What tool do you use for your keyword analysis? How do you find great keywords for your web articles to boost search ranking? Here I look at some Chrome extensions with the info you need.
You write an article, post it on your website and… nothing but crickets. Your site is a ghost town with no-one around. The question is, how to get people to visit your website and read your articles. How do you generate traffic? Search engines like Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo are great sources of traffic, but how do you get your site noticed by them? What do you need to rank on page 1? Great keywords!
People use search engines to search for stuff, obviously, so you have to produce content that matches what people are looking for. Keywords are the words and phrases that people enter into search engines to find things, so it is vitally important to include keywords in your website posts.
This is where keyword research tools are useful and they help you to find the words and phrases that people are searching for so you can include them in titles and body content.
It is a bit more complicated than simply finding popular keywords and there are some big websites out there with big budgets and lots of staff who are killing it for a keyword. If you are a solo blogger or website owner, it is not a good idea to go head to head with them. You need keywords that have a reasonable amount of search traffic, but aren’t targeted by major sites that are impossible to beat.
There are many keyword research tools and some are paid and some are free. A few show limited information for free and try to get you to pay to see the full results.
Here I am going to mainly look at a fairly new Chrome extension that aims to provide keyword research information to help you plan your next web post and make it a success. It is free and easy to use, but it is not the only Chrome extension for finding keywords, so there are some alternatives at the end that you should check out.
Keyword Surfer
Keyword Surfer is a free Chrome extension that aims to provide keyword information and suggestions in the browser when performing searches at Google. It does not do anything on other websites or search engines. It is a Google-only tool.
Search for anything at Google and the results page is modified by the extension to provide keyword information. For example, the search box shows the global and country-specific search volume for the keyword or long tail keyword (several words) you enter.
It goes even further and if you click in the search box, Google provides search suggestions and every one of those is rated too. This is very useful if you are looking for ideas and you can see alternatives and how popular they are.
Below each search result is a new entry inserted by the Keyword Surfer Chrome extension. There is the domain estimated traffic globally and for a specific country, and the domain quality backlinks. These figures give you an idea of the competition and high backlink and traffic numbers mean tough competitors, which you might want to avoid. Sites with low numbers are easier to beat.
On the right side of the search results page is a large panel that contains multiple items, all of which can help with your keyword research. The Similar keywords section shows 10 keywords that are similar to what you searched for and it is a useful source of ideas. The search volume and similarity with the keywords you searched for is displayed.
There are two charts on the right that show quality backlinks and estimated traffic. Let the mouse hover over a point in the chart and information is displayed about it. You can easily see the sites with the most quality backlinks or the sites with the highest traffic.
At the bottom of the right-hand panel is a list of related searches and it is useful for generating extra keyword ideas when there is too much competition for the one you originally searched for.
Conclusion
There are two issues with Keyword Surfer and one is that it shows results for individual countries and the most important one, the US, is missing. This means that you cannot see results for the US. You can see global search volumes and other information, but nothing US-specific. However, the developer has said that it will be added very soon. It may already have been added by the time you read this.
The other issue is how accurate the figures are. All lot of figures that tools like Keyword Surfer and other utilities show are educated guesses. Different tools sometimes show different results. For this reason, don’t make all your keyword decisions based on this one tool. Try a few and also use your intuition and common sense.
Keywords Everywhere – Keyword Tool
Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension used to be free, but most features must now be paid for. You buy credits and these are used to show search volume, cpc and competition data.
In free mode, it simply displays a panel on the right of Google search results showing two things, Related Keywords and People Also Search For. It is OK if you are looking for ideas, but you need credits to show the really useful data.
SeoStack Keyword Tool
SeoStack Keyword Tool has 28,800 users and a very good score in the Chrome Web Store, so this is a free tool that is worth installing. Click the toolbar button and a new tab opens with the keyword research tool. Enter one or more keywords on the left and it will then produce a list of up to 800 long tail keyword suggestions.
It is not perfect and the button to show volume and CPC data does not work. However, it is a great for getting keyword suggestions.
