9 Best Keyword Research Tools in 2024 [Free and Paid]

If you don’t know what topics your audience is interested in or what information they’re searching for, you could end up wasting your time creating pages that never attract any traffic. Thankfully, keyword research for search engine optimization (SEO) can help you solve that problem.

Today, many keyword research tools — both free and paid — are available to help beginner-level SEOs and content writers find keywords to target:

The best keyword research tools in 2024

1. KeywordsFX
2. Keyword Tool
3. Moz Keyword Explorer
4. Semrush Keyword Magic Tool
5. BuzzSumo
6. Google Trends
7. Keywords Everywhere
8. Ahrefs Keyword Generator
9. Mangools KWFinder

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9 best keyword research tools

We round up the best keyword research tools you can use for SEO in 2024. They were selected based on the data they provided, including:

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty
• Relevant questions
• Keyword monthly value

The table below summarizes the best keyword research software, their pricing, and key features:

1. KeywordsFX

Price: Free

Best feature: You can download a spreadsheet of all the keywords the site generated, making it easy to keep track of which ones you want to use on your site.

KeywordsFX really hits every possible keyword that you could want to consider. When you type in a keyword at the top, this keyword research tool creates a list using that keyword in conjunction with other words and phrases users commonly search for. When you comb through these lists, you may find entirely new avenues for your starting keyword.

Plus, it’s one of the best free keyword research tools. Most of the keywords generated by this Google keyword alternative are long-tail, making them more specific and likely easier to rank for than your original keyword.

2. Keyword Tool

Price: Freemium (Starts at $69/month)

Best feature: You can opt to include negative keywords in order to filter out terms that aren’t useful for your company.

Keyword Tool is one of the best keyword research tools you can use for free. It creates an extensive list of keywords that add terms both ahead of and after the keyword you searched, allowing for a range of different options.

In the free version of this SEO keyword research tool, you’ll be able to get a super long list of keywords that range from short-tail to long-tail. This tool is a great for generating keyword phrases that you may not have considered, due to the fact that the words placed before and after the keyword allow the topic range to extend immensely.

If you sign up for the Pro version, which costs between $69 and $199 per month depending on the plan you choose, you get even more keywords and more data about each keyword, including search volume and competition.

3. Moz Keyword Explorer

Price: Freemium (Moz’s suite of tools starts at $70/month)

Best feature: This tool’s best feature is the huge amount of information that you can export to a CSV file. You can also download the MOZ bar, which shows up at the top of your screen, allowing you to see the page and domain authority, the spam score, and the shares of any website that you are currently viewing.

Though many of Moz’s tools are only available with a subscription, their Keyword Explorer allows you to run three free searches per day if you sign up for a free account. When you perform a keyword search with MOZ, you receive not only a list of keyword suggestions but also the search volume, difficulty, opportunity, and potential. You can also view search engine results page (SERP) analysis reports for each keyword, which is extremely helpful in your search.

Your query also allows you to see the top organic results for that keyword along with each page’s page authority, domain authority, Facebook shares, and links to the page and domain, respectively. This keyword planner tool also allows you to see how difficult (or easy) any given keyword will be to rank for.

Bonus Read: 14 Chrome Extensions for SEO

4. Semrush Keyword Magic Tool

Price: Freemium (Semrush’s suite of tools starts at $108.33/month)

Best feature: In the Keyword Magic Tool, you can filter your keywords list by broad match, phrase match, exact match, related, questions, and more. You can even filter phrases by the words they include. The best part is, you can export all the lists!

Semrush is another paid research tool for keyword advertising, but it’s definitely worth the cost. When you type a keyword into the keyword overview field, you receive a live update of the volume, keyword difficulty, cost-per-click, and more.

You will also see lists of keyword variations, questions, and related keywords with their volume, cost per click (CPC), and other data, along with a SERP analysis.

5. BuzzSumo

Price: BuzzSumo’s suite of tools starts at $159/month (30-day free trial available)

Best feature: The tool provides you with context about a keyword through content ideas and the top influencers related to the term.

BuzzSumo is best known for providing lists of the top-ranking content for a given keyword, helping creators come up with new ideas for content. It also introduced a keyword research tool that provides related keywords and data about those terms, including search volume and CPC. When you search for a keyword, you also get:

• An overview of how many articles were published on a given topic in the last year by month
• Content ideas
• Questions related to your keyword
• An overview of the SERP for your keyword
• The top influencers for your keyword on social media

BuzzSumo is great when you aren’t quite sure how to utilize the keywords you find because the content ideas and articles provided give you potential contexts for your keywords.

6. Google Trends

Price: Free

Best feature: The tool tells you the keywords’ volume growth in percentage compared to a time period.

Google Trends is a tool that analyzes a keyword’s popularity in Google searches. It provides related topics and Google search queries, informing you of related terms that your audience might be searching for.

The tool informs you how popular a keyword phrase is by telling you its percentage of growth from a previous time period. When “Breakout” is indicated, it means the search term has grown from the previous period by over 5000%.

7. Keywords Everywhere

Price: Starts at $1.25/month

Best feature: The tool provides a list of relevant long-tail keywords along with search volume and CPC data.

Keywords Everywhere is a web browser extension that shows you a list of keywords a page is ranking for. It includes the following information:

• Estimated traffic
• SERP position
• Search volume

When you activate the extension when using Google search, it shows a list of related keywords along with their search volume and CPC in the SERPs. It also provides you with a list of long-tail keywords and other search terms that people use.

8. Ahrefs Keyword Generator

Price: Freemium (Starts at $83/month)

Best feature: The free version shows you relevant keywords from various search engines and platforms like Google, Bing, YouTube, and Amazon.

Keyword Generator is one of Ahrefs’s freemium SEO tools. It gives you relevant keywords in question format and phrase match.

The free version shows the following data:

• Keyword difficulty: It is a grade within a 100-point scale that indicates how hard it is to rank on the first page of the SERPs for a keyword.
• Search volume: It is a keyword’s estimated number of monthly searches for the past 12 months.

It also shows you keyword data from different locations, and various search engines and platforms, such as:

• Google
• Bing
• YouTube
• Amazon

For a free Ahrefs alternative, consider Ahrefs vs. Ubersuggest.

9. Mangools KWFinder

Price: Freemium (Starts at $19.90/month)

Best feature: The keyword research tool’s free version shows you a keyword’s difficulty score and SERP overview.

Mangools KWFinder is a freemium keyword research tool that provides you with relevant search terms based on your seed keyword. You can filter the list of keywords based on location and language.

Do you need to know the competitive landscape of a keyword? Mangools shows you a term’s Keyword SEO Difficulty score on a scale of 0 to 100.

It also gives you the SERP overview of a keyword, providing a list of the ranking pages and their key metrics, such as:

• Domain authority
• Page authority
• Number of external links leading to the page

Which SEO keyword research tools are right for you?

Looking through all of these keyword research tools, you may be overwhelmed with the thought of choosing the one that is best suited for you and your SEO efforts. My best advice would be to test them all!

There is no single correct choice as far as the tools that you use. One may work better for your technique than others. There are plenty of free options that work great if you are just getting started and aren’t interested in fronting any cash. You never know until you try!

Looking for an all-in-one SEO audit tool? You’ve found it.

SEO Checker provides data on key metrics to give you:

• Complete SEO score
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Find keywords for SEO with WebFX

At WebFX, we love helping people reach their digital marketing goals and grow their businesses. That’s why we created KeywordsFX, our free keyword research tool. We hope you try it out, along with the other tools listed in this post!

We also conduct advanced keyword research as part of some of our digital marketing services, including our SEO keyword research services. If you have questions about keyword research or are interested in working with us, contact us or call us at 888-601-5359 today!