April 7, 2025
So, you have a small business with great products and cool ideas but just can’t seem to get any visitors to your site?
You take one quick look at the SERPs for a couple of common terms and see that you’ll have to wrestle the clicks away from the greedy paws of about a dozen competitors. It’s frustrating because it seems like they all have a big head start and are dead set on leaving you in the dust. And the rise of AI-driven SEO tools isn’t making it any easier.
Well, proper keyword research is your only shot at carving out a slice of the market for yourself in 2025, as there are just too many companies fighting over those first few generic phrases that come to mind.
Lucky for you, this isn’t just another hastily slapped-together AI word salad—I actually went out and tested a bunch of free keyword research tools to help users save money and still get good results.
You’ll get my honest opinion, scathing as it is at times, and a detailed overview to help you get the full picture of each tool and decide on the best one.
With all the talk of AI and the changes it is bringing to the way people search for things online, it pays to listen to the experts on what the year ahead of us will bring.
Here is a quick rundown of all the important SEO trends for 2025:
As you can see, there is a clear shift toward more natural-sounding content with a personal touch that helps you build a whole story around your brand. People now ask full questions instead of using two- or three-word phrases when they need something online.
You’ll see a lot of long-tail keywords, and search engines will push the kind of content that gives unique insights and a clear message. For that, you need more extensive keyword research to find all the different angles you can use to draw in a bigger crowd.
The problem is that there are so many different tools out there, and the premium version can cost an arm and a leg. That, however, is precisely where free tools shine. They’re perfect for beginners, small operations, and those on a razor-thin budget.
Not all tools are made equal, and even though you won’t risk losing any money upfront if a free one doesn’t work out, it can still waste a lot of your time and cost you a bunch of potential customers.
I usually focus on a few important criteria when looking for the best keyword research tool:
It’s quite simple, really–if I can’t trust the data I get or can’t see all the important metrics, and especially if it’s a hassle to use, then the tool is pretty much useless.
A good tool will give you tons of keywords with insights on which ones you should focus on within seconds. Anything that saves a business owner time and eliminates the guesswork is a great choice–most of them are already one setback away from tearing their hair out as it is.
Now that we’ve covered all the basics and I’ve convinced you that good things can sometimes come free, we can go over the best tools that zero money can buy.
In my opinion, the best and most accurate tool for keyword research is Google Keyword Planner or GKP. In order to create a free GKP account, you first need to create a Google Ads account, which is essentially free.
You need to go to:
https://ads.google.com/nav/selectaccount?sourceid=awo&subid=ww-ww-et-awhc-6366720
Select a Google Ads account.
If you do not have a Google Ads Account, select: “New Google Ads Account.” You will be required to enter some basic information:
If you don’t have business information, there’s no need to worry. Google does not verify the accuracy of the details, so you can add any business information.
However, you will need to provide either a website URL, phone number, or app download page. If you’re unsure what to add, feel free to use a link to my site. 😊
You can then choose to add more information, which will help you generate more specific keywords related to your business. I strongly recommend taking the time to set this up right away—it won’t take long and can make a big difference.
Google will then prompt you to link any other systems you’ve set up, such as YouTube or GA4. In my case, it immediately recognized the GA4 account I had set up for my website, markotanaskovic.com.
You can skip this step, but I recommend linking GA4 if you’d like GKP to provide more specific keywords tailored to your site and business.
Next, you’ll need to select your primary website goal. There are four options to choose from. For me, it’s website leads, so that’s the option I’ll select.
The final step is to choose the type of action you want your visitors to take.
For my website, markotanaskovic.com, my goal is for visitors to reach out to me for digital marketing services. Google recommended this option based on my input, so I’ll stick with it.
The most frustrating part is that you have to write an ad copy before gaining access to Google Keyword Planner. To move past this step, I simply typed “hello.” Additionally, you’re required to provide a valid phone number to proceed.
Next, Google will ask you to add an image. You can use my logo from my website or simply choose any royalty-free image from Pixabay.
Now, you’ll need to choose the keywords you’d like to advertise your site for. I’ll simply select some of the keywords Google recommends at random.
Next, we need to choose the location(s) where we want to run our ads. I’ll select the US only, but you can choose multiple countries if needed.
Now, choose the budget you’d like to work with.
Wow, now they’re asking for credit card details and an address. Not cool, especially when all we want is to use Google Keyword Planner!
Phew! After what feels like 20 steps, the account is finally set up! To make things easier, just type “keyword planner” in the search bar to access it quickly.
Click on the “Get search volume and forecasts” option.
Enter the keyword you want to analyze and click “Get Started.”
You’ll then see keyword suggestions under the “Keyword Ideas” tab, which are primarily meant for running Google Ads. However, I also use Google Keyword Planner (GKP) for keyword research when writing blog posts.
That said, if you’ve never run a campaign before, the tool will only display a range for search volume (e.g., 0–10, 100–1k), which isn’t as detailed or helpful as a precise monthly volume analysis. Here’s an example of what this looks like if you haven’t run a campaign before:
Since I’ve had the opportunity to run Google Ads in the past, I now use GKP to identify the best keywords to include in this article. The insights are much more precise when you’ve already run campaigns, making it significantly more effective.
Setting up Google Keyword Planner wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. While it’s the most accurate keyword research tool—unsurprising given Google’s $237 billion revenue as of May 2024—it’s not particularly user-friendly. The free version only provides ranges for monthly search volumes, and to unlock more specific data, you’ll need to set up a campaign and spend money.
The next tool on the list is the Ahrefs Keyword Generator.
In this article, we will focus only on the free version of the Ahrefs, which is, unfortunately, very limited.
I typed in our keyword “free keyword research tools,” and it gave me only 20 keywords “for free.” Additionally, like Google Keyword Planner, it only offers ranges for search volumes—which, frankly, isn’t ideal.
Not only is the information limited, but it’s also inaccurate. For example, while GKP shows that 8,100 people in the USA search for this query monthly, Ahrefs estimates less than 1,000 for the same keyword. This discrepancy makes it difficult to trust the free Ahrefs keyword generator for reliable data.
In my honest opinion, Google Keyword Planner remains the most accurate tool for keyword search volume, even if its free version also has its limitations.
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Now, we move on to the Moz Keyword Explorer, which promises “AI-powered insights.” Let’s examine whether this is just marketing fluff or if it actually has some utility.
So, our keyword gave us five results, which at least had definitive numbers. Again, this was way off compared to what GKP had to say—Moz only shows that there are only 358 monthly searches for it, even though it uses GKP’s clickstream modeling to come up with these results.
While some additional features and suggestions are locked behind a paywall, the pro version offers a 30-day free trial; you might be able to get a bit more if you sign up for Moz.
I added the info and signed up, and now I can get a little bit extra from the tool.
The same inaccuracy here, but I also get access to more keyword suggestions with dubious monthly volume numbers.
It also lets me see common questions posed online using this and similar keywords.
A nice little addition is a basic analysis of the top 10 sites with this keyword in the SERPS.
It looks like this tool offers some extra utility, but this doesn’t help me that much. Also, the reported numbers are insanely low, even lower than Ahrefs’s estimates.
If I were to trust this tool, it would lead me to believe that a perfectly fine keyword with lots of monthly hits, as I’ve demonstrated, is actually not a great choice to focus on.
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WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool is a very basic tool that eventually gets the job done but offers no extra features or functionalities. When I type in free keyword research tools, there’s a quick prompt to “Refine Your Search,” which just means I can choose an industry and country.
When I click continue, the tool only takes a few seconds to return 500 suggestions, covering search volume, top-of-page bid estimates in the low and high range, and the amount of competition for each keyword.
You can also easily download the keywords, and there’s an option at the bottom to get a website score, but there’s little more than that.
As far as accuracy goes, it’s a little closer to what I saw from Google. It shows a few more monthly searches for my keyword but is right on the money for “Google Keyword Planner.” The bid estimates are also fairly close to what I saw with GKP.
It’s not much, but you get a decent number of suggestions and close enough accuracy to start building your strategy. It’s decent enough to give a new business with limited needs a basic overview and something to work with.
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This is an excellent tool for determining what people are interested in right now, during a particular season, or how often and when interest skyrockets for a particular topic or product.
Our designated keyword looks something like this:
We focused on the US here, and we can see that it was a bit quiet during the past 90 days, but there’s been a bit of a surge in interest just recently. My guess is that people had “optimize my website” and “rank higher in Google searches” as their top New Year’s resolutions, so we see an uptick near the end of the year.
As I narrowed it down to the last 30 days, more people started searching for this keyword as soon as December rolled in.
And you can also see the different regions where this term was most popular in the past couple of weeks.
At the very bottom, you have a list of related topics and queries, but there are only a few suggestions. Now, you could go down the rabbit hole of running each of those through the tool to see what comes up and then again with the suggestions you get in those searches.
However, you’ll get farther away from your actual target with each jump, so you’ll only get a bit of extra utility from this approach for the first two or three related queries. What you can also do is broaden the parameters from just the US to the entire world.
Here, we get some more potentially useful demographic information, but not much beyond that. In terms of keyword research, Google Trends can provide some cool insights and even show you where most of your traffic will come from if you focus on a certain keyword.
If you are mainly interested in finding more possible options to build your marketing campaign around, though, you’ll be a bit disappointed. This tool is best used once you’ve already pinned down a couple of keywords and want to learn a bit more about how popular they are, during which period, and in which parts of the world or the country.
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Right off the bat, the site asks you to get a Chrome extension, which is just a needlessly convoluted step. Alright, Surfer, have it your way—I’ll add it to Chrome.
Once you have the extension, you have to open Google in a separate tab and search for a keyword. You then get the monthly search volume for that keyword next to the search bar, which was pretty accurate, and the cost per click for Google Ads campaigns, as well as some information on each result in the SERP, just below the title.
However, you can only see monthly traffic estimates, the number of words on the page, and the number of times the keyword appears on each page. You can’t really get any further suggestions, but I guess you could use one of the other tools here to get a list of keywords and then double-check a few of them one by one with Surfer.
That would, of course, defeat the purpose and be incredibly tedious, so this tool is not the best option.
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This tool looks decent enough upfront, but when I enter the same keyword as the others, I get only 29 suggestions. Of course, I am prompted to sign up for a 7-day free trial to unlock 41 more results, which, I have to say, isn’t all that much more.
Ok, so maybe there’s more to the premium version, so I’ll go ahead and give it a click to see what kind of offer I can expect.
It’s the internet’s favorite SEO expert next to a paragraph talking about some great deal.
Now, I hate the old marketing ploy of special deals that are just about to expire—we only have three more hours, you guys—but I can forgive the Godfather of digital marketing for using a bit of razzle-dazzle.
So, what are the plans like?
There’s a lifetime offer, but since I don’t plan on doing any keyword research from the old folks home in Florida in 40 years or during a post-apocalyptic raid, whatever happens first, I’ll stick to the monthly plans.
The prices are a bit steep, but the Individual Plan seems reasonable if you need only a little research to get your brand up and running.
The free version gets the numbers for our keyword spot on, according to what the Google Keyword Planner showed me in terms of search volume and price per click. However, you don’t get much for free, and the basic version seems like a way to funnel visitors toward paid subscriptions.
You could use it to get some basic idea of which keywords could work, but it’s not going to help you with much past that unless you’re ready to open your wallet.
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That’s an odd-sounding name, but I’m ready to look past that if we can get some good suggestions on this site. Let’s see what it has to offer.
Ok, that’s not really what I was expecting here. Soovle uses nine different search engines, including those on Wikipedia and Amazon, to look for suggested similar searches based on the keyword you use. However, I only got about 10 suggestions per search engine, while some just came up blank.
Wait, hold your horses. If you scroll down the page a bit, you’ll see that signing up and using their SEO tool gives you access to more keywords.
Sure, I can give it a shot. I’ll just sign in with Google and save some time.
Now, we just need to fill in a few fields and, hopefully, get access to a more powerful keyword research tool.
Alright, great. I see a couple of smiling people waving at me—the guy in the pop-up and the girl in the background on the other side of an Upgrade Now button—so I know I’m in good hands here. We can go with “Help me find new keywords to target,” that sounds good.
Oh boy, it looks like I’ll have to do some more clicking.
At least this time, it’s just a short tutorial that guides new users through their first keyword search on the platform. I’ll admit that this is kind of useful for small business owners who have no experience with SEO and all the different tools.
I could do without the prompts telling me to press a huge button that says “Research” after I’ve typed in my keyword and am ready to see the results. That said, the tool does provide beginners with a good overview of the results.
There’s a little box like that for each category, so kudos to the team at Soovle for creating an excellent tutorial. I can see that the time they saved by not looking too hard for a better name was well spent on helpful features.
I’ll just skip through it and see what the results are.
I don’t want to alarm you, but it seems that the nice, smiling lady is gone. What initially looked like a polite suggestion to upgrade was actually more of a demand all along. Why am I getting that vibe?
Well, because you only get four disappointing suggestions, which are all just the words in my initial long-tailed keyword reshuffled a bit, they all show the same search volume.
Of course, they are also the most difficult ones to rank for, according to the tool. All the other 40+ results and basic functionalities, like filtering the results, are locked away.
The full version comes out to $19 per month if you pay the whole yearly sum upfront (so $228), or you can pay $24 monthly. So yeah, unless you are willing to upgrade, I’d say this tool is a waste of time.
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Well, it seems I spoke too soon when I made fun of the previous tool’s name because this one is in a league of its own. It’s easy to remember, I’ll give them that. You get a prompt to “Sheet Keywords,” and the tool starts doing its magic.
It takes a few seconds to get going, but it makes quite a few suggestions and just keeps going. I wanted to see how long it would keep chugging, so I left it alone while I got a drink from the kitchen and stretched my legs for a couple of minutes.
When I eventually clicked “stop,” it had already given me 195 suggestions, although it did slow down near the end and took its sweet time for the last few. On the site, they say it takes about 15 minutes to write about 1000 words.
So, I got plenty of keywords to work with; the only problem was that there was no way to tell how difficult each one was to rank for and what the monthly search volume was.
If you want all that information, it will cost you extra—$0.06 per keyword for the difficulty metric, $0.0012 for search volume CPC bids, and $0.012 for each of the top 100 SERP results containing that keyword.
I don’t know about this one; everything from the goofy name and unfortunate color scheme—I guess they wanted to go all in on the pun here—to the basic design from the early 2000s just doesn’t instill confidence. Either way, you don’t get any useful metrics for free with this one.
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Right away, the tool looks clean and simple, and there’s a little Q&A below to help new users with the basics. It scours the depths of Reddit to give you some keywords from a subreddit that matches your input.
As you might have guessed, there are no subreddits specifically tied to the keyword we’ve been using so far.
No problem, we can use something more generic this time, like “SEO.”
We get about 70–80 suggestions with monthly search volume numbers that they get from the Grepwords database, which gets its data from GKP. This should make it relatively accurate, but it’s not the most reliable.
The biggest issue is that it only searches subreddits, which drastically limits its usefulness. However, it can give you a general sense of what people are talking about and which keywords are most frequently used in discussions by people who are interested in the topic.
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After a couple of super-basic sites, it’s great to see something more professional-looking. Before we can go on, we’ll have to provide some information.
First, we enter our business type. Whoops, I don’t see much about IT and SEO, but there are many more hands-on professions, like gardening, electrical work, plumbing, etc. For now, we’ll just choose “Accounting” and check “Small Business Accounting.”
Then we scroll down to “Step 2,” where we can enter locations. I’ll use New York.
All that’s left is to hit the big button and let the tool generate some keywords for us.
Wow, a whopping three keywords, although the tool insists that it has generated six, for some reason. Nope, it just repeated the word New York a couple of extra times—excellent work. Remember, if you have trouble remembering this incredibly extensive list, you can always download it.
I decided to give it another shot, so I chose the “Fitness” category and checked several different “Service Types” to try to get more suggestions.
There are 24 keywords now—the tool still tried to smuggle in three plain “New Yorks” and claim it offered me 27—but these are not much use since I don’t know how popular each one is and how easy it would be to rank for any of them.
I’d suggest that you skip this tool and look for something better.
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Everything looks nice and simple initially with this tool, so let’s go ahead and get started.
We’ll have to enter some information to create a free account or just sign up with Google, which is what I did to save some time.
I
Once that is set, I can just click on the Keyword Research tab, though there’s a separate Keyword Volume Checker that we’ll have to try out later as well.
I entered “free keyword research tools,” which I’ve been using to test all the other tools on the list.
Interestingly enough, we get volume and competition level metrics for each suggestion, while the difficulty is available only for some and the CPC only for the first keyword. Sadly, there are only eight suggestions in total, and four of those are literally the same thing with 2017, 2020, and 2021 at the end, so quite outdated and repetitive.
It’s a major disappointment so far. We probably won’t have to bother with the volume checker, though we could add a few of these keywords in and see if we get different results.
Yeah, the first one overshoots the volume we got in GKP by nearly 2000. I can’t even be sure how accurate the other few options are. Again, based on the suggestions from the previous tool and a bit of imagination, we only get five or six long-tail keywords.
Finally, I tried the question tool before leaving the side and was surprised to see far more results, as well as relevant ones.
The “Google Keyword Planner” keyword shows an accurate volume, even the CPC and competition level metrics are close. They say that Google is the source of their information, so we can assume that the accuracy is close enough to be useful.
However, after the first 11 of the 98 results, the information is mostly sourced from Reddit and Quora, and we don’t get any additional information besides a range for the monthly volume.
I’d say this tool is hit-and-miss. It’s useful for seeing what people are talking about and answering some general user queries, but it’s not all that reliable. The real problem is that the setup with the different tools is not intuitive at all, and I almost missed it after the first two tools proved disappointing.
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After the smoke and mirrors of the previous tool, it was good to see a clean page design with plenty of different sources from which to get your keywords.
There’s Amazon, Bing, YouTube, Google, and even Walmart, so things are looking good.
I chose Google as the source, so we now have 97 keywords to review. Each has a few handy metrics, such as Autosuggest Position, Difficulty, and Hotness, indicated by little flames for the less popular keywords and a big ol’ bonfire for the trending ones.
Oddly enough, they chose to go with an overall score on the far right that represents popularity and engagement (the higher, the better). If only there was a way to be more precise, like, I don’t know, showing us the monthly search volume.
Flames and a double-digit score out of 100 are fine for video game reviews, but I’m really looking for a bit more precision out of my keyword research tool. Ok, maybe I can try out a few variations.
Nope, the free version gives you two searches per day. Even if you create an account, you only get two searches per tool each day—you’ll have to pay for anything more than that.
You can at least get a good general idea of which keywords are easier to rank for while still being relatively popular, so if you’re new and need somewhere to start, you can get some ideas from Keyword Tool Dominator. You won’t get much mileage out of it, though, and the results are a bit vague.
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This tool seems fairly professional. Two plans are available: the Team plan with a 7-day free trial and the Freemium option. We’ll choose the latter here.
I’ll just have to sign in with Google again, and we can get this show on the road. There are plenty of happy customer testimonials on the right, so I’m hopeful.
We can now select the “Keyword Research” tab on the left. This opens a bid dropdown menu. We click “Overview” to get started.
We can now enter our keyword, choose between Google and Bing, and pick a country. As usual, we’ll pick Google and the United States. All that’s left is to hit “Search” and hope for the best.
Here, I can see a lot of useful information, starting with volume, PPC competition, cost per click, and difficulty. There’s also a list of keyword suggestions and data on the main competitors focusing on these keywords.
The data for our main keyword seems accurate based on GKP, so we can click “See all” in the keywords section to get some more suggestions.
Disappointed again! Why do I always get my hopes up? So there are 10 keywords in total, with fairly accurate results—I did pick Google as the source after all—but that’s just not enough, as the tool taunts us with 465 more results tucked safely away in the paid version.
You can activate a free trial at least, but this is as far as the free version will get you. Honestly, I’d stick with one of the other options on this list.
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Will this be another dud judging from the layout of the page, or will it actually offer some value to users? There’s only one way to find out. Let’s get cracking.
The only truly free tool on the site is the “Free Keyword Generator,” but it only takes a blurb of text and churns out a few common keywords.
It’s not really all that useful, so I’d have to take the plunge and sign up for the 14-day free trial. It’s $30 a month for the cheapest option, and each has a free trial, but you’ll have to add your credit card information.
I’m not going to do that, as I’m only looking at free tools today.
Skip this one if you don’t want to sign up for the trial.
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Great, more Chrome extensions! I’m keeping my fingers crossed for this one as I click “Add to Chrome.”
It takes you to the Chrome Web Store, where you can actually download it. We’ll have to sign up as well, but not so fast.
Alright, no big deal, let’s just fill out the form.
After I’ve signed up and confirmed my email, it’s time to start looking for keywords.
When I click “Try it out,” it takes me straight to Google, where I can search for the keyword I want—yep, you guessed it, the very same one.
You can see the estimated monthly volume and CPC on the right side of the search bar, and I can already tell that it’s not the most accurate assessment. If we scroll down, we can find a bunch of suggested keywords.
Of these, 13 have volume and CPC info, and there are another seven that have no additional information at all. Not exactly a gold mine of useful data, but at least they seem to be hitting the ballpark for accuracy on some of the suggestions.
There is a “Discover More” option tucked away in the bottom right, so maybe we can get a bit more out of this tool after all.
It bugged out, and regardless of how much it tried to gaslight me, I did not, in fact, create “Too Many Requests.” However, whenever I hit the “Search” button, even a few minutes later, it would report the same issue!
I’m not exactly thrilled by this tool, but if you could get the “Keyword Discovery” to work, maybe you’d have a few more suggestions to work with. As it is, it’s a hard pass from me.
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This looks like another pleasantly simple site where you don’t have to sign up and go over several steps—you can just enter your keyword and go. Here’s what I got.
Hey, there are over 100 keywords for us to review, so that’s a nice change of pace from the previous few tools that barely offered 10. However, as with all these free tools, there is a catch—you can’t see any volume or CPC data.
You can only access all the additional metrics if you start the free trial for the paid version.
The prices for the plans are pretty steep—even the cheapest one is just under $60 per month—though they all have free trials. Unfortunately, I’m only looking at the basic free offers, and this one is a bit lacking.
Sure, you could use the Keyword Suggestion tool to get a bunch of suggestions and then combine it with one of the other options on this list that offer very few keywords but a lot more metrics for the ones you put in.
It would be a hassle, but you could manually run over a dozen keywords or so through an additional tool and get some decent results.
That could be a backup option if you’re in a pinch, but it’s not ideal and certainly wouldn’t be my first choice.
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Great—another extension to slap onto Chrome. These extensions haven’t had a good track record so far, so I hope this one can break the trend.
So, right away, I like that they provide a short video tutorial. Once you add it to your browser, in my case, Chrome, you get some additional clear instructions.
You can use everything for free, so you don’t need to obtain additional information, such as their API key unless you plan on buying a subscription.
After I entered my keyword in Google search, I was pleasantly surprised. There are tons of results on the right side of my screen, so we’ll need to scroll down and take a look.
First, there’s information about the main keyword I used, such as SEO DIfficulty, and a link to a Google Trends chart. You can also use different AI tools to Get User Search Intent. So far, so good, so let’s keep scrolling down.
Down here, we have a couple of short lists of four Topical and nine Related keywords, but this is where I start to see the main issue.
If you want to “Load Metrics,” there’s a nifty little button for that, but it will only cost you a set amount of credits, four and nine, respectively. So, you get some keywords with no context unless you’re ready to reach for your wallet.
At the very bottom, there is a full list of keywords, with 23 results in total. Again, there’s no info on any of them, but you can get it for 23 credits. Now, bear with me as I go over the insanely complex math in my head—I think that comes out to one credit per keyword.
Where do you get these credits? At the credit store, of course. Yep, you buy one of their plans. It looks like my math was right; they have the equation on their page.
Oh well, you can’t have everything. As I mentioned, you could use it with another tool to produce a few results, but I wouldn’t recommend using this tool alone.
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Very direct and straight to the point—you just click and download the tool.
After you’ve added your email, of course.
My computer was having none of it, and warned me about downloading unverified files, but after I assured it that everything was alright, I was ready to install Rank Tracker.
To install the program, you’ll need to click “Agree” and “Next” a couple of times. Then, it will ask you to add a website—I just entered the name of my site: www.markotanaskovic.com.
It will start working its magic, but I’m only really interested in keyword research, so I’ll click on the corresponding tab on the left.
Now, we’re in full research mode. We’ll just need to find the right option here.
You can use “Autocomplete Tools” to get a big list of keywords—I now have 107 suggestions listed, all from Google. There’s also the “Related Searches” tab, but at that point, we can just use Google instead.
In fact, for any serious research, you will need to connect to your account and access the Google Ads Keyword Planner.
As I’ve covered GKP as the first tool on this list, I see no point in using this program as a proxy when I can do everything I need directly in Google’s tools and the basic search engine.
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The last, but hopefully not the least tool on our list, Jaaxy has a completely free Starter plan.
To create an account, we simply need to complete a quick form, and then we’ll be ready to go.
Looks like there’s a limit, but 30 searches is plenty, especially if you’re just starting out. Fingers crossed.
Not bad. We have monthly searches, traffic, and a few other metrics for each keyword. But, of course, there had to be something—we got about 10 visible keywords and a big ol’ message telling us to upgrade to see more results.
Now, this is frustrating, but it’s standard procedure for most of these supposedly free tools. Only 10 results, though? That just won’t fly. I expected a little bit more since they already have a search limit, but hey, there are several other tools on our list that can give you far better results.
What little you do get seems wildly inaccurate, so I don’t think the paid version would even be worth it. At least we didn’t have to download anything or add it to our browser, so it could have been worse.
Pros:
Cons:
If you hate reading, why don’t you just check out the comparison table we created. It pretty much summarizes all the info we’ve covered above:
| Tool Name | Pros | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Google Keyword Planner | Excellent Accuracy; Lots of Results | Anyone |
| Ahrefs | Easy to Use | Beginners |
| Moz Keyword Explorer | Decent amount of suggestions | Beginners |
| WordStream's Free Keyword Tools | Relatively Accurate | Initial Keyword Research |
| Google Trends | Insights about seasonal changes | Further keyword analysis; Seasonal planning |
| Keyword Surfer | Good accuracy | Initial keyword research |
| Ubersuggest | Reasonable accuracy; AI functionality | Initial keyword research |
| Soovle | Simple and has good tutorials | Very rudimentary research |
| Keyword Sheeter | Lots of suggestions | Very rudimentary research |
| Keyworddit | Quick and easy | Very rudimentary research |
| Bulk Keyword Generator | Simple design | People in trades |
| QuestionDB | Has a couple of different tools | Customer pai point research |
| Keyword Tool Dominator | Lots of suggestions from different sources | Initial keyword research |
| Serpstat Free Plan | Useful metrics for Google and Bing | Initial keyword research |
| SEOptimer Free Keyword Tool | Not much | Basic competitor content analysis |
| WMS Everywhere | Relatively detailed and streamlined | Very rudimentary |
| Sitechecker Keyword Suggestion Tool | Plenty of suggestions | Basic keyword research |
| Keywords Everywhere | Decen number of suggestions and AI functionality | Basic keyword research |
| Rank Tracker | Additional SEO tools | Basic keyword research and SEO insights |
| Jaaxy Free Starter Plan | Relatively accurate metrics | Very basic keyword research |
There are plenty of options on this list, so I’ll try to narrow them down for you. The last thing you need is to waste time on half a dozen tools before you find the right one. After all, the whole point is to help you streamline your marketing.
It essentially boils down to three categories.
If you are just starting out and need something quick and effective to spit out a few keywords you can focus on, you can’t go wrong with any of the simpler tools on the list.
However, if you have been stagnating for a while and are planning an expansion over the next few years, it’s best to go with a more professional option like GKP.
All the tools on the list are free or have a free version, so if you are on a tight or non-existent budget, you’re set.
However, if you think your needs will grow over time, and you might want some additional options offered by the paid version, you should look into a Google Ads account coupled with GKP.
Those who are completely new to SEO may want to stick to the same simple tools I recommended for beginners with basic business goals.
If you’ve been around the block and can handle something with more bells and whistles, you can look into GKP or Moz.
Getting a business up and running or trying to grow a small operation is stressful and takes a lot out of you and out of your bank account. The last thing you need is any additional expenses or stress.
Don’t worry, though. You can use one of the many free tools to get over that initial hurdle of finding the right keywords to build your marketing campaign around. They will save you tons of time, and you don’t have to be an expert to use them.
Try out two or three free keyword research tools from our list and see how easy it can be. Feel free to share your experience here in the comments—I always like to hear firsthand examples of people having great success with some tools or having issues with others.
If you want my two cents, I’d say Google Keyword Planner works well enough, but every other free keyword tool just drops the ball. That’s about to change once Rankioz hits the market, so keep an eye out for that.
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