If you’re serious about SEO, then you should definitely use some of the below listed tools rather than relying solely on Google Keyword Planner and/or Microsoft Ad Intelligence Tool.

Below are keyword research tools that professional SEO experts and digital marketers alike use:

• Ubersuggest (free)

Ubersuggest will provide you with a list of search suggestions containing longer tail search queries and organised alphabetically based on your keyword root. The tool is also useful for identifying negative keywords that need to be implemented.

• WordStream (free & paid)

WordStream Keyword Tool can identify negative keywords, group keywords, and their Keyword Niche Finder will help you to discover niches that your competitors may be overlooking. With the free version of this tool you get to see the top 100 keyword results only, but a paid version delivers thousands of results.

• SECockpit

SECockpit is a cloud-based keyword research tool which can pull results from Google Suggest, Related Searches, and synonyms from Adwords. Interestingly, it has its own bar-rating system for keywords, which takes into account top 10 competition, monthly search volume to help users identify not only traffic keywords, but converting keywords too.

• FreshKey

FreshKey offers a powerful Amazon spy tool and Google Trends with real-time data features. It can generate keyword ideas, variations, and synonyms to give you wider insight into a market. Importantly, this keyword research tool sorts keywords depending on popularity.

• Long Tail Pro (Free & Paid)

Long Tail Pro allows marketers to quickly generate unique long tail and profitable keywords based on one or multiple root keywords, competitor analysis, what is your ranking and how you can achieve ranking on Google, Bing or Yahoo.

• Keyword Snatcher

Keyword Snatcher is a tool which delivers a huge amount of keywords that offer insight into niches that your competitors might be overlooking. You can take keywords from this tool and audit them using any of the others listed.

• Moz

The Moz keyword research tool might be a bit basic but will retrieve the top 10 rankings for any keyword and then assign keywords a difficulty score. You can view search volume data with this tool and pull up the SERPs to see which websites and/or competitors rank in the top 10.

• Keyword Typo Generator

Keyword typo generator will generate a list of common misspelling word for any particular keyword. Best to use this tool for your branded terms as well as high traffic terms (because they often consist of single or short phrase).

• Market Samurai

  Market Samurai is a Keyword Research and competition analysis tool. For page rank purposes their Rank Tracker Module allows you to keep track of different keywords and different websites.

• Traffic Travis (Free / Paid)

Traffic Travis is basically like Market Samurai. It enables you to get an inside look at your competitor’s keyword list, how many backlinks their website has, what page rank they’re in, how many pages they have indexed in search engines and a lot more.

• Ultimate Niche Finder (Paid)

Ultimate Niche Finder is brilliant at finding profitable keywords. This tool able to get accurate and quick analysis of your competition, and it will let you know about how many backlinks you’ll need to rank for any given keyword.

• SEO Profiler (Paid)

SEO Profiler will help you find and evaluate new keywords and the difficulty of ranking and check out the competition, see the keywords your competitors use in their PPC campaigns. It will give you a complete report about errors in your website structure, socialisation of your website, SEO, broken links and other vital optimisation reports.

• Keyword Wrapper

Use this easy-to-use tool to quickly create keyword sets in all match types.

• Phrase Builder

Phrase Builder tool gets phrases from the first set of phrases one by one and creates new phrases by concatenation with phrases from the second set of phrases.

• WebCEO (Free)

WebCEO is an all in one search engine optimisation package. It gives you global searches, related keyword ideas, competition and search trends. It has lots of extra features that provide an excellent SEO workflow as well.

• Keyword Discovery (Paid)

Keyword Discovery is a Wordtracker alternative. The tool itself has several impressive features, giving users access to data including Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) analysis, search trends, keyword density, and industry keywords. You can also crawl for related terms, saving yourself a lot of time from researching each particular keyword.

• Google Trends (Free)

Google Trends provides data on search volume over time. It can tell you whether a keyword is gaining in popularity or falling out of favor among searchers.

• KeywordEye (Free & Paid)

KeywordEye pulls data from Google keyword tool and presents it  the form of a tag cloud and shows keywords with larger search volume in a larger font. Based on this you see the most searched for words quickly.

Finally, included are best competitive intelligence tools to help find out what keywords your competitors are bidding on and their estimated spend too.

• SEMRush (Free & Paid)

With SEMrush you will see an overview screen, which will show you how you are doing with the traffic you are getting – both paid and unpaid. Then you will see how big the competitive field is for a keyword and who wants to pay for it and how much. Quite uniquely, it offers ‘related keywords’ which is an important piece of information to consider putting in the negatives of your PPC campaign.

• Spyfu (Free)

Spyfu is effective tool to spy on your competition. You can spot the best adwords keywords your competition is using. You can find profitable keywords, top ad competitors, organic keywords, top organic competitors, ad history, whether ad copy has changed and lot of useful features.

• KeywordSpy (Free & Paid)

KeywordSpy can spy on the top competition and unveil accurate data on how much that site is spending in paid search, who their competitors are, what keywords they spend the most money on, and more. The competitors tab is also pretty neat; you can see both organic and paid competitors side by side.

What keyword research tools are you using, do you have a favourite? Look forward to hearing your experiences.