Keysearch Review: The Best SEO Keyword Research Tool

People often think they need to most expensive or even the most popular tools to be successful. Wrong!

I got into Mediavine in 6 months and Keysearch was the only keyword research tool I used.

I’ve tried Ahrefs, SEMrush, Low Fruits, Keyword Explorer, Ubersuggest, and many more since, but nothing has compared to Keysearch.

Not only is it the most budget friendly keyword research tool, but it’s also the most effective for bloggers. I’ve been using it since January 2021 and it’s still my #1.

In this review, I’m going to take you through all of the functionality of Keysearch to show you exactly how you can use it to find easy keywords to grow your blog’s traffic and income. I’m also going to share some cons of the platform – because nothing’s perfect.

👉 Get Keysearch – my favourite keyword research tool – for 30% off with code “sheknowsseo”!

Is Keysearch Worth It?

Yes! Keysearch is very worth the price.

At $169 a year – or less than $135 if you use code “SHEKNOWSSEO” – it’s the cheapest keyword research tool I’ve found that actually works. You can also buy it for $17 a month and cancel on the months you’re not doing keyword research, making it even more of a bang for your buck.

Keysearch is very user friendly and makes it very easy to find keyword opportunities and even guest post opportunities.

The #1 thing I recommend people buy when starting a blog is a keyword research tool. If you have $200 to spend on your blog, get hosting, a domain name, and then Keysearch.

It’s the best ROI you’ll find for your SEO!

About Keysearch

Keysearch was founded in 2015 by Dan Pfeffer but it didn’t really hit it big in the SEO space until 2023, when the Niche Twins invested in the company and started marketing it to long time Ahrefs users.

Ahrefs spent most of 2023 annoying it’s legacy users by retiring their accounts and limiting access to new features, which was driving them to find something new.

Enter Keysearch!

Like most SEO tools, Keysearch started as a simple way to find keywords. But unlike most keyword research tools that are very B2B and focus on high level SEOs running thousands of searches a day, Keysearch is for the normal person running a blog or two.

It’s expanded to include content audits on par with RankIQ, rank tracking, competitive analysis, Youtube research and more!

It really is a full service software that means you don’t need to shell out thousands of dollars a year on other tools.

👉 Get Keysearch – my favourite keyword research tool – for 30% off with code “sheknowsseo”!

Keysearch Plans & Pricing

There are 3 plans with Keysearch: Free Trial, Starter, and Pro.

I’ve had the starter plan since Jan 2021 and it’s really all you need. But let me walk you through the variations in the plans:

Free Trial	Starter	Pro
$0 for 1 month	$17/mo or $169/yr	$34/mo or $279/yr
✅ 5 Keyword searches per day	✅ 200 Keyword searches per day	✅ 500 Keyword searches per day
✅ Youtube keyword research	✅ Youtube keyword research	✅ Youtube keyword research
❌ Rank tracker keywords	✅ 80 rank tracker keywords	✅ 200 rank tracker keywords
❌ Competitive analysis	✅ Competitive analysis	✅ Competitive analysis
✅ Backlink checker and explorer	✅ Backlink checker and explorer	✅ Backlink checker and explorer
❌ Site audit	✅ 2,000 site audit pages per month	✅ 5,000 site audit pages per month
✅ Content assistant	✅ Content assistant	✅ Content assistant
❌ AI credits	✅ 5,000 AI credits monthly	✅ 15,000 AI credits monthly

The best plan for bloggers is the Starter plan.

I’ve only hit my daily limit for keywords 5x since 2021. And most of those times were when I was doing keyword research for over 100 clients.

Trust me, you’ll be fine doing research for your own site.

The only reason you’d need the Pro plan is if you’re using it for a more enterprise level, or if you really want to track more keywords’ rankings.

👉 Get Keysearch – my favourite keyword research tool – for 30% off with code “sheknowsseo”!

Keysearch Features

Keysearch includes:

• Keyword research
• Competitive analysis
• Explorer (site audits)
• Rank tracking
• YouTube research
• Content assistant

Let’s break down what each of these features actually does and how they’ll help you grow your blog.

If you’d like to see all of these features at work, check out my Keysearch tutorial:

Keyword Research

The main point of Keysearch is to do keyword research. When you’re logged in, this is also the home screen.

This is where you can do your keyword research by typing in your seed keyword, such as “Rome” in this example:

It will show you the average monthly volume. This score is calculated as an average over the last 12 months. You can also see the trend report of when the keyword had the majority of its searches.

Keysearch gives every keyword a score out of 100 for difficulty. The higher the score, the harder the keyword is to rank for.

This score is calculated based on backlinks, Domain Authority, whether the URL is optimized for the keyword, and use of the keyword in the blog post primarily.

The difficulty levels are blue (easiest), green, yellow, and red (hardest).

This screen also shows you other related or suggested keywords (up to 700) that you might want to consider writing on instead, or that you might want to include as secondary keywords.

The CPC score is cost per click, or the average cost to get a click from Google Ads.

PPC is the competition for these ads, with 1 being the highest.

Bloggers don’t need to worry about these scores for organic search terms. But they can help to show that there is commercial intent for a keyword if brands are buying ads for affiliate keywords.

Keysearch shows the top 10 SERPs at a glance based on “all locations” as a default. You can adjust this to a specific country as well:

It displays the URL, page authority, domain authority (Moz metric), number of unique domains linking to the domain (DomdsD), the number of do follow links (Auth), the number of total links to the specific post, and if the URL has the exact keyword in it.

Beneath the SERPs table, you’ll find summarized statistics that tell you the lowest stats – aka. the easiest site to beat in the SERPs – and the average stats of the top 10 rankings:

The “Links Score” provides an estimate of how many links you might need to beat out the average site in the top 10.

Lastly, this page shows the “Search Engine Keyword Suggestions”. These are the “related searches” you would find in Google. These are often good keywords to consider as alternatives, headers, secondary keywords, or even as other posts in the future.

This is a lot of data at a glance, but you can use the settings to save them for the in custom lists that you can refer back to later.

You can compare two keywords to determine which is a better fit for your post.

And you can export keywords to run reports or share with your team.

You can check your keyword research credits in the drop down on the left hand menu. Unlike Ahrefs, every move through the site doesn’t automatically dock you 10 credits. And because you get 200 a day, it’s actually hard to run out of them.

Note: You can also search for keywords off Google in this area. I focus on the “Related Keywords” for additional suggestions, but you can filter for Bing, Youtube, Ebay, Pinterest, and even competitor keywords.

How to Find Long Tail Keywords

If you’d like to search specifically for long tail keywords, enter your seed keyword and hit search.

In our example, I used “Rome”. But this is very general. If I know I’m doing this for a Rome travel blog, I’d add “travel” to the seed keyword.

Then you can “filter” the suggested keyword by the number of words.

A long tail keyword is 4 or more words, so I’d put 4 as the minimum number of words. In travel, this is usually 6+.

You can leave the maximum blank.

This will filter the 700 existing results from the “Rome travel” search to only show the keywords with 4 or more words.

It does not trigger a brand new search of 700 results. It is just filtering the existing 700 that came up from the seed keyword search.

That’s why I try to narrow down the seed word a bit to ensure the results are on topic.

Note: You have to close the filter box, otherwise it won’t let you scroll to see the last couple keywords.

How to Find Easy Keywords

Keysearch uses a color coding system to show easy vs. hard keywords:

Technically there are actually 6 variations with light green being 20-29, and dark red being 69+. However, for most bloggers all stages of green are easy and all stages of red are very difficult to rank for so you’ll often see people refer only to 4 levels.

Now that you know the difficulty numbers, you can filter the results like we did for long tail keywords.

This time we’re filtering for a score up to 39 (before we move into “moderate” territory):

This will filter the 700 results to only show the keywords that are blue or green, aka. easy to rank for.

Remember you still need to evaluate these yourself to ensure you can actually rank for them.

Quick Difficulty

Have a giant list of keywords from somewhere else?

Do a quick difficulty search to see how challenging they are.

If you’ve bought a list of keywords somewhere or did some Google Autofill keyword searches, this is a good place to bring your results to get a quick guide to their difficulty, and to be able to go through their SERP results without having to click through 50 different pages.

You can add up to 50 different keywords. Just use a comma to separate them.

Keyword Lists

Keyword lists allow you to save keywords you may want to write on in the future.

You can even create different lists for different sites or different topic clusters.

I like that you can export the lists as well to give to your team.

Brainstorm

The brainstorm area isn’t spoken about enough. This is a really cool area where you can find trending topics.

Writing on new or trending topics is a great way to rank quickly, and it can even get you on Google Discover. The page syndicates Twitter Trends, Amazon Movers and Shakers, and Google Trends.

I find the Google Trends one glitches a bit because Google has some weird coding in it, but if Google sorts that it’ll be a great hub.

You can also use this area to get Google Autofill options at-a-glance:

Just enter a seed keyword and get ideas from Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Youtube.

I don’t usually do Google Autofill keywords because they’re kind of tedious but this way you can do them instantly across 4 platforms!

Explorer

Keysearch’s Explorer area lets you analyze a whole site or a specific page.

Enter the URL of a site – your own or someone else’s – and you’ll be able to find the Domain Strength (Keysearch’s version of DA or DR), their recommendation for the difficulty score you can target, and more!

Those are the two metrics I’d look at for my own site.

But for other sites I use this area to check backlink numbers at a glance and referring domains, top organic keywords at a glance, view top pages of competitors, see the top competitors of my competitors, see the highest DA domains linking to them, and check the breakdown of their keyword rankings throughout the top 100.

It’s a great at a glance tool to see how a competitor is performing.

Backlink Checker

The backlink checker is akin to Ahref’s backlink overview, where you can see all of the links going to a blog as a whole or to a specific page.

This is a great way to find guest post opportunities, because if someone is linking to your competitor, they might be willing to link to you.

I also use this area to check the number of do follow backlinks going to a competitor’s post. This helps me figure out how many I need to get for my own post.

The summary in the SERP table is good, but it can’t filter out spammy or syndicated links. Just by glancing at the domains, I can pretty easily identify spammy sites that I can then subtract from the number of backlinks I’d need to outrank the site.

Competitive Analysis Organic Keywords

The Organic Keyword section of the Competitive Analysis area is where I spend the most time on Keysearch.

This is where you can mine competitors for keywords, find forum keywords, and even find affiliate keywords.

Just enter a site’s URL, and you can find all of the keywords they rank for.

You can even filter the results to only show keywords including a certain word, getting a certain amount of traffic/volume per month, or based on their rank.

I typically filter ranks 1 to 10, cause I don’t care about keywords they aren’t ranking on the first page of Google for.

Once they add the ability to filter by score and expand the number of results (currently it only goes up to 1,000), this will be exactly the same as Ahref’s ability to mine competitor keywords.

But this is plenty for 99% of bloggers.

You can also use this area to find the secondary keywords a competitor ranks for. Just input the specific post URL, select “Specific Page” and find the keywords that page ranks for.

I do wish they’d add the ability to save keywords to lists from this page, but hopefully that’ll come in a future update.

Site Audit

Audit your site with one click – like Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

Plans have limits for how many pages can be crawled on their site, and the system does require you to verify that you authorize the crawl. It just requires you to click “ok” though, where Ahrefs does require a verification of your site.

The system then scans your site for any technical SEO errors, broken links, duplicate or missing metas, missing titles, images missing alt text, and pages with redirects.

I like that they have a score for “low readability rate” that suggests posts that are too hard for a user to read.

This might mean the language is too complex, or that there aren’t enough headers breaking up the text.

Competitor Gap

A great way to find keywords to target is to see what your competitor is targeting, but you aren’t.

The first time you mine a competitor, this is pretty easy to sort through. But as the years go on, things will get pretty intermingled and you don’t want to waste those 1,000 keywords on 500 keywords you’ve already written.

The Competitor Gap tool fixes this, but allowing you to search for keywords a competitor ranks for but that you don’t rank for.

Keep in mind, this is pulling from rankings. So you may have a post on the topic, but if it doesn’t rank, that keyword will still be shown to you.

If you compare 3 sites, there’s a little glitch that means the keyword seems to need to be on all of their sites to be listed. So I recommend going one by one instead of having all 3 sites:

I only use the 3 sites if I’m looking at specific pages for secondary keywords they rank for that I don’t.

URL Metrics

URL Metrics allows you to do mass competitor research.

Enter the URLs of competitors on each line (up to 20) to compare their DA, PA, backlinks, traffic, and more.

This is a great way to get started finding comparable competitors to target for keyword mining – because mining someone with a DA of 70 makes no sense if you have a DA of 1.

That would be like me deciding to be a singer today and saying my competitor was Demi Lovato. Um, no. We’re on very different levels. Also, I’m tone deaf AF.

Youtube Research

Youtube Research is a lot like the traditional Keyword Research section of Keysearch, but it’s filtered for Youtube/video results.

Instead of focusing on any sort of domain authority, it focuses on where the keyword is used in the video, the number of views the video has, and the age of the video.

It still shows search trends, average monthly volume of searches, and a difficulty score.

I know I’m on Youtube now, but I still don’t use this section. I just wing it with my videos.

Rank Tracking

Keysearch’s Starter plan includes 80 tracked keywords. You manually select these and can change them at any time.

You can filter them by domain if you want to track say 10 for 8 different sites.

You can set these reports to automatically email to you so you get notifications of your rankings.

If you don’t know which keywords to track, the software will pull up keywords that it has found that you rank for and you can select from the list.

I don’t bother with rank tracking outside of GSC, but if you want this is an easy way to do it.

Content Assistant

Most people don’t know about the power of the Content Assistant, but they should.

It’s a content optimizer that is built into Keysearch and has basically unlimited uses. I do believe it pulls a keyword credit each time you run it, but considering I’ve been able to do 25 posts in an afternoon and haven’t hit a cap, I’m impressed.

Most content optimizers like RankIQ or SurferSEO cost $50 a month for 16 posts.

This is included in your $17/mo plan with basically no limits.

The Content Assistant helps you optimize posts for your chosen keyword.

Just enter the keyword at the top of the screen, and it will show you:

• an average word count based on the results on the first page of google
• the number of “must words” (LSI keywords) to include in the post
• secondary keywords that your competitors rank for
• questions to include (these get pretty off base for longtail keywords)
• headers that your competitors use
• the top 10 posts at a glance, including their word count
• informational snippets from competitors that have info you might want to include

The only issue with this area is that it messes up formatting. I write my post elsewhere and then copy and paste it in to check that I’ve hit all of the LSI and secondary keywords I need to.

I know some people write inside of RankIQ or Surfer, but I never did so to me this isn’t a major issue.

Keysearch AI

Like every tool, Keysearch introduced AI when it took off in 2023.

They were actually one of the first to add a tool into their software and it doesn’t cost anything additional to use it!

Starter Plans get 5,000 AI credits per month.

Within the Content Assistant, you can use the AI to create an outline, heading, titles, intros, conclusions, main content, metas, and listicles.

I don’t use it much because I have ChatGPT and Jasper, where I usually write my content. But I have used it for headings and metas before.

It’s fine to get you started on the other sections, but because you can’t train the AI the outputs aren’t nearly as good as ChatGPT or Jasper.

For someone new to AI or who just needs to get over blank page syndrome once in a while, it’s more than enough.

Customer Support

If you have any issues, you can contact Keysearch’s customer support via the left menu dropdown. Click on “support” and it’ll take you to their knowledge base where you can find helpful articles and you can open a ticket with their staff.

There are popular articles about canceling an account, upgrading an account, and changing out your credit card information.

I’ve literally never had to open a ticket. I’ve been with them since 2021, and things have gone smoothly the whole time.

SEO Crash Course and Tutorials

I love a tool that teaches you how to implement strategies to use it better, and Keysearch does that.

You’ll find blog and video guides on how to use the entire software, how to find easy keywords, and why you should care about certain SEO elements like LSI keywords:

The best of their tutorials is the “SEO Crash Course” which is a free 9 part guide accessible to anyone, even if you don’t have an account.

It’ll teach you all of the basics of SEO so you can start off strong. I wish I’d taken it when I first started using the tool, but I was pretty sure I was an SEO God just because I could type in a keyword. … so yeah, I made some mistakes.

I took it in late 2021 and learned more than I had in a popular SEO course, so I recommend giving it a watch.

Keysearch Pros and Cons

The Verdict: Is Keysearch the Best SEO Keyword Research Tool?

Keysearch is my favourite keyword research tool.

I tried to get on board the Ahrefs train because everyone on Twitter loved it and seemed to suggest you needed to use it to be an SEO.

I used it for a year and other than 2 instances where I was doing in depth internal link audits (which I basically only did to justify paying for the tool) and I needed to filter a certain forum by URL, Keysearch could do everything Ahrefs could.

I got into Mediavine with only Keysearch in my SEO toolbelt. It’s really all you need.

Fancy, expensive tools won’t get you into an ad network faster or make you more affiliate money. That comes from your strategy.

Yes, some tools can expedite or assist that strategy – like Query Hunter or RankIQ – but you don’t need them to be successful. If you have the money for them to help you great, if not you’re ok!

Ultimately if bloggers can only afford one tool for their blog, I recommend buying Keysearch yesterday!

👉 Get Keysearch – my favourite keyword research tool – for 30% off with code “sheknowsseo”!

Read More About Keyword Research

• How Many Keywords Should I Use for SEO?
• Are SEO Keywords Case Sensitive?
• 12 Best Ubersuggest Alternatives for Keyword Research
• SEO Pageview Calculator and More!
• 23 Best Ahrefs Alternatives For Bloggers (Free & Paid)
• 19 Best Surfer SEO Alternatives for Bloggers
• How to Find Blog Competitors on Mediavine & Mine Keywords
• What is a Zero Volume Keyword?
• Keysearch Review: The Best SEO Keyword Research Tool

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