Should a Newbie spend money on Rank Tracking & Keyword Research Tools?

mgeer

mgeer

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Looking for some opinions on this -- when starting out, is it worthwhile to pay $30-$100 per month for a keyword tool/SERP tracker?

As of now I'm unable to hire content writers (don't have an adequate budget). I'm writing all my content. However, I could afford $30-$100 if I absolutely needed to / could justify it.

Is it better to spend that money now for a little bit of data and time saving, or better to save that to put towards other website related expenses?
 
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mgeer said:
Looking for some opinions on this
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What I would do in your position is spend $5/month on SERPROBOT for rank tracking, and manually do keyword research with the aid of the Keywords Everywhere and Keyword Surfer chrome extensions (both are free).

This article provides a good, succinct explanation of how to do manual keyword research.

For new/low authority sites, I actually think manual keyword research uncovers considerably more opportunities than any keyword tools.
 
NeverStop said:
What I would do in your position is spend $5/month on SERPROBOT for rank tracking, and manually do keyword research with the aid of the Keywords Everywhere and Keyword Surfer chrome extensions (both are free).

This article provides a good, succinct explanation of how to do manual keyword research.

For new/low authority sites, I actually think manual keyword research uncovers considerably more opportunities than any keyword tools.
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Thanks for the info! I have Keywords Everywhere bookmarked, and am even prepared to buy some credits if needed. I’ll check out SERPROBOT, Keyword Surfer, and that article tomorrow. Thanks!
 
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You're welcome.
If you really want to be frugal, you don't have to buy any KE credits. Just use KE for their ideas. Keyword Surfer will tell you the search volume of any keyword you google. And you'd probably want to google every potential keyword anyway, to gauge the competition and the degree to which search intent is matched.
 
I'd spend the $10 on the 100,000 Keywords Everywhere credits for the ease of use. With KE I see basically everything I want to know - searches per month, CPC, difficulty, as well as suggestions on the right-hand side. If you do buy credits though make sure to tweak the settings so that it doesn't show the volume everywhere for everything. By that I mean KE will run by default when you go to Youtube, Amazon, Instagram. That'll run down your credits fast, so go into the settings and untick what you don't need. Or just activate KE when you need it - I don't care to do that because it's annoying to me, so I just keep it on. I bought 10$ of credits - 100k - more than a month ago and still have 93,000 left. Highly recommend it.
Not sure if it's allowed to mention here, but there are also ways to gain access to something like Ahrefs without paying the full price. And Ahrefs is great. If you're short on money, you could pay for it for a month and just use that month to do as much research as possible (making sure to save/export the important, juicy stuff) and then drop it until you need it again. Good luck either way!
 
With your budget I wouldn’t worry about premium data or tools. Just write about stuff in Google auto complete for your niches big stem keyword and track your rankings with search console. With time, persistence and a bit of watching your search console reports. A path forward will start to emerge unless you’re really unlucky or bad at writing.

Good luck.
 
Sorry guys, I missed these replies. I got a notification for everything else (but not these), so didn't think to check the thread again.

mikiso said:
I'd spend the $10 on the 100,000 Keywords Everywhere credits for the ease of use. With KE I see basically everything I want to know - searches per month, CPC, difficulty, as well as suggestions on the right-hand side. If you do buy credits though make sure to tweak the settings so that it doesn't show the volume everywhere for everything. By that I mean KE will run by default when you go to Youtube, Amazon, Instagram. That'll run down your credits fast, so go into the settings and untick what you don't need. Or just activate KE when you need it - I don't care to do that because it's annoying to me, so I just keep it on. I bought 10$ of credits - 100k - more than a month ago and still have 93,000 left. Highly recommend it.
Not sure if it's allowed to mention here, but there are also ways to gain access to something like Ahrefs without paying the full price. And Ahrefs is great. If you're short on money, you could pay for it for a month and just use that month to do as much research as possible (making sure to save/export the important, juicy stuff) and then drop it until you need it again. Good luck either way!
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The running through credits is the reason why I haven't bought credits yet, but I think I will now knowing I can adjust the settings. Thanks for the tip!

I didn't do that for Ahrefs, but I did do that for SEMRush (since that's what the company I work for uses and I'm familiar with it). I did get a bit of data saved too :wink:

secretagentdad said:
With your budget I wouldn’t worry about premium data or tools. Just write about stuff in Google auto complete for your niches big stem keyword and track your rankings with search console. With time, persistence and a bit of watching your search console reports. A path forward will start to emerge unless you’re really unlucky or bad at writing.

Good luck.
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Appreciate the advice. That's a good idea. I do have a list of 300+ topic ideas that I generated, but many of them are money pages or other topics that are a bit more competitive.

I was going to start brainstorming / researching either other less competitive topics to start with and/or any sub topics I can write about (of the topic ideas already on my list).

Auto complete is a good idea too. I didn't think of that (usually only use it when thinking of other keywords to target (in addition to People also ask and Related searches). I'll make sure to do that too.

Thanks guys!
 
I purchased ahrefs as a newcomer of IM, and do not control it completely, now I directly use the autocomplete and also ask in google which can also give more valuable keywords.
 
It seems logical to need a tool when starting off, but I’ve found over 8+ months looking up keywords and ideas that there’s usually no better gauge than your own Google searches and following intuition for topics.

That said, I usually start with Keyword Chef, then into clicking around the SERPs’ People Also Ask’s, then Keywords Everywhere is really useful to quick look up some volumes and find more ideas, with some KGR on top to verify some 1st page ranking likelihood.

All those cost like what $20?
 
It depends on the business model and how you want to monetize your site. If you want to monetize a site with Ads, then you can search for underserved topics and use Google or a tool like Keywordseverywhere or Ubersuggest.

However, if you are in a B2B niche like myself, and monetizing with affiliate marketing, you need a good keyword tool. There are few transactional keywords than you need to find, and you need to analyze alternative angles that you can target. Moreover, you need to reverse engineer the competitors backlink profile, which is easier with a tool like Ahrefs.
 
When I started out, I used the 30 days Moz trial and after that did a 7-day Ahrefs trial for $7. That's enough to get you started and will give you keyword ideas for months
 
Whatever you do, whatever you spend, find a tool that makes it easy to see what *else* your competitors are ranking for on any given post. It's priceless, whether it's $15 per month or $100 per month.

Once you start to get a little bit of traction and you're ranking for a keyword, try to find similar sites that are ranking just below you (or just above) for that keyword, and see what else they're ranking for throughout the rest of their site. This gives you a hint that these sites are potentially close to you in terms of what they (and you) can hope to rank for.

Now, you have a list of terms that you ought to be able to outrank them for. Do this over and over anytime you find a competitor who is in your same tier.

"If this guy's ranking for X, I should be able to as well since I'm already beating him for Y..."

This gives a great starting point. Ryu and others have been hammering this home for ages and it works. It works again and again, it's undefeated. There are other variables, of course, there always are... But I've found this to be a much better starting point than "I'm just going to write everything with low enough competition/volume."

So, whatever tool you go with, make sure it can do *this*, being able to contextualize what ELSE your near-competitors are able to rank for will save you so many resources and will get you traction more quickly.

TLDR: A keyword tool that does ^ that, is what you need, full stop.

People like to go hella scientific beyond this, and props to the big brain duders and their SERP science/astrology. There's a million rabbit holes you can fall into and a thousand metrics to obsess over, but this Viking Method of just finding a village that's a little bit smaller than yours and pillaging it seems to be prettay prettay prettay good.
 
I literally just use free Ahrefs for rank tracking and free Ubersuggest, keywords everywhere plugins for keyword research. Serving me well so far and costs nothing.
 
Potatoe said:
Once you start to get a little bit of traction and you're ranking for a keyword, try to find similar sites that are ranking just below you (or just above) for that keyword, and see what else they're ranking for throughout the rest of their site. This gives you a hint that these sites are potentially close to you in terms of what they (and you) can hope to rank for.
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To clarify, if I’m ranking above a similar site for “blue widgets,” I should see what other pages this site is ranking well for, assuming that if they’re ranking well for a term - say, “green widgets” - and I’m beating them for “blue widgets,” I should be able to rank for “green widgets” too?
 
mgeer said:
To clarify, if I’m ranking above a similar site for “blue widgets,” I should see what other pages this site is ranking well for, assuming that if they’re ranking well for a term - say, “green widgets” - and I’m beating them for “blue widgets,” I should be able to rank for “green widgets” too?
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It's not quite as simple as that. For example, just because you are beating a Wikipedia page for one term doesn't mean that you can beat Wikipedia for every search term.

You can turn it around and use a version of the 'Avalanche technique' - where you look at kws in your niche with a similar level of keyword difficulty to 'blue widgets' in whatever tool you are using. (I find it a useful technique to occasionally order ranking pages for a site and just eyeball down the keyword difficulty column to get an idea how or if things have changed.)

And you can combine the two by looking at the other 'blue widget' sites and then attacking their pages which are ranking for similar (and maybe slightly higher) keyword difficulty terms.
 
@ToffeeLa That makes sense, thanks. It sounds like this might be a good way to find potential low hanging fruit (KWs/pages). Then you'd want to check the SERPs to see if you truly have a chance to rank (for) it.
 
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