How To Create An Awesome Explainer Video

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So you think you want an explainer video on your website? Well, there are plenty of good reasons why you should be seriously considering this option to improve your conversion rate on key pages.

Videos can be great for a number of purposes:

  • Business – Get your visitor’s attention by explaining your
    product or service is less than two minutes
  • Crowdfunders – Having a video as part of a funding campaign
    often helps raise double the money than if you don’t have a video to explain your proposition and business plan.
  • Authors – Can benefit from having an engaging and
    entertaining book trailer.
  • Marketers – Communicate your latest service or content using
    rich media.
  • Contests – Grab attention for promotions or contests using a
    short video.

You can then use your video on your website and drive more traffic to your website by uploading it to YouTube and sharing it on social media. Crazy Egg has a video on their homepage and they estimate it generates an additional $21,000 a month in new income. At the bottom of this post you will find verified links to over 100 explainer video companies.

Types of Explainer Videos: 

1. Live Action Video:

A non-animated video can be good if you are selling a tangible product or a people-oriented service, such as a design agency or consultancy. People love to see what a product looks like in context and having the people who your customers would interact with in a video may help establish an emotional connection.

However, live-action videos do restrict you to the real world and so special effects are limited and unless you have a large budget your location is also going to be local.

2. Animated Explainer Videos: 

This type of videos allows for much more creativity in your visual story and they are easier to edit or refresh if you need to adapt them at a future date. Animated videos are particularly good for explaining services and intangible products, such as digital tools or
software.

If you don’t have a physical product or object to show you can use an animated video to construct a compelling narrative about how your solution will be the answer to your customer’s problem.

3. Whiteboard Explainer Videos: 

This is where the animation is hand drawn and erased using a whiteboard. It is popular because of its simplicity and the low cost of producing such a video. However, they can be very compelling and powerful at telling your story.

4. Kickstarter Videos: 

Almost every Kickstarter project has an explainer video because it’s a great way to sell an idea and persuade people to part with their money. They do tend to be longer than your average explainer video, but Kickstarter does give you easy access to lots of examples of explainer videos.

Ok, if you are convinced you want to use explainer videos it is important that you have a reliable process to create a video. Outlined below are six steps people normally follow to produce an awesome explainer video.

Step 1: Get Script Right First: 

The main determinant of whether your video will improve conversion or revenue is how good the script is. The audio script needs to engage and persuade viewers that what you are communicating is relevant to them and worth staying with until the end of the video. You are likely to be better at understanding your product or service than a video studio or freelancer. So a draft script should be generated from within your organisation to capitalise on this knowledge.

The aim of the video should be to answer any important questions that your potential customers may have within two minutes. If you can’t do this within the time you should review the amount of detail that you are going into or the scope of the video.

Step 2: Understand Customer Goals and Concerns: 

It is important that you take a step back at this point and assess how well you understand your potential customers or reader’s needs. Your visitors come to your site to complete a task or achieve a goal. To allow you to structure your script you need to be able to answer some or all of the following questions about your visitors by conducting some research:

What tasks are they looking to complete by coming to the site?

  • If they didn’t complete their main tasks, what prevented them from doing so?
  • What information is missing from the page?
  • What is their biggest concern about the product or the site?
  • What, if anything, is unclear or confusing on the page?
  • What is their number 1 reason for wanting to buy the product?

You can use tools such as SurveyMonkey or Qualaroo to ask your website visitors questions and see my post how to use Voice of Customer tools to boost conversion for other providers. This should help you identify the main barriers to customers purchasing and what questions you could seek to answer in the video. By better understanding the topic from your customer’s perspective you are more likely to press the right buttons and deal with potential objections.

Step 3:The Script: 

To keep your video to within two minutes it necessary to plan your script carefully so that you deal with the most important customer objections and effectively communicate why your product/service will meet their needs.

Introductory slide:
  • This should communicate what your organisation does or the product/ service that you are promoting. Ensure it states a clear and important benefit.
Introduce the problem:

Outline the problem that potential customers have using the language expressed in your visitor research.

Explain your solution:
  • Answer the problem with how your product or service provides a solution and again try to use some of the language customers used in your Voice Of the Customer research.
Focus on important features:
  • Make sure you communicate how some of your product’s features solve specific and important problems.
Call to action:
  • Ensure you include a clear and compelling call to action at the end of the video so that people are clear what to do next.
Build trust:
  • Demonstrate why customers can have confidence in your organisation by displaying trust signals. This should be evidence such as well-known clients or partners, awards or other independently verified seals of approval. A free trial offer can also reduce the perceived risk from the customer’s perspective of making a wrong decision.

To retain viewer interest you should aim to have a video of 90 seconds or less. As a script of between 110 to 140 words should translate into a minute of video, you may want to aim for around 165 to 210 words in total.

Other things to consider are:

  • Communicate your most important message and value proposition in the first 30 seconds
  • Use 2nd person language, using words such as “you”, “your” and “yours”
  • Avoid jargon and technical words to keep the language simple
    and easy to understand.
  • The tone of voice should be appropriate for the subject and your audience. This usually means that people choose a casual, conversational tone of voice.

Step 4: Choose A Narrator: 

You can find your own voice-over, perhaps you have a brand ambassador or local celebrity, who has done adverts for you before. Alternatively you can ask your video studio or freelance to suggest someone for you. Either way they need to have clear diction and a tone of voice that aligns with the subject matter and your audience.

Step 5: Create Your Video. 

Here you have a number of options from leaving it all to a professional studio to producing your own animated video using a do-it-yourself website. However, given that it is good practice to A/B test your video and you are unlikely to produce the optimal video on your first attempt, I suggest you keep the cost to the minimum. You are likely to have to tweak or even make new videos as part of the optimization process. Further, if your product changes fairly frequently you may be forced to make new videos on a regular basis.

The main options are:

1. Professional Studios:

A studio will be more expensive than a freelancer or DIY option, but they do have the advantage that they can often also help with such tasks as choosing a narrator and background music. You will find entries for over 100 explainer video studios near the bottom of this post.

The list includes Explainify who have produced videos for Nestle and Walmart, while PlanetNutshell have been used by Google and Microsoft . Demo Duck on the other hand have worked for Netflix and Crazy Egg.

2. Freelancer:

This option tends to be cheaper as freelancers have to be more competitive to get the business and don’t have the high overheads of a digital studio. You can either search the internet for a freelancer or use a crowd source website.

3. Do It Yourself:

If you have the time and inclination you can create your own animated videos. Websites such as GoAnimateVideoscribe and PowToon provide you with easy to use solutions and advice on how to go about this process.

Step 6. A/B Testing Video:

It is always wise to A/B test your video for a number of reasons. A great video can certainly engage visitors and improve conversion, but a video that is on the wrong page, is too long, has a poor script or lacks a compelling call to action can in some cases reduce conversion. So you may have to test more than one video to find one that improves conversion and then you should continue to adjust the video to test different versions or calls to action to optimise the video.

Check that you have analytics tracking for your video. If you use video players such as Sproutvideo and Vimeo they provide analytics to allow monitoring of how many unique impressions and plays your video receives. These video players can also tell you the location of viewers and the type of device that visitors are using. This can help you with deciding how to amend your video to further improve your conversion rate.

Finally:

For your video to be successful it is important to follow a clear process and set an appropriate budget for creating your explainer video. By following the steps outlined above you will increase the chance that your video will be both relevant and engaging for your website visitors. You will also have allowed for A/B testing to further optimise your video content and be flexible enough to respond to product changes.

Here are some great examples of different templates of business explainer videos that you may find useful.

Top Explainer Video Companies:

Here is a list of over 90 studios and explainer video companies for you to choose from. I have checked every link personally to ensure they are all relevant to explainer videos.

1. #1ExplainerVideo:
  • An explainer video company and studio for creative animated explainer videos. Clients: Google, XBox360, Personality Plus, Ion Digital.
2. 1/29 Films:
  • Inspiring brand loyalty and love. Clients: Intel, BrightCove, Adobe
3. Advids:
  • Online studio for explainer videos on-demand. Clients: Mercedes Benz, Valmont, holidog.com
4. Againstudios:
  • A pioneer in producing animated explainer videos with over 6 years experience in the industry. Clients: Google, TomTom, TD Bank
5. AmodFilms:
  • Animated video production studio using video to explain & promote. Clients: Hasbro, iimyjobs.com, iBluebottle
6. Animated Video:
  • Studio for explainer & promotional videos. Western Union, The World Bank, AAPT
7. Animotus:
  • Amsterdam-based explainer video company for animated explainer videos. Clients: Juniper Networks, Westcon, Amsterdam RAI
8. AppVideos:
  • Explainer videos for mobile apps and software. Clients: Flockthere, Vito Technology, Quickoffice
9. BWD:
  • Johannesburg based digital marketing agency. Clients: NEDBANK, T Systems, BOSUN
10. Blink Tower:
  • Animated explainer videos. Clients: National Academy of Engineering, Mozilla, Vodacom
11. Breadnbeyond:
  • Explainer video company which offers Free guide on animated explainer videos. Clients: AskForTask, Pinterest, BetterBoo, Wealth Dragons
12. Broadcast2world:
  • Hand crafted videos for your business. Clients: ebay, Nokia, Johnson & Johnson, RICOH
13. Cartoon Media:
  • Awesome explainer videos built to achieve your profit goals – Premium Whiteboard Videos & explainer videos. Clients: Mazuma Mobile, HILTI, Wrexham Council
14. Chat Noir: 
  • Bespoke film makers for video and animated films. Clients: British Army, Active Cheshire, ea Technology and Cheshire West and Chester.
15. Coat of Arms Post Production:
  • Explainer video company which produces unique explainers & original post production services. Clients: Land Rover, Undercover Cupid, Marriott
16. Common Craft:
  • Hand crafted media for explainers.
17. Creamy Animation:
  • Explainer and whiteboard videos. Clients: Microtek Corporation, Unstoppable, Pure Mortgage
18. Creative Theory:
  • A Canadian based explainer video company which offers creative and business services. Operates in Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. Offers video production services.
19. Cullin Collective:
  • Explainer video company that also produces explanation videos. Clients: basho, Zopim, onit, AES International
20. Daily Planet:
  • A full service design and production studio. Clients: Subway, Nationwide Insurance, CocaCola, AT&T, Capital One
21. Demo Duck:
  • Make little videos that get big results – Clients: Netflix & Crazy Egg
22. DemoFlick:
  • Explainer video company.
23. Easy Explain Video:
  • Explain, educate, entertain – explainer videos
24. EdmanTV:
  • Freelance producer and motion graphics designer specialising in website videos
25. Epipheo Studios:
  • Explainer video company that creates video content for large enterprises and small businesses alike.
26. Explainers.in:
  • Your story, explained in video
27. Explainify:
  • Explainer video company that positions videos around awakening your best story. Showing people what your brand is all about. Clients: Walmart, Coca Cola & Expedia Engaging. Instigating. Converting.
28. Explanimate:
  • Corporate animation explainer video company based in Brisbane, Australia
29. Explainervideoly:
  • Studio for big brands, medium-sized companies,start-ups and even non-profits. Clients: WWF, htc and Panasonic.
30. Flikli:
  • Create top-notch animated videos faster and more affordably than ever before to make your brand truly shine
31. Flock of Pixels:
  • Vimeo animation, motion design and post production. Clients: Amex
32. Fueled:
  • Award winning mobile design & development explainer video company. Clients: Porsche, Ducati, P&G
33. Gisteo:
  • Creates one-of-a-kind marketing videos built to engage, entice & convert. Clients: ORACLE, Intel, KPMG, CITRIX
34. GoAnimate & GoAnimate for schools:
  • Make professional animated videos. Easy learning curve,low budget, simple do-it-yourself tools. Clients: CNN, WIRED, Mashable, The Wall Street Journal
35. Green Iguana:
  • Explainer video company which produces cartoons & animation, customer live action & stock videos, motion graphics & 3D. Clients: pci Security Standards Council, Virtual, Spirit Telecom
36. Grumo Media:
  • Product demo videos. Clients: Microsoft, Walmart, Fidelity Investments, Halifax, Recket Benckiser
37. Howcast:
  • The best how-to videos on the web. Clients: Next, Adobe, Virgin Media
38. Idea Rocket:
  • Put your message into orbit with animated videos. Clients: Bank of America, Alcatel Lucent, Verizon, Electronic Arts
39. Illustrate It:
  • Digital media agency who create compelling videos for companies. Clients: Uber Media, P&G, Microsoft, Call Fire
40. In 60 Seconds:
  • Develops creative concepts, infographics, video productions and animations. Clients: Philips, eon, Oxfam Novib.
41. Instruxion:
  • Digital agency who specialise in conceptual design, development and distribution of high-impact digital content to achieve your business objectives. Clients: Sony, Bayer, IKEA
42. Kasra Design:
  • Premium animated explainer video, corporate video and anything in between. Clients: Panasonic, HTC, Dell
43. Kicker Inc:
  • Emmy award winning video production. Clients: Nike Golf, ATB Financial, Share Vault
44. Less Films:
  • Create videos that turn web traffic into customers – Free case study. Clients: Salesforce, Dashlane, Grasshopper
45. Legwork Studio:
  • Digital agency which delivery app design & development, ecommerce and explainer videos.
46. LooseKeys:
  • Chicago based explainer video company who don’t just make videos, but tell stories. Clients: Cars.com, nakedwine.com
47. Lumeo:
  • Affordable explainer videos. Clients: Accenture, Plexus, Professionals Australia
48. Mable Animation:
  • Mable Animation is a passionate illustration and animation studio located in Adelaide, South Australia
49. Mypromovideos:
  • We make your message sell. Clients: Ogilvy, Flipkart.com
50. Motion Crafter:
  • Explainer video production company. Clients: HP, Rackspace, Allstate
51. Panda Motion:
  • We make explainer videos. Clients: Squarespace.com, Quipster
52. Picturelab:
  • An explainer video company with a team of creative folk who are passionate about visual storytelling and everything web and tech. Clients: Google, eSignal
53. Piehole:
  • Create kick ass video to explain what you do. Clients: Zapper, Agent Converter, Smartvault.com
54. Planet Nutshell:
  • We make videos called Nutshells that explain alien concepts to everyday people. Clients: Microsoft, Google, cpb
55. RapidFire Consulting & Video:
  • Explainer videos to help tell your story.
56. Revolution Productions:
  • Authentic Marketing Videos
    & Animated Video Production. Clients: Lexis Nexis, John Deere, The World Bank
57. RocketWheel:
  • Ignite your sales with video on mobile & desktop. Clients: Amazon, Symantec, Dell, Bloomberg BNA
58. Sandwich Video:
  • Make videos and TV commercials, mostly for neat tech products. Clients: Groupon, OSMO, Slack
59. Say it Visually:
  • We explain complex ideas for clients. Clients: Amazon, Chevron, Met Life
60. Sean Duran Studios:
  • A freelancer who creates live action and animated videos. Clients: Panasonic, Coachd, Metalab Flow
61. Simple Story Videos:
  • Explainer video company which aims to create video for brands that’d rather make history than repeat it. Clients: CocaCola, Shopify, Citrix
62. Simpleshow:
  • Hand-crafted explainer video production. Clients: Adobe, BMW. ebay, Audi, Swiss Re
63. Simplifilm:
  • Enterprise grade product demo videos. Clients: Seth Godin
64. Splainers:
  • Explainer video company which produces videos that get results. Clients: Microsoft, Pepsico, MasterCard, NFL
65. Sprinkle Lab:
  • We make and distribute delicious videos. Clients: Levi’s, IBM, Microsoft
66. Sundstedt Animation:
  • We make hand-crafted explainer videos. Clients: Pushdigital, VMS, Onyx Health
67. Studio Pigeon:
  • Even the best ideas needs explanation. Clients: farmerfinder, StudioPress, Snip2Code
68. StudioTale:
  • Creative videos. Clients: Scootr, Marbles App, Gotogether
69. SureelVideo:
  • Animated explainer video company.
70. Switch Video:
  • Corporate video production & animated video production. Clients: IBM, Microsoft, HP, Bayer
71. Tadapix:
  • Animated video studio. Clients: Del Monte, Zooztunes
72. The Video Animation Company:
  • Explain your business with video animation. Clients: Mashable, ebay, The New York Times
73. The Explainers:
  • Digital communications studio focused on explainer videos, infographics, and content strategy. Clients: National Broadband Network, National Australia Bank
74. Think Mojo:
  • Explainer video company which produces smart videos that get results. Clients: ebay, LinkedIn, Western Union
75. Think Video:
  • Web video specialists with a knack for explanation.
76. Topic Simple:
  • Great animated videos for your product, idea, business, or startup. Clients: MSN, Springboard
77. Topline Comms:
78. Transvideo Studios:
  • Explainer video company that claims to be the largest video production company and studio complex in Silicon Valley. Clients: Mint.com, esignal
79. UserFarm:
  • Content creators – Connecting you with the world’s largest community of film makers. A global crowd of 100,000 classified filmmakers, backed up by a team of awesome professionals. Clients: Fiat 500, Smeg Factory, Santal, Rio Mare
80. Veedme:
  • Any video task. Clients: Google, MOSCOT, WAZE
81. Veracity Colab:
  • A video agency driven by strategy, story and design. Clients: Lenovo, Google, Adobe
82. Video Igniter:
  • Turnkey animated video production for agencies, businesses and marketers. Clients: LinkedIn, RICOH, ALTIMETER
83. Vismo Media:
  • Ideas into motion. 2D/3D animations. Clients: Thompson Reuters, Allstate, WSO.com
84. Vjsual:
  • Explainer video company which aims to improve the way you communicate. Clients: Commerzbank, Groupon
85. Vungle:
  • Provides the infrastructure for app monetization through video ads. More than 200 million people worldwide see a Vungle ad each month.
86. WeblyGuys:
  • Explainer video company and production studio. “We create marketing systems that convert your visitors & prospects into buyers, followers and fans!“
87. Wienot Films:
  • Explainer video company which delivers videos, whiteboard animation, editing and production services.
88. Wooshii:
  • Find an animator or video-maker for your explainer or demo video. Free e-book. Clients: Google, ebay, Unilever
89. Wyzowl:
  • Create animated explainer videos with and without characters, website or web app walk-through using screen recordings, mobile app walk-through and video graphics based around statistics. Clients: UserReport, Heebo.com, Postify
90. YansMedia:
  • High quality explainer videos from $2,000. Clients: HiJack, Tempo, Parkway Bank.
91. Ydraw:
  • What’s your story. Explainer video production company. Clients: BlueSafe, Magic Sock,
92. YumYum Videos:
  • Explainer video company which produces tailor-made animated videos and offers unlimited revisions. The company has also produced a series of educational videos on inbound marketing, including What is inbound marketing? Clients: Walmart, McKesson, AMEX and Red Bull

How To Do Keyword Research!

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Keyword research remains an essential part of SEO strategy for both organic and paid traffic optimisation. With the Hummingbird update long-tail keywords became more important to SEO. As a result keyword research needs to consider optimising a website on a semantic level to inform a site’s architecture and segment site topics into thematic areas. It’s important to allow for how search engine spiders crawl sites to deliver relevant content on the search engine results page (SERPs).

This has made keyword research more complex but it is still an important element of SEO strategy. Below are 18 of the more popular keyword tools that are often recommended by SEO experts. But first here is a 6 step guide to how to do keyword research:

1. Identify important topics to your business.

Draw up a list of all the important and relevant topics that relate to your business. Start with general topics (e.g. landing page optimisation & web analytics) for your keyword research.

2. Produce a list of keywords for general topic.

These should be keyword phrases that you consider, it will be important to rank on SERPs. The key here is to capture all your ideas as this won’t be the final list of keywords. Remember to use your web analytics to identify what keywords your site is already getting found for.

3. Examine related search terms.

Go to Google and start typing one of your phrases and see what related search terms are suggested by Google. These suggestions may generate more ideas for new keywords that you hadn’t previously considered. You can also take them a step further by typing some of the related search terms into Google to see what their related search terms are.

4. A mix of head terms & long-tail keywords.

Head terms are short keyword phrases, usually one to three words. Long-tail keywords tend to contain three or more words. People generally search using head terms more frequently and so they tend to be more competitive and harder to rank compared to long-tail terms. On the other hand long-tail terms are more specific and give you a better understanding of what people are really looking for. For this reason your keyword research needs a good mix of both types of terms.

5. How do your competitors rank on keywords?

Undertaking keyword research into what your competitors are targeting is useful from two perspectives. It can provide ideas for reviewing your own list of keywords. Additionally, where you are both targeting the same keyword it means that you may have to work harder to improve your own ranking.

However, don’t just copy the keywords that your competitors target, they may not always be relevant and it will also make it more difficult to improve your rankings. By targeting keywords that your competitors are ignoring may give you a quick win by allowing you establish high ranking for these terms due to a lack of competition. Use tools like SEMrush and others outlined below to find out which keywords your competitors are ranking on.

6. Keyword list reduction.

Use tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner to reduce the number of terms in your list. This will help to ensure you are focussed on terms that have reasonable number of searches (i.e. neither too little or too much). Use Google Trends to find out their trend history and forecasts so that you don’t remove terms that have potential in the future.

18 Awesome Keyword Research Tools:

1. AuthorityLabs:

Track historical rankings and view graphical representation of how a keyword is ranking over time. Allows you to automate your SEO monitoring, track local rankings and recover (not provided) keywords.

30 day Free trail for keyword research is available. The Basic plan is priced at $24 a month and offers 100 keywords and up to10 domains. The Plus plan costs $49 a month for up to 250 keywords and 50 domains. The Pro, their most popular plan costs $99 a month for 1,000 keywords and 100 domains. The Enterprise plan starts at $450 a month for 5,000 + keywords and unlimited domains.

2. Bing Keyword Research Tool:

All data is based on organic searchers over the last 6 months and provides ideas and suggestions for your content. Just sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools to access the keyword research resource.

3. Blog Post Headline Analyzer:

This Free tool is from CoSchedule and will analyse headlines for length, how powerful or emotionally engaging the words are, how uncommon the words are and provide recommendations to improve your headline.

4. Google Adwords Keyword Planner:

A Free Adwords keyword research tool that allows you to search for keyword and ad group ideas, get historical data, see how a list of keywords might perform and set up a new keyword list by multiplying several keywords together.

5. Google Keyword Suggest Tool:

An easy to use keyword research tool from SEOChat.com for identifying longer and more specific phrases to narrow targeting. Enter a term and it will generate a list of the most popular keyword phrases that all begin with the base word – using Google, Amazon, YouTube and Bing “suggest” data bases. The tool generates phrases for every letter of the alphabet. Choose a phrase and then move to the next step to generate more phrases.

6. Google Trends:

Is a Free keyword research tool that allows you to view what people have been searching for with Google. It graphs how often a term is used over time and how this varies geographically. It allows you to generate predictions of how search volumes are changing. You can also compare more than one term to view their relative popularity.

7. iSpionage:

Provides insights into competitors’ effective keywords, ad copy and budget. A highly recommended tool for finding out what your competitors are up to.

Free trial available for all plans. For keyword research the Silver plan costs $69 a month with unlimited searches and 10,000 data exports a day. The Gold plan comes in at $99 a month for unlimited searches, 50,000 data exports a day and 10 competitor alerts. For additional services such as daily landing page and web page monitoring, the Campaign plans costs $129 (Pro) and $299 (Premier) a month.

8. Keyword Discovery Tool:

One of the most popular keyword research tools that provides keyword search statistics from all the major search engines. It will provide the search phrases that people use to find a product or service. It should help you identify the search terms driving traffic to your competitors.

The Standard plan is currently at a special discount price of $29.95 per month for up to 3 domain research results and 20 projects. The Professional plan costs $199.95 per month for up to 100 domains and unlimited number of projects. Both plans allow up to 1,500 searches a day, with 1,000 results displayed and 10,000 terms per project.

9. Keyword Multiplier Tool (Clever Clicks):

This is a free keyword research tool that allows you to generate a list of all possible keyword phrases. Just type in your list of keywords and the tool will produce a list of every phrase variation possible.

A simple tool that requires you to enter the following information :
1: Primary keywords
2: Secondary keywords
3: Location

10. KeywordTool.io:

The Free version is excellent for finding out what people are looking for as it produces around 750 suggestions for each keyword. The suggestions generated depend on the specific Google domain and language that you select.

The Pro plans start from $48 a month and offer:

  • Up to 1,440+ keywords from Google and YouTube, 1,875+ from Bing, 3,750+ from App Store returned for a single search.
  • On average 2x more keywords than in free version
  • Google search volume
  • Level of competition on Google AdWords
  • Suggested bid on Google AdWords
  • Ability to export all the data to a CSV file
  • Ability to sort keywords by any parameter

The Lite plan ($48 a month) offers 2 times more keywords than the free plan and the ability to export data in CSV. The Pro Basic ($68 a month) also gives you search volumes to understand how popular a keyword is. In addition Pro Plus ($88 a month) provides CPC and competition on AdWords.

11. searchmetrics:

Essentials is their standard keyword research tool. The suggest function will show you where the specified domain ranks for a particular keyword, plus you can add and tag keywords using the tool.

The Essentials plan costs $69 a month for limited access to their database, $2,000, up to 1 year of visibility history, up to 3 countries, up to 10,000 rankings per report and current historic keyword rankings.

The Suite Business ($2,000 a month) is an integrated SEO solution built for smaller brands and beginners. This provides complete visibility history, all countries, up to 20,000 rankings per report and historic keyword rankings for the last 6 months. Additionally this provides content and site structure optimization, extensive backlink analysis and other services.

Prices for their Suite Enterprise and Suite Ultimate plans can be obtained by request.

12. SEMRUSH:

The industry standard keyword research tool identifies your main competitors based upon the keywords you plan to target. Click on your competitors and it will show you what other keywords they target ad to and the ad copy they use. Highly recommended for seeing who your top paid and organic competitors are for the keywords you plan to use.

It allows you to easily combine and visualise SEMrush data to compare competitive domains and estimate keyword difficulty. For projects it enables you to launch global campaigns and view all the key metrics regarding competitors, keyword rankings, and on-page health in once place.

Plans start from $69.95 per month for Pro which offers 10,000 results per report, 3,000 reports per day, 5 projects and the ability to track 500 keywords. The Guru plan which costs $149.95 per month provides up to 30,000 results per report, 5,000 reports a day, up to 50 projects and the ability to track 1,500 keywords.

Finally, the Business plan comes in at $549.95 per month and delivers up to 50,000 results per report, 10,000 reports per day (for each of 4 users), unlimited projects and resources for tracking up to 6,000 keywords.

13. Soovle:

A very easy to use and Free keyword research tool which generates a list of the best keywords by analysing search engines Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Answers.com, YouTube, Bing and Yahoo!

14. Spyfu:

A great tool for identifying all the places where your competitors show up on Google. It will show you all their keywords and the ad variations they have employed. Excellent for understanding your competitors’ most profitable keywords.

The Basic plan costs $79 a month with unlimited keyword and domain results, track up to 400 keywords, over 9 years of AdWords and organic history, and 250 sales leads and domain contacts. Professional costs $139 per month, and offers everything in the Basic plan in addition to rank tracking of up to 800 keywords and access to their API.

Lastly the Agency plan is priced at $999 per month and delivers unlimited custom reporting and keyword rank tracking. Further, you can search monthly data which allows you to track a domain’s weekly rank updates on keywords that you select. You can save up to 47% on the cost of a plan by choosing an annual subscription.

15. StoryBase:

StoryBase have spent 3 years creating this very easy to use keyword tool. It now has more than 5 billion long-tail keywords, 100 million question keywords and 2 billion related LSI keywords.

A free plan is available for a single user with to 10 searches a month, 15 results per search and one list. A starter plan for a single user costs just $9 a month with unlimited searches, up to 400 results per search and ten lists. The Premium plan for up to 5 users costs $79 per month for unlimited searches, up to 1,000 results per search, 1,000 lists and offers priority support.

16. Tinyranker:

A simple, but flexible all-in-one SEO tool. As well as keyword analysis, Tinyranker provides for tracking keyword rankings, on-page SEO and competitor keyword rankings.

30 day free trial available for all plans. Prices start from $19 a month for up to 100 keywords. An agency plan is available for $119 a month for up 2000 keywords.

17. Ubersuggest:

A simple and Free keyword research suggestion tool that begins to pull in keyword suggestions from Google and other sources the second you start to type. Often used for PPC and SEO keyword research.

18. WordStream’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool:

A Free tool that allows you to run a limited number of searches in its massive keyword database. A fast tool which holds over 1 trillion keywords in its database. Excellent for long-tail keyword suggestions.