5 Free keyword research tools to maximise the organic traffic to your recruitment blog
By Samm Green
Do you ever find yourself running out of ideas for your recruitment blog and feel like sometimes you’re just writing an article with little purpose and value? Efficient keyword research is great for coming up with topic ideas that are not only going to resonate with readers but generate organic traffic to your website.
Before you start the keyword research process you need to think of some core topics which are somewhat relevant to your business and something that would be relevant for your blog audience. For a recruitment firm, if you want to attract candidates, this could be - “CVs” or “Interviews” for instance.
Let us take “CVs” for example as the head term, keyword research will allow you to delve deeper into the topics and find keywords that people are searching for such as:
- How to write a cv for a job with no experience
- How to layout a cv
- How to make your cv stand out
There are a collection of free online tools which can be used for the keyword research process which include:
Answer the Public
Answer the Public pulls in all the auto-complete data (see image) from search engines and then sorts them into categories such as:
- Questions, such as: can, how, what, why
- Prepositions, such as: for, with, to
- Comparisons, such as: like, versus, or
For broad keywords such as “CVs”, it will give you lots of topic ideas that can be displayed in a visualisation which can be exported as an image or alternatively it can be displayed in columns.
Alsoasked.com
Alsoasked.com’s tool differs to Answer the Public in terms of that this tool scrapes the “People Also Asked” (see image)
It then topically groups the results which can be exported as a CSV file or downloaded as an image.
Google Keyword Planner
If your business uses Google ads, you are able to use the Google keyword planner for free, which will provide you with the most important metric associated with a keyword, monthly search volume.
Search volume will be able to validate your topic idea to make sure that a significant amount of people are searching for the topic, or keywords related to the topic, in the Google search engine.
Keyword Surfer
Keyword surfer is a handy Google Chrome extension for keyword research on-the-fly. As you are typing a query in Google it will match autocomplete queries with search volumes.
Another feature is that it will generate a range of similar keywords too on the right-hand side of the search engine results page.
QuestionDB
QuestionDB is slightly different from the other tools as this scrapes questions related to your topic that have been asked in Reddit.
For instance, if I search for “Interview Tips” some questions that have been asked in Reddit are:
- tips to overcome interview anxiety
- tips for an all-day interview
- tips for a first interview
These 5 free tools are great to delve into keyword research and understanding the questions that your audience is asking. Once you have mastered the free tools, there are a few paid alternatives, such as Ahrefs & SEMrush, which can help your keyword research go even further with added metrics such as keyword difficulty which will highlight opportunities which you stand more of a chance of ranking in the top few positions in the Google search results.
About the Author:
Samm Green is the Co-founder at Few & Far. A talent consultancy firm based in London and San Francisco.
Few&Far finds digital companies at the forefront of technology the talent needed to design, scale, and build products and services globally. They've worked with clients all over the world including Starling Bank, Babylon Health, Typeform, Agoda, Tesco PLC and World Remit.
