Keyword research is the base of any SEO, PPC, and content marketing campaign. Every search people do is an expression of what they need, want, desire, or have interest.

Choosing the right keywords allows you to deliver the right content to the right audience. When you do a good job choosing your keywords, you’ll have more traffic, more leads, more customers, and ultimately, make more money.

There are many online keywords research tools, both free and paid. They will help you to find which keywords you should target and well as they will show you how competitive they are.

When you’re thinking about keyword research tools, you automatically think about Google Keyword Planner . Since 2013, if you want to use this tool, you need to create an Adwords account. But this is just a minor disadvantage compared to the information you can retrieve. The biggest advantages when you’re using Google Keyword Planner are:

* you can see the trends;
* does a great job examining the search volume
* you can enter on your competitor’s landing pages and see their high volume relevant keywords.

But there are other online keyword research tools that have some unique features to help you target the right audience for your website.

* SEMRush

This is a great tool to find keywords. It gives you an estimated traffic data as well as the keyword difficulty scores.

Semrush dashboard

One feature that puts SEMRush aside from its competitors is that it allows you to check both the keywords your organic competitors are using, as well as to discover which keywords they are bidding on. This is a great source of information because if your competitors are willing to pay for a specific keyword, it’s because they’re having traffic or sales from it. So, you can put a little more effort and try to attack the keyword organically.

* Ubersuggest and KeywordTool.io 

These two online keyword research tools are very similar, Their goal is to provide you with a wide variety of long tail keywords that usually Google Keyword Planner doesn’t show you.

You can either expand your keywords list, or you can also use any of this tools to find variations of your long tail keywords to use on your articles or blog posts.

Although BuzzSumo can’t be considered an online keyword research tool in itself, you should use it. When you already decided about the keywords you want to use, you can check BuzzSumo and look for ideas for your article or blog post.

There may be many online keyword research tools, but it all starts with common sense. Try to think as if you wanted to buy your product or service, as if you had the need you’re fulfilling with your article your blog post. Try to think as your targeted audience and come up with keywords that you would search for by yourself. This will give you a great starting point.