Motivated sellers do not do deep research. They are feeling a lot of pain and need relief – fast. They often turn to the internet to find a solution, and type in something like: ‘Sell house Anytown USA’ or ‘Buy My House.’
They won’t go 5-6 pages deep in Google... almost always they look on the first page and go with the closest website to what they need.
Your job is to be the website that motivated sellers choose, which means:
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Ranking your website high on Google searches.
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Having the right words (keywords) that connect with your customer.
Meeting those two objectives means you know ahead of time what words motivated sellers use to search. Using keywords strategically has become a real science requiring a lot of in-depth planning.
Lucky for us, there are a bunch of tools available that can help us figure out keywords that will bring the most people to our website.
Do You Really Need A Keyword Research Tool?
Before we dive into the sea of keyword tools, it is important to get a clear view on why you need a tool in the first place. After all, many of the high-quality tools are an added expense to your business.
Here’s why we think it’s worth it.
So, keyword tools can save you a lot of time. A keyword research tool speeds up the research process since the tool will basically do it for you. You can generate a whole list of high-value keywords in a very short period of time.
Another important reason is that the right keywords will help you close more deals. It’s just math. The more people that come to your website, the more people will take the next step.
So, if there are around 140 people searching for the exact phrase “Buy my house in Washington DC,” your high-ranking website could receive up to 35%-38% of the traffic – especially if they’re on the first page of Google. That percentage is about 50-60 motivated sellers visiting your website.
2 Types of Keyword Research
Keyword research is divided into 2 groups:
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Traditional Keyword Research is more of an old-school approach to keyword research. You enter what you think is a popular keyword to find keywords with high search volume and low competition.
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Competitor-Based Keyword Research is all about finding keywords that are already proven to drive traffic, because your competitor is already ranking for them. It does not use one keyword to find other keywords. It uses your competitor’s websites, instead. The logic behind this that if it works for your competitors, it will most likely work for you, too.
Best Keyword Research Tools
Most of the keyword research tools available are still programmed for the traditional approach because it’s been the strategy of SEOs over the past years, and it still works. But, there are a handful of keyword research tools that are competitor-based.
These are some of the things you should look for in a keyword research tool:
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The number of keyword suggestions it gives you.
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How it filters data because volume isn’t everything.
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The monthly search volume of every keyword.
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SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) analysis
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If you are able to filter and pick low-competition keywords.
Here are some of the most popular and highly rated keyword research tools.
Traditional
1. Long Tail Pro
Spencer Haws created Long Tail Pro in 2011 because he was frustrated with the long and tedious process of keyword research. He created a tool that promises to give you speed, efficiency and all the tools you need in order to find profitable keywords.
This tool saves you a lot of time by merging keyword research and SEO metrics. It also works with AdWords Keyword Planner data and Majestic to get data for search volume, keyword suggestions, backlinks and SEO data. If you do not have an AdWords account, create one for free.
Long Tail Pro gives you at least 800 keywords for every seed keyword, plus their search volume, PPC and competitiveness guidelines – which is constantly updated and calculated automatically. And it saves you time because LTP is now one of the fastest keyword research tools in the market.
Long Tail Pro costs $37/month with a $1 trial.
2. SE Cockpit
Even though it’s has been around longer than any of the featured tools, it still has a huge following – with over 67,000 members. This one promises to give you fast keyword results, advanced campaign tracking and a superior analysis data.
You can also use SE Cockpit for other tasks related to SEO like site planning and improving ranking. It also gives you solid data in terms of keyword analysis, estimated traffic, and if Amazon appears in the top 10 results.
Its SERP analysis makes it easier for you to compare data since it’s color coded. And it offers you different metrics to compare the given data.
Price starts at $40 per month and they offer a free trial for 30 days.
3. KWFinder
KWFinder is one of the newest tools available today, and they are also one of the fastest-growing keyword research tools on the market. KWFinder is completely dedicated to keyword research.
You can see the ranking sites for your keywords on Google and how the keyword has trended since 2004. It also offers search volume data, trends, cost per click, keyword difficulty and keyword suggestions.
You can specifically target cities, countries and states for each keyword. Plus, it gives you domain, social and traffic data.
Price starts at $29 per month or you can opt for the $12 per month rate if you pay annually.
Competitive-Based
4. SEMRush
SEMRush is undeniably a popular competitive-based keyword research tool. Being the first on the market to spice up the approach in finding profitable keywords, SEMRush reverse-engineers your competitor’s organic rankings.
Instead of manually typing seed keywords to come up with a list of more keywords, this competitive-based tools lets you to enter your competitor’s URL to generate a list of their highest-ranking keywords.
You can get a sneak peek of your competitor’s landing pages, search engine reports, traffic stats, rankings and backlinks. As if that’s not enough, you can also conduct a full SEO site audit with SEMRush.
Price starts at $99 per month with a free trial.
5. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another competitive-based tool that uses both approaches – traditional and competitive-based keyword research – which makes them different from the tools in this lesson.
You can use Ahrefs to track your website ranking, brainstorm ideas for traffic-worthy content and find opportunities to backlink your site. It’s considered one of the best keyword research tools out there since it can do almost everything Moz, SEMRush, Buzzsumo and Rank Tracker offer.
Ahrefs just recently released Keyword Explorer 2.0 to give you a bunch of keyword suggestions. You can also properly evaluate keyword difficulty through Ahref’s link index of over 12 trillion links.
Pricing starts at $99 per month with a free trial.
Are You Keyed In?
Which one of these keyword research tools work best for you? Let us know in the comments below.
Try Out the Freemiums. Many of the keyword tools offer free trials for you to evaluate them.
Stay Up with What’s Working. Search engines change what they think are important for ranking. Stay connected to the changes or hire people who do SEO for a living.
Create Great Content. Ultimately, a motivated seller will choose you because you offer them the most value and show you care about them. So don’t just stuff keywords on your website. Give value.