Competitors can be a great source of keyword ideas. But it’s very likely that there are many keywords that your competitors haven’t covered yet. You can find these using various keyword research tools.
Keyword research tools all work the same way. You plug in a seed keyword, and they pull keyword ideas from their databases based on that keyword.
Google Keyword Planner (GKP for short) is perhaps the most well-known keyword tool. It’s free to use, and although it’s made for people who want to display paid advertisements in Google, you can also use it to find keywords for SEO purposes.
Here are some keyword ideas that GKP has given me for the seed keyword “coffee”:
It is important to note that GKP is capable of generating keyword ideas that don’t necessarily contain your seed keyword in them. Take the keyword “percolator,” for example. Unless you’re a hardcore coffee connoisseur, you probably won’t know this relates to coffee. Which makes GKP quite a useful tool for discovering non-obvious keyword ideas.
And whenever you discover an interesting keyword like that, try using it as your new seed keyword and see what kind of new keyword ideas you’ll get from it.
Beyond Keyword Planner, there are quite a few other free keyword research tools. These are great if you’re just starting out, but you’ll soon realize that they’re quite limited in terms of data and functionality.
Thus, if you decide to commit to growing the search traffic to your website, you may as well skip the free tier and use a “professional” keyword research tool. Like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
Let’s enter a few of our seed keywords and see how many keyword ideas it gives us.
3.9 million keywords! No free tool will let you work with such a vast number of keyword ideas.
That may seem like an overwhelming number of keywords to work with. And it is. But don’t worry. You’ll learn how to narrow them down right in the tool later in this guide.
For now, let me briefly explain the differences between the two main types of keyword idea reports that we have in Keywords Explorer.
Matching terms
This report will only show you the keyword ideas that contain your seed keywords in them. It has two modes: “Terms match” and “Phrase match.”
“Terms match” shows keyword ideas that contain all words of your seed keyword in them, regardless of where exactly they are and what order they’re in. So if our seed keyword is “coffee machine,” we’ll get the following keyword ideas:
- coffee vending machine
- machine gun kelly coffee shop
“Phrase match” only returns keyword ideas that have the words of your seed keyword in the exact order as you entered them. Like so:
- best coffee machine
- coffee machine with grinder
Related terms
This report will show keyword ideas that don’t necessarily contain your seed keywords in them. It also has two modes: “Also rank for” and “Also talk about.”
- “Also rank for” shows you search queries that the top-ranking pages for your seed keyword also rank for.
- “Also talk about” shows you words and phrases that are frequently mentioned on the top-ranking pages for your seed keywords.
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