SEO Keyword Research Guide: Compile a Killer List of Keywords for Free

One of my favorite tools, Keywords Everywhere provides free-of-charge keyword volume, CPC, and AdWords Competition information for our list of keyword suggestions.

Keywords Everywhere is pretty easy to install. It’s found in the Chrome Store so install it like any other Chrome extension. There is one additional step: you’ll need to enter in a free API key which they email you to get full access. They provide clear instructions.

If you want, you can set it up so keyword data appears in Google search results. It will show you the monthly search volume and CPC right in the search engine results page. You can turn it off as well, of course.

Keywords Everywhere actually integrates with Google analytics and Google Search Console also! It is very useful to see the keyword volume overlaid in these tools to get a sense of how large the SEO opportunity is.

It integrates with several other tools including the next keyword tool.

The main feature of Keywords Everywhere we are going to use is the bulk upload feature.

The way we use it is we paste all the keywords from keywordtool.io into the bulk keywords section of Keywords Everywhere.

This bulk keywords section will be our central holding place for all keywords we will find using various sources.

Now you could just go to one source like Keyword Tool and have those be the entirety of your keyword pool. Totally fine, especially for a less important blog post.

But we’re going to use three more sources to round out our keyword pool so we have a larger and more diverse set of keywords.

But first, I’d also like to throw in the question keywords from Keyword Tool. These are simply keyword phrases in the form of a question. These are great for a couple of reasons.

First, these could be good phrases for your focus keyword.

Second, question keywords are also useful to look through for any good questions that you can potentially write an article around.

You might find a gem of a question that you know people are asking about so it might be a good topic for a future article

We now have our keyword suggestions from Keyword Tool and if we simply wanted to get it from one source we’re basically done.

Click “Get Search Volume and CPC,” in Keywords Everywhere to get the search volume, CPC (cost-per-click), AdWords competition (for both global and national regions).

For example, “a beatles story” is searched 70 times a month and it has a $0 CPC amount because it’s not a very commercial term so people don’t bid on it for ads. Similarly, the competition level is a 0 on a scale 0 – 1.

On the other hand, “1 Beatles DVD” gets searched 10 times a month and has a CPC of $0.26 because it is actually something people may want to bid on and buy ads for because it could lead to a sale of the DVD. Therefore, the competition level from is much higher at .71.

I mostly just use search volume in keyword analysis but we may look at CPC and competition from time to time so it’s good to know where to get it from.

Note: This is competition level from a paid search (ads) viewpoint. Competition to rank organically requires an important metric called “Keyword Difficulty”, which is different.

As you see, Keywords Everywhere returns results very quickly.

You can sort the columns by clicking on the column headers.

You can even add keywords to a favorites list by clicking the star. This builds a favorites in Keywords Everywhere with your most important saved keywords.

As I mentioned, you could stop here but we’re going to check out a few more sources to broaden our group of keywords.

The next tool we are going to use is Ubersuggest.

Using Uber Suggest is very similar to Keyword Tool.

The difference is Ubersuggest sources keywords in a slightly different way than Keyword Tool.

Instead of autocomplete, Uber Suggest uses the keyword suggestions from Google.

For that reason, every keyword it provides starts with Beatles, similar to how you’ll see the auto suggestions in Google based on your starting word.

Otherwise, Uber Suggest is very similar to Keyword Tool.

Similar to keyword tool, is it gives us a lot of free keywords but restricts search volume and CPC to paying customers.

Update: Neil Patel recently acquired Ubersuggest and now it provides search volume and CPC for free! Also the URL is now: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/

But by now we know this wouldn't stop us anyhow. We can simply copy and paste these into Keywords Everywhere to get search volume data with the rest!

One cool thing is Keywords Everywhere actually integrates with Ubersuggest. If you are signed into Keywords Everywhere when you do a query you will see monthly search volume, CPC, and competition right on the page.

So really this could be a one-step option for getting keyword information.

But we are simply going to copy and paste those into the Keywords Everywhere bulk upload box anyway, since it’s our central holding place. This will then add these to those keywords we got from Keyword Tool.

Now our keyword pool is starting to get deeper. We have a growing list of keywords from multiple tools that use different methodologies.

Ubersuggest has a couple of other nice features.

Ubersuggest has a word cloud feature which can be a nice visualization tool in certain cases.

Ubersuggest also has the option to check the seasonality trends using Google Trends.

Tool #4 LSI Graph

LSI stands for latent semantic indexing. This sounds like a very complex technical term but is actually quite straightforward.

Essentially, a latent semantic keyword is a related keyword or synonym. For any query, LSI Graph provides many words and phrases which are semantically linked. This means they are often found together in text so they are probably related even if they don’t share a common word (unlike other tools).

Semantic keywords further flesh out your keyword pool.

For example, if you enter in “baseball” it may also return bat or World Series which are phrases that don’t contain “baseball” necessarily but are semantically related.

This is important for a couple different reasons:

One, Google checks for this to see if your article is in naturally-written style. Why? Because when normally writing about a topic, you naturally use synonyms and different related phrases. On the other hand, an article that uses the poor practice of keyword stuffing to game SEO would have the same focus keyword over and over.

Second, it’s going to expand your keyword pool. It results in a broader variety of keywords instead of just one focus keyword which potentially increases the keywords that your article can rank for.

That’s the theory of LSI. In reality, I find this tool to be more interesting than particularly helpful in uncovering great alternative keywords.

So the Beatles isn’t a great example to use for this. “The Beatles” doesn’t have too many synonyms being a proper noun.

It’s be really nice if something like the Fab Four came up.

Maybe it doesn’t list that because this moniker doesn’t come up in articles enough to be considered semantically linked. But I think the more plausible reason is this tool is not sophisticated enough at this point.

Let’s try a different keyword: coffee.

Enter in coffee in the search box and don’t forget to click the “not a robot” captcha first.

Unlike with the other tools we used, LSI graph’s results don’t necessarily have the keyword (coffee in this case) in the results.

That doesn’t necessary need to be the case or should be the case.

While most of these results have coffee, others like “why is caffeine bad for you?” importantly do not.

It is sophisticated enough to know that this phrase about caffeine is related to coffee without having coffee in the actual phrase! So that’s how Latent semantic keywords and indexing work and why Google uses them.

So while this tool is still in the early stages, it’s definitely worth using as part of a comprehensive keyword research project.

The final tool we are going to mine keywords with is called SEOquake. This is a great Chrome extension that we use in many different aspects of SEO.

For this method, first visit an authoritative article on your topic whether it be a home page or a Wikipedia article. You are looking for a page that is has a lot of in-depth information about a topic and therefore rich for keyword mining.

So in our case we will first visit the Wikipedia page of the Beatles.

This page has a wealth of Beatles-related phrases like “Lennon and McCartney” and “Beatlemania” which are not returned in traditional keyword tools when searching The Beatles. This method can result in a lot interesting keywords that other tools won’t identify.

Now it would be tedious to go through the entire page to find good keywords.

That’s where SEOquake helps.

Go to SEOquake in your toolbar and proceed to the density tab.

This provides a table of the most frequently used words and phrases in the article. Its organized into how many words are in the phrase: one, two, three and four-word keyword phrases.

Now instead of going through the whole article, you can go through these tables and see if there are any phrases that might be good to round out our keyword list that we haven’t seen elsewhere.

“Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” is a phrase which might be interesting to include in an article about the Beatles to expand our subject reach.

Another example is “Cavern Club” which is one of the first places the Beatles played in when they were coming up.

Take “Fab Four” for example, an iconic Beatles phrase that didn’t show up in any of the keyword tools.

“Fab Four” would be a great keyword to add to our article and one that has not shown up thus far in other sources. Let’s in fact consider Cavern Club as one of our potential keywords also.

So this Wikipedia + SEOquake technique is great to get more unique keywords and phrases.

We now have a great selection of different keywords. Let’s go ahead now and do a final pull for search volume and CPC.

Back to Keywords Everywhere to come Full Circle

In the bulk section of Keywords Everywhere, you should now have keywords sourced from Keyword Tool, Ubersuggest, LSI Graph, and Wikipedia.

Another great feature of Keywords Everywhere is that it also dedupes the list. Pulling from many different sources, you will have several duplicates.

We don’t have to worry about this because Keywords Everywhere dedupes the list in the bulk tool automatically.

Again simply click “Get Search Volume and CPC” and you’ll quickly get the keyword volume, CPC, and other information from

To do further analysis, often you’ll want to export the information to a csv or spreadsheet. Keywords Everywhere makes this easy (unlike some free SEO tools which don’t allow exporting).

But instead of exporting we are simply going to copy all this information to the clipboard and paste into a Google spreadsheet.

To go ahead with the free theme, we are using Google sheets which is a great spreadsheet program.

This is as far we’ll go with this article. The next step of a keyword research project is choosing the target keyword out of this massive list of keywords based on Keyword Difficulty score and a competitive analysis of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). These are outside of the scope here but you can learn about those topics with our course:  https://www.martechwiz.com/course/free-seo-stack-course/