Adam Sherk

  • About
  • SEO
  • Social Media
  • PR
  • Publishing

The Best Tools for Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis and Trending Topics

October 7, 2014 by Adam Sherk

keyword research toolsEditorial teams and content creators are always on the lookout for useful tools for keyword research and content planning.

To help with that, I’ve put together a list of the best options for keyword research, competitive analysis and monitoring search and social trends.

There is a wide universe of tools out there and my intention is not to cover them all. Instead I’ve highlighted the ones I like best and regularly recommend to editorial teams. I’ve also focused primarily on tools that are free or relatively inexpensive.

If I haven’t included something that you frequently use, let me know and I may add it to the list.

Keyword Research

1. Google AdWords: Keyword Planner
Google’s Keyword Planner has become a hassle for new users to set up since it now requires having an AdWords account. But it is still the preferred choice for keyword research, and it is good to get the data right from the source. You can use Keyword Planner to compare terms, get new content ideas, explore topical categories, monitor seasonality and compare desktop vs. mobile, among other tasks.

2. Google Trends
Editorial teams like using Google Trends because there is no sign-up or login required. It doesn’t provide search volume figures but it’s a quick and easy way to compare various terms and examine both long-term and more recent trends. In addition to drilling down on specific timeframes and topical categories you can focus specifically on Web search, news, image, shopping or YouTube. You can also get weekly email updates on priority terms.

3. KW Finder
KW Finder is a newer tool that I like a lot. It pulls in monthly search volume data from Google Keyword Planner and “interest over time” graphs from Google Trends. This is complimented with competitive data on the top 10 Google results for the keyword and an overall keyword difficulty score. There is a free version (limited to five searches per day) and then the paid versions are very reasonable, especially if you pay annually.

KW Finder

4. Bing Keyword Research
Bing Keyword Research is available within Bing Webmaster Tools. You have to be logged into your profile so this one has less appeal to editorial teams. But it is a useful additional source of data for exploring topics for content planning.

5. Wordstream
Wordstream is a popular paid option. Their main focus is PPC but as with Keyword Planner the data is useful for SEO too. They offer several free tools including a basic keyword tool, a niche finder and a keyword grouper.

6. Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool is handy for pulling suggested search/autocomplete data for Google, Bing and even YouTube. Just enter a term (e.g. “football”) and you’ll get suggested search data for it plus every letter in the alphabet and some other combinations:

keywordtool.io

A good approach is to use Keyword Tool to explore keyword ideas and then plug your main candidates into Google Keyword Planner to get the search volume figures.

7. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest has similar functionality to Keyword Tool. It was first on the scene but Keyword Tool has become more popular of late. When doing more extensive research it’s good to check both because their data does vary a bit. One advantage of Ubersuggest is the ability to drill down on specific verticals like images, news, shopping, videos and recipes.

8. Google Webmaster Tools: Search Queries
While not a keyword research tool, the Search Queries section in Google Webmaster Tools offers a good way to find out what terms are currently driving search impressions and clicks for your site:

Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries

This will help you to understand what’s working and what isn’t, and what topical areas you can potentially expand on. And now that the vast majority of keyword referral data in analytics tools is “not provided” or “keyword unavailable” it’s one of the best available sources for referring terms. Extra tip: try using Supermetrics Data Grabber to extract this data and trend it over time.

Competitive Analysis

1. Site:[domain] searches
One of the easiest ways to mine competitors for keyword and content ideas is to do a site:[domain] search in Google: [site:example.com search term].

competitive analysis search

This will show you what content they’ve created around specific topics and provide insight into their optimization targets too.

2. SEMrush
Plug a competitor’s domain (or your own) into SEMrush and you’ll get a data dump of thousands of keywords that it has top 20 Google visibility for, as well as the specific URLs that are ranking. There’s also a domain comparison report that allows you to see what terms a competitor is ranking for that you are not (or alternatively what intersecting terms you share). In addition SEMrush is a good keyword research tool. It provides search volume figures for matching phrases and related keywords and it has a keyword difficulty scoring system.

3. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is fast becoming the preferred tool for competitive analysis projects. It provides fairly extensive data on the audience and traffic sources for any site (including direct, search, social and paid).

SimilarWeb traffic share

Specific to search, you can drill down on what percentage of total traffic comes from search engines and get a breakdown by engine and vertical (i.e. web, news, image, video and shopping search). It also provides data on ranking terms (for keyword ideas) and top performing pages and sections.

SimilarWeb search traffic by channel

4. Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool
In addition to identifying keyword targets it is also important to get a sense of just how attainable they may be. The Keyword Difficulty Tool from Moz analyzes the top 10 ranking pages and provides data on domain and page authority, link signals and on-page optimization to help you understand what you are up against. A keyword difficulty score is also provided.

Search Trends

1. Google Trends: Hot Searches and Top Charts
By the time a trend makes it to the Hot Searches report in Google Trends it is often too late to capitalize on it. That’s by design. Google used to provide a fresher and longer list but too many sites used it to try to game Google News, so they modified the format. However it still has some basic value and you can also sign up to get email alerts when a new trending topic is added. There is also a Top Charts report that lets you examine popular topics in a variety of categories like business, entertainment, sports and more.

2. Google News: Top Stories
An easy way to see what topics are currently hot in Google News is to check the Top Stories module in the left rail of the homepage:

Google News top stories

Clicking on a particular category like Business, Technology, etc. will also show you the trending topics in that section.

3. Bing News: Trending Topics
Bing News also provides trending topics on its home and section pages, as well as links to news that is trending on Facebook and Twitter.

Social Trends

There are a wide range of tools for monitoring trending topics and content performance in social, too many to try to cover here. But I’ll point out a few free and easy options that I often suggest to editorial teams. For additional suggestions see my post on social media analytics tools for publishers.

1. Social Mention: Trends
The Trends section on Social Mention provides a frequently updated list of the top 20 trending terms across various social channels. The quality of the data has varied in the past but in recent years they have tightened it up. So it’s a good source for a quick check.

2. Buzzsumo
I like Buzzsumo a lot. Enter any domain or topic and get a list of the most shared content across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+. You can filter by the last 24 hours to see recently trending topics or explore larger timeframes for content ideas and competitive analysis.

3. NewsWhip
NewsWhip, an offshoot of the social analytics tool Spike, provides real-time data on editorial content that is trending on social media. It doesn’t provide a list of trending terms but a quick scan of the top headlines will clue you into what the hot topics are. So it is a good source of both ideas and basic competitive analysis. You can filter by location and specific topical categories.

4. The Reddit Edit
The Reddit Edit is a simple dashboard that highlights articles that are currently doing well on the Reddit homepage and some specific subreddits. As with NewsWhip, this will give you a quick sense of who’s doing well and for what topics. There’s also a separate section that highlights trending stories from mainstream news sites.

5. Topsy Social Trends
Topsy’s Social Trends is a good source for monitoring trending topics and articles on Twitter. Select “English” and then “Links” in the left rail and you’ll get fresh data on what content links are currently being shared a lot in tweets.

Related posts:

  1. Yahoo! Search Data (@YahooSearchData) a Good Source of Trending Topics for Lifestyle Publishers
  2. A Simple Workflow for Keyword Research for Content Planning
  3. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
  4. Google Trends Graphs No Longer Embedded in Search Results?
  5. eHow and Mahalo: How Many Keyword Variations is Too Many?

Comments

  1. Renee Silverman says

    October 16, 2014 at 9:28 am

    Thank you for this wealth of information. It’s great to see all the avenues of working with SEO in one place.

  2. Soumya Roy says

    November 10, 2014 at 12:35 pm

    Such an useful article on a really important topic. I personally use Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest and SEMrush but here, there are so many tools you listed in one place and all are really handy. Thanks for sharing.

  3. Stephens M. says

    December 1, 2014 at 6:34 am

    Bunch of useful tools. I use keywordtool.io for my YouTube search. I also use sg.serpstat.com cause it has the ”questions only” tab for more relevant content titles.

  4. Stan says

    May 14, 2015 at 8:45 am

    Stephens you talked about sg.serpstat – This is a nice tool. thanks for bringing it around. I also recently started using the pro version of this tool serpstat.com that can now run competitive analysis having over 45 million keywords in database.

  5. Robert says

    March 13, 2016 at 11:25 am

    Aother tool you may want check out is my new free keyword tool KWAlert.net. It enables you to collect search terms related to your keyword over any period of time and will keep you informed about the latest results thanks to its email notification service (optional).

    The longer you use the tool, the bigger will be your list of results and the higher will be the chances that any newly added term hasn’t been used up until recently. Such keywords have a great potential since you will be able to tap into them before your competitors do!

  6. Carlos Aguilar says

    March 25, 2016 at 1:17 pm

    We’ve been using KWRevealer tool for some time, but some times it just doesn’t work (no idea why). Also LongTailPro with their downloadable software + Payment for SEO Keyword competitiveness. Tried KWFinder for a month or so, but found the KWRevealer SEO Score a little more trust worthy. Maybe is because all our search terms are in spanish.

    Nice list you have here, also use Ubersuggest a lot, but did not knew Keywordtool.io, or that BuzzSumo existed, more importantly, that it can “get a list of the most shared content” that’s pretty awesome.

    Thanks for Sharing.

  7. George Raboy says

    May 31, 2016 at 3:41 am

    GUYS, NEED HELP!

    I’ve been using SpyFu + SEMrush + Google KW tool to manage SEO, then I switched to Serpstat. It’s great but LITE package is not enough for me, and since STANDARD a bit pricy for me ($89/mo) I’m looking for a tool that has similar abilities like URLs comparison (not domain comparison).

    Would appreciate your help,
    THNX!

  8. Jason Nieter says

    June 2, 2016 at 3:46 pm

    Hi Adam,

    really nice and useful list of tool, few of which I am actually using currently. I wanted to point that topsy.com is no longer active as its service was shut down some time ago. So, the link you posted isn’t working and you may want to update your list accordingly.

    @George Raboy

    You can try webceo.com, as an alternative tool to the ones you mentioned, but I’m not sure if it has URLs comparison. It may have a similar feature, but with a different name on the dashboard. Anyway I hope you will be able to somehow find it helpful for your needs.

    Cheers,
    Jeson.

  9. Mark Folly says

    September 22, 2016 at 8:50 am

    Hi guys, great article! I’ve been using KWFinder.com for some time and it’s my favourite tool so far. I definitely recommend it 🙂

  10. Richard says

    January 31, 2017 at 6:00 am

    Great write up Adam. Proper research can save a lot of heartache. A great tool for competitive analysis straight in the SERPs is SerpWorx.com – it gives you SEO metrics like Trust Flow – DA etc straight in the search results.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Please confirm you are a real person: * Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.

Subscribe and Connect


Follow @adamsherk

About Adam Sherk

Adam Sherk is an SEO and PR consultant helping publishers with digital strategy and audience development, including enterprise SEO, public relations and social media marketing.

Adam is VP SEO and Digital Strategy for Define Media Group.

Recent Posts

  • 8 Critical SEO and Digital Marketing Opportunities for Publishers
  • How Much Google News Traffic Do Publishers Get? Here’s Data on 80 News Sites.
  • 10 Things That Expose Good Sites to Google Panda
  • Mobile Visits Account for 40% of All Traffic for Publishers
  • The Best Tools for Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis and Trending Topics

Categories

  • Public Relations
  • Publishing
  • SEO
  • Social Media

Popular Posts

  • The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases
  • 5 Ways that Social Media Impacts SEO
  • Media Relations Gone Wrong: How Not to Pitch a Journalist (Video)
  • The Most Common Google News Errors and How to Avoid Them
  • SEO Guidelines for Sponsored Content and Partner Links
  • 8 Social Media Questions Publishers Should Be Asking Themselves
  • Top Link Building Tactics for Publishers
  • The Best Free (or Cheap) Tools for Blogger and Influencer Outreach
  • A Simple Workflow for Keyword Research for Content Planning
  • Beyond Facebook Insights: Useful Facebook Analytics Tools
  • The Best Free Tools for Twitter Analytics
  • Editorial SEO Tactics for the Newsroom
  • SEO Metrics for Publishers: How are You Tracking and Measuring Success?
  • Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
  • Google News Optimization Tips

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed on this blog are Adam Sherk's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of his company or its clients.

Sitemap | RSS | © 2009-present AdamSherk.com