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Let’s get right down to it: The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords.

Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic terms, they’re associated with more qualified traffic and users that are typically further down their path of intent.

The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process — one that’s made all the more simple and quick when you use the right tools to perform your keyword research.

Download our free SEO template here to organize your keyword research into an actionable plan for your site. 

In this post, we’ll cover the nine best tools out there for performing keyword research for your website content. Before we get started though, let’s briefly go over two important things to consider as you do your research: relevance and (if applicable) location.

Keyword Relevance

Relevance is the most important factor to consider when choosing the right keywords for SEO. Why? Because the more specific you are, the better.

For instance, if you own a company that installs swimming pools, it’s likely that you’d attract more qualified prospects by targeting a keyword such as “fiberglass in-ground pool installation,” rather than “swimming pools.” That’s because there’s a good chance that someone searching for “fiberglass in-ground pool installation” is looking for information on installation or someone to perform the installation … and that could be you!

Sure, optimizing for “swimming pools” has its place. But there’s no doubt that this keyword will attract a much more generic audience that may not be looking for what you have to offer. Go for the relevant, long-tail keywords instead.

Location-Based Keywords

Another major factor to consider when optimizing for the right keywords is location-based searches. When looking for contractors and services in their specific area, search engine users will usually include their location in the search. So, “fiberglass in-ground pool installation” becomes “fiberglass in-ground pool installation in Boston, MA.”

If you operate in one geo-location, you may want to consider adding location-based keywords to all of your pages, since traffic from other locations isn’t going to be very much help to you. If your business operates in several geo-locations, it is also a wise choice to create a separate web page dedicated to each location so you can make sure your brand is present when people are searching for individual locations.

Now, how do you choose the right keywords for your business? We certainly don’t recommend guessing, for obvious reasons. Instead, there are many ways to research and find long-tail keywords that are right for your business.

Here are nine awesome free and paid keyword research tools you can use to quickly and easily identify strong long-tail keywords for your SEO campaign.

Free Keyword Research Tools

1) Google Keyword Planner

Google has a few tools that make it easy to conduct keyword research, and their free AdWords tool called Keyword Planner is a great place to start — especially if you use AdWords for some of your campaigns. (Note: You’ll need to set up an AdWords account to use Keyword Planner, but that doesn’t mean you have to create an ad.)

When you input one keyword, multiple keywords, or even your website address into Keyword Planner, Google will spit out a list of related keywords along with simple metrics to gauge how fierce the competition is around each one and how many searches it gets on both a global and local search level.

It’ll also show you historical statistics and information on how a list of keywords might perform — and it’ll create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together. Since it’s a free AdWords tool, it can also help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your AdWords campaigns.

Image Credit: Google

Unfortunately, when Google transitioned from Keyword Tool to Keyword Planner, they stripped out a lot of the more interesting functionality — but you can make up for it somewhat if you take the information you learn from Keyword Planner and use Google Trends to fill in some blanks.

Which brings me to the next tool …

2) Google Trends

Google Trends is another free tool from Google. It lets you enter multiple keywords and filter by location, search history, and category. Once you enter that information in, it’ll give you results that show how much web interest there is around a particular keyword, what caused the interest (e.g., press coverage), and where the traffic is coming from — along with similar keywords.

The best part about Google Trends is that it doesn’t just give you static keyword volume numbers like most keyword research tools. Instead, it generates colorful, interactive graphs that you can play with, download, and even embed on your website. It’ll also give you more dynamic insight into a keyword with information like relative popularity of a search term over time.

Interestingly, its data doesn’t include in repeated queries from a single user over a short period of time, which makes results cleaner. It also groups together searches that it infers to mean the same thing, like misspellings.

One way to use Google Trends? If you’re trying to decide between two keyword variations for your latest blog post title. Simply perform a quick comparison search in Google Trends to see which one is getting searched more often.

3) Keyword Tool.io

Keyword Tool is pretty rudimentary online keyword research tool, but if you’re just looking for a list of long-tail keyword suggestions related to one you already have in mind, then it can be useful. It’s also totally free — to use the most basic version, you don’t even need to create an account.

What Keyword Tool does is use Google Autocomplete to generate a list of relevant long-tail keywords suggestions. The search terms suggested by Google Autocomplete are based on a few different factors, like how often users were searching for a particular term in the past.

This type of suggestion tool can help you understand what people are searching for around your topics. For example, bloggers might use a tool like this to brainstorm blog post titles that’ll do well in search.

Again, all the free version does for you is generate other keyword suggestions in alphabetical order — it doesn’t tell you anything about search volume or cost-per-click (CPC). To get that information, you’ll have to upgrade to Keyword Tool Pro. The Pro version will also let you export the keywords and use them for content creation, search engine optimization, CPC/PPC, or other marketing activities.

Paid Keyword Research Tools 

4) Term Explorer

Price: $34/mo. for Basic; $97/mo. for Pro; $499/mo. for Agency

Term Explorer offers probably the deepest research reports of any keyword research tool on the market. From one single seed term, you can get over 10,000 keyword variations.

Best of all, the tool does a great job of keeping the results as relevant as possible and pulling through lots of supporting metrics with them.

It’ll give you data for all the results on page one of search engine results pages (SERPs), including the number of results, link strength, trust score, and keyword difficulty. To help you get a handle on your competitors, you can use the tool to research domain age, page ranking, and links, as well as the word count, page rank, links, outbound links, and the number of keyword occurrences in title, URL, and headers for individual webpages. You can also export all this data into a CSV for your own analysis.

Image Credit: Term Explorer

Note: If you only plan on using it a few times a day, there is actually a free version of this tool that’ll do five tiny keyword jobs and five keyword analyses per day, with no queue priority.

5) Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool

Price: $99/mo. for Standard; $149/mo. for Medium; $249/mo. for Large; $599/mo. for Premium

The keyword difficulty tool from Moz is one of the most useful components of their paid suite. It’s a fantastic resource for analyzing the competitiveness of a keyword and for unearthing low-hanging fruit.

When you input a keyword into this tool, it’ll find the top 10 rankings for that keyword. Then, it’ll assign that keyword a “Difficulty Score” based on the pages that currently rank for that word. You can look at search volume data for your keywords, then pull up the SERP to see the top 10 results for each term.

Image Credit: Moz

Want to do some competitive keyword analysis? You can use the tool to see who else is ranking for your targeted keywords, along with information like each site’s page authority and the number of root domains linking to their page.

You can also export all this data into a CSV for your own analysis.

6) SEMrush

Price: $69.95/mo. for Pro; $149.95/mo. for Guru; $549.95/mo. for Business

SEMrush is a competitive research tool that lets you keep an eye on on your competitors’ keywords to find opportunities to bump them out for a top position in Google’s and Bing’s organic search results. You can compare a number of domains against one another to evaluate the competitive landscape, including their common keywords and positions in Google’s organic, paid, and shopping search results.

Position tracking is kind of like a sophisticated version of Google Trends, letting you see a keyword’s position in SERPs and analyze the history of rises and drops. Their colorful, visual charts are also super helpful for more quickly understanding trends and analyzing results.

Image Credit: SEMrush

7) Ahrefs

Price: $99/mo. for Lite; $179/mo. for Standard; $399/mo. for Advanced

Position Explorer is similar to SEMrush, but with some added bonuses — and a much more intuitive design.

For example, the Site Explorer part of the tool will let you find the URL rating and domain rating for any website you put in there, along with number of backlinks, number of referring domains, and social metrics for Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. It’s also great for finding link targets: You can use it to get a quick analysis of a site, and you can also use its extensive index when you want to do a deeper dive.

Ahrefs’ user interface is a big plus. It’s not just black-and-white tables filled with numbers; instead, you’ll get colorful, interactive charts of things like number of indexed pages, internal and external backlinks, new vs. lost backlinks — all over time.

Image Credit: Ahrefs

Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, say that Ahrefs is his #1 go-to tool for backlink analysis: “I’ve tested over 25 link analysis tools and none come close to Ahref’s in terms of index size, freshness, and overall usability.”

The Position Explorer part of the tool lets you find keyword opportunities where your competitors are ranking, while also giving you a ton of extra link metrics that help you determine keyword competitiveness. And the Content Explorer lets you browse through the most shared content for any topic.

8) Accuranker

Price: $19.95/mo. for Beginner; $29.95/mo. for Pro 300; $44.95/mo. for Pro 600; $74.95/mo. for Pro 1K

Accuranker is a keyword rank tracking tool with a key differentiator: It’s lightning fast while being extremely precise. So if you’re used to spending hours monitoring the rank progression of your keywords, this’ll end up saving you a ton of time.

Other advantages of this tool? It has built-in proxies to get a quick glance at whose ranking within the SERPs for any given keyword. If you plan to report keyword metrics to your manager or your team, you’ll like its scheduled weekly reports feature.

Image Credit: Accuranker

It’s also one of the best rank trackers out there that offers highly localized search engine rankings for your keywords. So if you’re marketing your business to an international audience, it’s a great tool for analyzing which pages are ranking in different countries.

Finally, it has integrations available with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Social Monitoring, and YouTube so you can keep an eye on statistics and estimated search traffic for your keywords straight from your AccuRanker dashboard.

9) HubSpot’s Keywords Tool

Price: $200/mo. for Basic; $800/mo. for Pro; $2,400/mo. for Enterprise; (Free Trial Here)

HubSpot also has its very own Keywords Tool within the software. The Keywords Tool helps you research keywords, identify the best keywords for optimizing your site, and track results from each one. This tracking feature allows you to see which keywords are actually driving traffic and leads, so you can use this information to continue optimizing your keywords over time.

The tool will also show you how your competitors rank for specific keywords, and help you monitor and build high quality inbound links. 

(HubSpot customers: You can access the Keyword Tool in HubSpot by clicking here or going to Reports > Keywords.)

Now that you know about all these great tools, get out there and start discovering your best keywords for SEO.

What tools and methods do you use to find long-tail keywords? Share your favorites with us in the comments below.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in August 2011 and has been updated and for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

Pens, t-shirts, water bottles, baseball caps, lanyards … so many lanyards.

Welcome to the wonderful world of swag, where — in a tremendous display of humanity’s technological prowess — we prove that we can stamp a logo or catchphrase on just about anything.

In politics, candidates don’t just use swag to raise money. They use it to learn more about their supporters. As Vanessa Friedman of The New York Times reported, “The choice of a product can reveal whether you are a beer drinker, a sports fan or what cellphone you use. It can suggest that there are a lot of joggers headquartered in a specific region of the country, indicating that a campaign may want to direct its health communications to that state.”

Candidates are essentially using swag sales data to help build out their buyer personas. (Or, in this case, voter personas.) Using the insights they glean, candidates can tailor their messages to the different regions they’re campaigning in.

But what kinds of products are candidates actually stocking in their swag shops? And what can candidates hope to learn from selling some of the more ridiculous items you’re about to see on this list? Let’s take a closer look. 

12 Pieces of Presidential Campaign Swag You’ve Got to See

1) The Obligatory Beer Koozie

As a presidential candidate in the U.S. of A., you’re expected to do three things on the campaign trail:

1. Kiss babies
2. Eat hot dogs (no fancy mustard allowed)
3. Drink beers with fellow, good ole-fashioned, beer-drinking Americans

To showcase just how beer-friendly they are — and to keep the hands of their suds-sipping supporters from getting cold — many presidential candidates sell signature beer koozies in their online campaign stores.

I chose to highlight Hillary Clinton’s and Ted Cruz’s koozies in the image above since their campaigns took the extra effort of making (terrible?) puns.

2) Candidate Coolers

Of course, a koozie is only useful when you’re carrying around a single beer. To carry around several beers, you need a cooler. Fortunately, the Cruz campaign store has got you covered. President Barack Obama’s campaign store sold a cooler back in 2012 as well, and John McCain’s 2008 campaign store sold one too — although McCain opted for an embroidered, soft-sided cooler as opposed to a hard plastic one.

3) Something With Overtly Millennial Messaging

The first two items on this list may have helped candidates identify who among their supporters were beer drinkers. But with the two pieces of swag pictured above, it’s likely that the Marco Rubio campaign (suspended March 2016) and the Hillary Clinton campaign are trying to target millennial supporters. Rubio’s “bae” sticker and Clinton’s “yaaas” t-shirt both highlight some very recent additions to American vocabulary.

And while we can’t help you in the “yaaas” department, we do have a flowchart that will teach you when it’s appropriate to use the term “bae” in your marketing.

Bonus: This 404 error page from the Jeb Bush campaign website.

4) A $75 Guacamole Bowl

FYI: I discovered that 404 error page from Jeb Bush’s campaign site while searching for his headline-grabbing $75 guacamole bowl. (Since dropping out of the 2016 presidential race in February, Bush’s campaign store is no longer operational.)

From a data standpoint, this one’s a no-brainer: Supporters who buy a $75 guacamole bowl from your campaign website must LOVE guacamole. You can use the sales data to make sure you’re serving guacamole at campaign events in the regions where guacamole popularity is at its highest. Note: These findings can also help to inform your campaign’s overall policy on guacamole and other snack-related issues.

5) A Commander-in-Chief Cutting Board

While we’re on the subject of presidential candidate-branded kitchenware, here’s a $20 cutting board from President Obama’s 2012 campaign. Can I prove that this $20 cutting board helped President Obama win the 2012 election? No, I cannot. But I also can’t prove that it didn’t help …

6) Star-Spangled Spatulas

Just kidding, these grill spatulas aren’t really spangled with stars, but they do incorporate the candidates’ campaign logos — in this case, President Obama’s campaign logo from 2012 and Ted Cruz’s campaign logo from 2016 — in a pretty nifty fashion. Have a hankering to know if your supporters are BBQ fans? Selling spatulas could be the secret recipe.

7) The Same. Darn. Water Bottle.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign store sells one ($15). Ted Cruz’s campaign store sells one, too ($15). And back in 2012, President Obama’s campaign store sold the same one for — you guessed it — $15. Sales of such bottles, no doubt, have helped candidates figure out which of their supporters are fans of water.

To be serious for a second, when you see items like water bottles being sold in conjunction with, say, yoga pants, and other athletic items, you can start to identify supporters for whom health and fitness are a priority.

Speaking of yoga pants …

8) Yoga Pants

Here’s another example of swag that’s aimed at fitness- and health-focused supporters: yoga pants. On the left are the Ted Cruz campaign store’s pants, which sell for $40. On the right are the pants from President Obama’s 2012 campaign, which sold for $35.

9) Specialty Shirts & Jerseys

There’s a lot of presidential candidate apparel out there, and most of it is pretty boring: just a logo and/or slogan printed on a t-shirt or cap. But in some cases, campaign stores take the design up a notch …. or down a notch, depending on your particular fashion sensibilities.

The first example above is from the Bernie Sanders campaign store, and it’s a t-shirt that was designed by street artist Shepard Fairey ($30). Next is an “ugly sweater” from the Ted Cruz campaign store, which features the candidate’s likeness ($65). Finally, we have a basketball jersey from President Obama’s 2012 campaign store.

10) Baby Swag

Yes, the legal voting age in the U.S. is 18, but that hasn’t stopped candidates from targeting the next generation with baby-sized swag. Also, sales of such swag can help candidates identify who of their supporters have youngsters in their families.

Pictured above: a “Make America Great Again” onesie from the Donald Trump campaign store ($18); a “Bernie 2016” bib from the Bernie Sanders campaign store ($15); and a onesie from the Marco Rubio campaign store that reads, “My parents love me, so they are voting Marco Rubio 2016” ($25).

11) Phone Cases

Lots of candidates are selling phone cases in their campaign stores nowadays. But back in 2012, Mitt Romney straight up owned the branded phone case game: All six case styles you see above are from his 2012 campaign store. They sold for $40-a-pop.

12) Swag Bundles

How do candidates identify their most ardent supporters, the supporters who are going to show up at rallies and help spread the campaign message like wildfire? It’s possible they look at the folks who are purchasing massive bundles of swag from their campaign shops. These bundles can include bumper stickers, pins, signs, flags, and more.

Pictured above: The “Organizing Pack (Large)” from Bernie Sanders’ campaign store ($80) and the “Rally Pack (for 12)” from Donald Trump’s campaign store ($250).

Know of any other awesome (or awful) examples of candidate swag? Let us know in the comments section below.

The search for higher education has changed in the past decade. While websites have long been an important part of the marketing and recruitment efforts of any school, they’re now the most important part. 

Still, many schools either don’t have a search-engine optimization (SEO) strategy in place—or are playing guessing games when it comes to what will attract the most prospective parents and students to their site.

To help you correct your search strategy course, we’ve compiled 8 SEO missteps that schools often take, and provided some guidance on a better way to 

Take a look at the preview below, and then snag your copy of the full ebook here. 

DON’T: Assume Prospective Students Are Searching For Your School 

Students who already know your school aren’t the ones you’re trying to reach with SEO. That means using your school’s name as a keyword isn’t a great move. Your goal is, instead, to attract new potential students who may be interested in the programs you offer and other attractive qualities.

Focus on the needs of your target audience. If you’re an online institution, you’re aiming to reach students who don’t have the time or ability to attend on-campus classes. Do you have one of the top business schools in the country? Your SEO should focus on that. When you address the problems or needs of your target audience, then they’re more likely to find you.

Once you’ve snagged their attention, you can continue your inbound marketing strategy. Without attracting those students through the keywords they’re searching, you’ll never get past the first step. 

DO: Assume Prospective Students Are Still In Research Phase When Brainstorming Keywords

Research starts with a question. That’s how your prospects will begin their search into schools like yours. Those questions will be very specific and cover much more than one or two words—keywords—when seeking an answer.

That means your SEO must plan for long-tail keywords and search phrases that match your target audience’s needs. In other words, those searching for a “business degree” will need much more information than just about the degree itself. They may search for “business degree from accredited online” university, or “business bachelors degree in two years.” They need all the facts during this initial research period, and if your chosen search terms aren’t focused on providing those facts, then qualified students won’t find you.

How can you choose keywords that are relevant to potential students and beneficial to you? Here are some tips to get you started:

• Make a list of important topics that are relevant to your business and the students you want to attract
• Choose keywords and search phrases that match your topics
• Research those terms to uncover related search terms you may not have considered
• Investigate other schools to see how they rank with your chosen search terms

Remember, the search terms you choose to help students research your school should appear in copy on your website. That requires quality content that provides answers to the questions these prospective students may have.

Ready for more Do’s and Dont’s? 

You can download the full ebook by clicking on the image below:

“I wish I were more stressed.” 

I’d guess that you’ve never heard anyone utter that phrase. Almost everyone is on the hunt for ways to avoid or better manage the amount of pressure they experience. 

But what if I told you that introducing a little stress into your routine might make you more productive? 

According Yerkes-Dodson Law, increased mental arousal can actually help improve performance, but only to a certain degree. You see, this positive form of stress — known as eustress — marks the highest peak in the human performance curve. However, most people struggle to achieve such balance, leaving them feeling either under-stimulated or distressed.

Want to learn how to better measure and manage workplace stress? Check out the infograpic from Bryan College for more detailed research, as well advice on how to leverage positive stress in the workplace.