9 Free Keyword Research Tools (That CRUSH Google Keyword Planner)

Are you tired of Google Keyword Planners restrictions? Then you’re in the right place.

Remember the good ol’ days when GKP was awesome?

You could enter any ‘seed’ keyword and see tons of keyword suggestions, plus search volumes.

Now, Google has restricted these numbers to general ranges.

SIDE NOTE:  You can still see exact numbers, but only if you spend enough on AdWords campaigns for Google to deem you worthy of such data.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a useful tool. It suggests some good keywords, splits them into groups (which is useful), and is 100% free.

But if GKP is the only tool you’re using for keyword research, then you’re missing out.

Yeah, you can use a tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer which has tons of data, features, and filters. But what if you’re just starting out and can’t justify paying for any SEO tools whatsoever?

Here are some free keyword tools to help kickstart your SEO with zero investment:

1. Google Trends
2. Keyword Shitter
3. AdWord & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator
4. Answer the Public
5. Google Correlate
6. Keywords Everywhere
7. Wordtracker Scout
8. Google Search Console
9. Google

Let’s delve deeper into each of these tools.

1. Google Trends

Let’s kick things off with another useful keyword tool from Google: Google Trends.

Google Trends visualizes how search trends change over time.

Enter a keyword, and you will see the relative popularity of that search query over the past 12 months.

To show how this can be useful, let’s check the Google Trends data for  “protein powder.”

It looks like the search popularity of this query is quite stable throughout the year.

But if we look closely, we can see that there is a gradual decline between August and December, with popularity spiking in January.

This is likely because many people are on a ‘health kick’ in January.

If we check Google Trends data for the past five years, we can see that this is, in fact, an annual spike.

(This is information that we couldn’t glean from Google Keyword Planner.)

So if you have a fitness blog, it may make sense to publish a piece of content about protein powder in early January.

But Google Trends has another cool trick up its sleeve: related queries.

Drop down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see a ‘related queries’ box:

This show related queries with rising popularity.

SIDE NOTE. Learn more about top and rising ‘related queries’ by clicking the question mark icon in the related queries box.

2. Keyword Shitter

It doesn’t take much of an imagination to guess what this tool does.

Enter a “seed” keyword (or many) and hit “Sh!t keywords!”

Because of this, it’s quite basic.

It doesn’t show search volumes or trends data, nor does it group keywords in any way (as Google Keyword Planner does).

But it does have one other notable feature: positive and negative filters.

The easiest way to explain how these work is to show an example.

So let’s add the word “buy” to the positive filter and run our “protein powder” search again.

Now you can see that it only mines queries containing the word “buy.”

The negative filter does the opposite—it excludes queries containing the filtered words.

This can be useful for finding related queries with high purchase intent (e.g., “buy protein powder,” “protein powder store,” etc.)

SIDENOTE.

3. AdWord & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator

This tool combines lists of keywords into every possible permutation.

Here, the tool took my three lists of keywords and combined them into a list of permutations:

This is useful should you want to add transactional or informational modifiers (e.g., “best,” “cheapest,” “buy,” etc.) to a list of topics.

It’s also useful for local SEO purposes.

For example, let’s say you run a plumbing company and offer your services in different counties.

Here’s how you could use such a tool:

SIDENOTE.

There’s not much else to say about this tool.

It’s quite simple functionality-wise, so it doesn’t give you much data (e.g., search volumes, trends, CPC, etc.)

But that’s not what the tool is for—it exists to save time.

SIDENOTE.

4. Answer the Public

Answer the Public finds questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabeticals, and related searches.

Confused? Let’s tackle each of those one by one.

We’ll start by entering a “seed” keyword—let’s stick with “protein powder.”

(Yes, I used a GIF to show how damn cool the site looks.)

First thing you’ll see after entering a “seed” keyword is questions.

These are search queries containing who, what, why, where, how, which, when, are, and is.

E.g., “what protein powder tastes best?”

By default, you’ll see a visualization, but you can switch to a regular ol’ list if you prefer (which I do).

Next up, we have propositions—i.e., for, can, is, near, without, with, and to.

These are search queries that fit the [seed] [preposition] [______] format.

E.g., “protein powder without carbs,” or “protein powder for weight gain.”

We then have comparisons—i.e., versus, vs, and, like, or.

Once again, the format is [seed] [comparison] [______].

E.g., “protein powder versus meat,” or “protein powder or chicken breast.”

And finally we have alphabeticals and related.

Alphabeticals are Google Autocomplete suggestions.

And related, well, who knows?

From my experience, the number of suggestions in the related category is almost always ~20. I have no clue how from where it derives those keywords. But it does kick back a few gems from time to time.

But where does ATP get their data from, anyway?

As far as we’re aware, that would be Google Keyword Planner and Google Autosuggest.

SIDENOTE.

5. Google Correlate

Yep—another tool from Google.

According to Google, “Correlate finds search patterns which correspond with real-world trends.” I.e., trend correlations.

SIDENOTE.

Let’s dive straight in by searching for—yep, you guessed it—“protein powder.”

Google kicks back ten search queries with trends that correlate with “protein powder.”

SIDENOTE.

You’ll notice that not all these queries contain the “seed” phrase.

That’s because this is correlation data. In other words, they’re keywords where the search trend correlates with that of your seed keyword.

For that reason, this tool can uncover some seriously unrelated keywords.

But every now and again, it will kick back a gem that you never thought of.

A good example of this is “ninja blender.”

I would never have thought of this on my own, but thinking about it, I can see why these two might correlate. Ninja blender is a brand of blender, and people use blenders to make protein shakes. (Duh!)

So it could be the case that people are searching for “ninja blender protein recipes.”

6. Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a free add-on for Chrome (or Firefox). It adds search volume, CPC & competition data to all your favourite websites.

These websites include: Google, eBay, Amazon, Answer the Public, Keyword S**tter, and more.

Here is the tool in action on Google search:

… and on Keyword Shitter:

This is a very useful tool as it transforms casual browsing into keyword research.

Think about it: how many Google searches do you do each day?

For me, it’s hundreds. Maybe even thousands.

Now, every time I search—whether that’s on Google, YouTube, Amazon, Ebay, etc.—I see data related to that keyword.

But from where is this data derived?

I reached out to the founder of Keywords Everywhere, Akash to find out.

Here’s what he said:

The search volume, cpc and competition data shown by Keywords Everywhere comes directly from Google Keyword Planner. We have a cache of over 2 billion keywords that get updated every month or so. Keywords with volume greater than 50 get fresh numbers from GKP once every month. Lower volume keywords get updated once every two/three months.   

Akash Mansukhani, Founder, Keywords Everywhere

TLDR; these numbers come straight from Google Keyword Planner.

Two things to note here:

1. These numbers won’t be as accurate as those from a paid tool (e.g., Ahrefs Keywords Explorer) for a number of reasons.
2. You should never blindly trust search volumes for traffic estimations—regardless of source.

But these estimations are still useful, and far better than the vague ranges GKP shows.

SIDENOTE.

7. Wordtracker Scout

Sticking with Chrome extensions, here’s another cool one—Wordtracker Scout.

Hit the extension on any webpage and it will pluck the most relevant keywords from the copy. (It’s like a keyword density checker, but better.)

It displays the data as a word cloud, which you can then play around with to refine the suggestions by relevance and number of words.

Here it is in action on Bodybuilding.com’s list of the best protein powders:

If you navigate to the “Keywords” tab, you’ll see some more insights for the keywords. Searches, competition, opportunity, and a few other data points.

There’s also the option to view data for different countries/territories.

All this data is copyable (hit the “Copy” button) and pastes neatly into a Google Sheet.

But where does this data actually come from? It isn’t data from Google Keyword Planner, right?

According to Wordtracker, it’s from their “huge database […] of literally billions of real searches by real people.”

I reached out to Wordtracker to ask for more details about this.

Here’s what they said:

[Wordtracker Scout] uses the Wordtracker data set which is passed to us from a variety of third party sources such as second tier search engines.

Owen Powis, Chief Executive Officer Wordtracker

Check out this post if you’d like to learn more about how to use Wordtracker Scout.

8. Google Search Console

Most keyword tools (free or otherwise) find new keywords to target.

But what about the existing keywords you already rank for?

Can’t you learn something from these too?

Definitely.

For that reason, Google Search Console is a keyword tool not to overlook.

SIDENOTE.

Go to: Search Console > Performance > Queries

Now you will see which queries sent the most clicks to your site in the past 28 days.

You will also see the impressions, CTR, and average position for each query.

This report can tell you a lot—but only if you know what you’re looking for.

So, for starters, look at the impressions column. If GSC reports your average position as ~7 or under, then you’re showing up for the majority of searches.

The result? Impressions = a relatively accurate estimate of search volume.

For example, take “free SEO tools.”

Our post ranks in position 3.1 on average, and showed up 9,373 times over the past 28 days.

If we check the query in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, we see that this number isn’t far off the actual search volume.

Unfortunately, we only received 663 clicks from that search query.

This keyword = low-hanging fruit.

If we were to rank higher for this query, we could “steal” a larger percentage of those ~9.6K monthly searches.

So this is a keyword for which we should try to boost rankings, perhaps by building some links.