cool part of Long Tail Pro is that they will analyze your website, give it a score based on its age, authority and backlinks, and then compare each keyword to your own website and tell you whether or not you will have a good chance to rank for that keyword.
This is a great way of knowing whether you will be wasting your time when targeting a particular keyword. Of course, I’m sure this tool isn’t perfect.
Long Tail Pro costs $37 a month for 10,000 searches, though there are higher priced plans. Your first seven days are free!
Jaaxy
Jaaxy is a very sophisticated keyword tool created by Kyle Loudoun and Carson Lim, owners of Wealthy Affiliate.
Jaaxy has very accurate data when it comes to how many searches per month a keyword gets; they don’t just pull it from Google’s Keyword Planner.
In addition, they also have a score that will tell you how hard it will be to rank for a particular keyword, based on the competition.
There are also red, yellow and green lights for each keyword that tell you if a keyword is hard or easy to rank for. They also give you PPC competition analysis.
The part about Jaaxy that I like the most is something that no other keyword tool does: They tell you how many websites are competing for the exact keyword you want to rank for.
By the exact keyword, I mean word for word; how many websites are using the entire long tail keyword.
They recommend that you don’t target a keyword that has more than 300 competing websites, though under 100 is ideal.
Jaaxy has other cool features as well, such as the ability to track your rankings, tools for finding domain names and affiliate programs, and much more.
Jaaxy starts at $49/month – though the first 30 searches are free!
Wealthy Affiliate’s Keyword Tool
The Wealthy Affiliate Keyword tool is very similar to Jaaxy. It’s basically Jaaxy without the bells and whistles.
However, it does all the basic things to get the job done – you can find how many searches a keyword gets per month and how many websites are competing for each keyword, as well as a score of 1 to 10 that tells you how hard it will be to rank for a keyword.
There is also a PPC competition score.
This article was written by Ben Levin.
Ben is a writer, blogger and internet marketer. He loves blogging and New York. You can find more at his blog (CanItReallyBeTrue.com).
If you have any questions or thoughts on any of the keyword tools within this article, we’d love to hear your comments below…
Great explanation! I was hoping to learn more about why the total number of monthly searches for Keywords Everywhere and Jaaxy have been VERY different.
One long tail keyword I wanted to try said it had 1300 monthly searches on Keywords Everywhere while Jaaxy stated the exact same keyword phrase had less than 10/month.
How would one know which is right? Thanks!
Thanks for stopping by, Liz! 🙂
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to answer that question because keyword tools pull results from various sources on the web and also use different metrics to make calculations when it comes to traffic numbers and competition, etc.
As for Keywords Everywhere, it’s a tool I’ve never used for my own research because I’ve used Jaaxy for years since it’s never let me down with locating the right keywords for rankings and traffic. So I trust Jaaxy’s results 100%.
I think if you’re still sitting on the fence over the 10 – 1300/monthly search results (which is a massive gap), then write an article on your chosen long tail keyword to find out which keyword tool out of the two is correct.
But my money’s on Jaaxy lol.