Edit: After ten years, we've taken the decision to close the old free keyword tool. But you can still start your resarch straight away without a credit card on the free tool available on our home page.
The news that Google is retiring its Keyword Tool has been around for quite a few weeks now - and it's only a matter of time (and probably not very much time) until this happens and keyword researchers are left wondering how to do their keyword research.
The answer, of course, is Wordtracker's new free Keyword Tool - modeled on the main Keyword Tool at original.wordtracker.com.
The tool is now live and open for anyone to use - just sign up with your email address, and you can get 50 keyword results for any search you make. Confirm that email address, and we'll double that for you instantly.
What can I do in this keyword tool?
It's actually a much more flexible tool than previous versions of our free Keyword Tool, and has much more in common with the paid subscription tool. I'll give you a few tips on how to use it, and to do that I'm going to have to get into character.
Today, I'm a chocolatier who is ready to share my chocolate recipes with the world - but I want to make sure that I'm using the right keywords on my page, so I'll do some research on chocolate recipes
With the default 'keywords in any order' setting, I'm going to get lots and lots of keywords like 'chocolate cake recipe', 'chocolate mousse recipe', 'chocolate cookie recipe' and so on. These are helpful, and I'll keep a note of them, but they're not really what I'm looking for right now. I'm making chocolate, not chocolate products.
The simple solution is to choose 'exact keyword inside a search term' - which will only give you keywords back that contain the phrase 'chocolate recipe' as I entered it into the seed word box. Now when I look at my results, I can see things like 'chocolate recipe', 'raw chocolate recipe', 'homemade chocolate recipe' and so on - and these are all things that I want to share with the world, so now I've got a sense of the keywords people are using to search for my recipes, and I can prioritise accordingly.
Two clicks. Highly focused results. But there's more.
You'll notice a 'plurals' checkbox in that panel as well - by selecting this, you'll get not only 'chocolate recipe' keywords, but also 'chocolate recipes' keywords - so you can get a real sense of the language that your audience is using to search with.
My last tip for today is negative keywords. My chocolate shop also sells tea - but researching 'tea' gives me a bunch of 'tea party' results which I'm not really looking for. I can just enter:
tea-party
and I'll still have 100 keywords, but none of them will be talking about tea parties. It's easy to focus your keyword results in the free Keyword Tool.
Try the free Keyword Tool now, and let us know what you think - there will be more features coming in the next few weeks, so if you don't see exactly what you want, let us know and we can consider it for inclusion.
