Last Updated: November 14, 2024
In this article, we’re going to be discussing and reviewing the SEO tool, KeySearch.
We’ll be doing a KeySearch review, going into depth about all of the tools features, unique benefits, and drawbacks, including the reasons why we use KeySearch as our primary keyword research, analysis, and evaluation tool for our SEO efforts.
With that being said, let’s talk KeySearch, and why exactly it’s an important tool!
Table of Contents
What are Keywords
Keywords are simply the words on a web page, and search engines like Google use these keywords to determine the subject matter, context and overall messaging behind a piece of content.
Why is this important? Well, Google’s search works through algorithmic regulation, and therefore it’s important that you can create content that can not only be understood by Google-bot, but also optimized in the best possible way, so that it has a greater chance at showing on page 1 for a particular query (or target keyword).
This is where basic SEO comes in, and where optimizing your article for 1 main keyword, and 3-5 secondary keywords is crucial… Not to mention including LSI keywords, but we’ll talk about that at a later stage in the article, and how KeySearch can help with this.
Why is Keyword Research & Analysis Important
As we explained, keyword research is the fundamental aspect behind on-page SEO, and doing it right will help you in the long-term.
See, search engine optimization comprises of both on-page and off-page factors, on-page factors are related with anything that is controlled on your website/webpage, including content, headings, structured data, schema, site speed, etc. Off-page factors are to do with backlinks, citations and brand mentions, etc.
Think of on-page SEO like your vehicle, and off-page SEO like your fuel, without a solid on-page foundation, the off-page is useless and ineffective.
This is where KeySearch comes in, as it allows for you to not only discover new keywords, but to analyze the competitors, in terms of both their on-page (content) and off-page (backlinks/link profile). It’s an incredibly useful keyword difficulty checker.
Keysearch Overview
How Keysearch Works
Although there are multiple facets to the tool, and we’ll be discussing all of these features in-depth within the next section,
Keysearch works through a simple-to-use interface, and works through initially allowing the user to enter a seed keyword to begin the analysis phase.
This seed keyword is then analyzed to give an overview of the competitive landscape, and other related keywords (with monthly search volume included), and therefore it’s especially useful in helping website owners diagnose new target keywords and secondary/supporting keywords for a particular article.
Benefits of Using KeySearch
- Easy to use
- Highly informative, taking the guesswork out of on-page and off-page analysis
- Helpful to increase the likelihood of first page rankings
- Extremely Affordable (with a free trial and monthly discount available)
- Includes a Free KeySearch SEO Training Course & Tutorials
- Includes a Google Chrome SERP Analyser (with API)
Keysearch Features
- Keyword Research
- SEO Overview
- Competitor Analysis
- Backlink Checker
- Organic Keywords
- Competitor Gap Analysis
- URL Metrics
- Page Analyzer
- YouTube Research
- Rank Tracker
- Content Optimization Tool
- Outreach Opportunity Finder
Keyword Research
The keyword research interface is the one that you’ll most likely be spending 80% of your time looking at.
All you need to do is enter your ‘seed keyword’, which is the search term that you’re looking for keysearch to analyze, with its keyword difficulty checker.
In this demonstration, this search query is ‘Keyword Research Tool’, and once we enter the keyword, we click the ‘search’ button and the magic starts to happen.
So what can we see?
Ok, so towards the top, we have a visual representation of the query’s search trends throughout the year, so you can work out if a particular keyword is popular all year round, or if it has seasonal interest.
To the right, we have the keyword list, which shows us lots of useful information, including a full range of related keyword phrases & keyword suggestions, alongside the following information:
- Monthly Search Volume
- CPC (Cost Per Click – For paid advertising)
- PPC (Pay per click competition)
- Score (Organic SEO competition)
Let’s talk about each of these below, and what exactly we can determine from the data.
Monthly Search Volume
The monthly search volume lets us know approximately how many people are searching for that particular keyword in Google each month.
When using this data alongside the ‘Search Trends’ data, it gives us invaluable information, showing us if our efforts to rank for this particular keyword is worth it… And KeySearch does a great job in making this data simple and intuitive to understand.
After all, SEO can take some time, so ranking for a highly seasonal keyword may not be worth out time, depending on your business’ goals.
CPC
The cost per click data is often overlooked by SEOs, as they see it as a metric that is only useful for paid advertisers… But no!
For those that don’t know, cost per click is the cost that an advertiser pays for their website to be clicked on in the ‘paid’ search results in Google.
Therefore, a high CPC $ amount, suggests that the traffic is converting, and therefore more advertisers are wanting a piece of the pie, hence the rise in price.
Ranking for a keyword with a higher CPC is therefore useful, if your website has the authority to do this.
PPC
PPC competitiveness is a KeySearch metric scored out of 1.
The higher the score (the closer to 1), the more existing competitors who are bidding so they can be displayed for that particular keyword in Google’s paid search results.
Score (Organic Keyword Analysis)
Score is a metric in KeySearch to determine the competitiveness of a keyword within the organic search results. It is measured out of 100, and is visually represented through a color grading system:
- Blue: 0 – 19 (Competition is very easy)
- Green: 20 – 29 (Competition is fairly easy)
- Dark Green: 30-39 (Competition is easy/moderate)
- Yellow: 40 – 49 (Competition is moderate)
- Red: 50 – 59 (Competition is fairly difficult)
- Dark Red: 60+ (Competition is very difficult)
Score is essentially a keyword difficulty check taking the top 10 competitors featured on page 1 for that particular query, telling the user how easy a first page ranking is to obtain.
It takes multiple factors into account, including Domain Authority, Page Authority, Exact-match keyword optimization of crucial on-page SEO elements, etc. We’ll explain more about this in the SERP Analysis section next.
SERP Analysis
The SERP analysis section of KeySearch is a particularly useful section, and really provides a quick insight into who your competitors are, and the strength of their sites, giving you more of an indication as to whether your site can rank for that keyword or not.
This is a great function to quickly determine keyword difficulty and competitive analysis, at a glance, in order to find keywords that are outliers.
Let’s firstly discuss what data this table provides, before we delve into some tips for using the SERP Analysis section.
SERP Analysis Metrics
- URL – Address of specific ranking page
- PA – Page Authority (Moz)
- DA – Domain Authority (Moz)
- mRank – Moz page rank
- mDom – Moz domain rank
- Auth – Number of DoFollow links pointing to the specific URL
- Links – Overall number of backlinks pointing to the specific URL
- Title – Keyword mentioned in Title
- DESC – Keyword mentioned in Description
- URL – Keyword mentioned in URL
Additionally, there are two other tabs within this section, being ‘Rankings/Traffic’ and ‘Social’.
Rankings/Traffic Tab
This section provides an overview of the first page, top 10 ranking competitors’, in terms of both their monthly traffic and the keywords that they rank for.
It does this at both the URL and Domain level, so you can see what keywords that the competitor’s URL ranks for, that you can also target, and what other articles the competitor’s website is ranking well for, as inspiration for your next pieces of content.
Social Tab
The social tab is useful to give you insight on which of the top-ranking (page 1) competitor URLs have gained social media shares on both Facebook and Pinterest.
Social media popularity is synonymous and correlates well with search engine popularity, as Google wants to show users what they want to see.
Therefore, it’s useful to know if a competitor is ranking due to their social media presence, as opposed to their SEO optimization, as it may mean that you should replicate their method.
SERP Analysis Tips
Well, in the 2 years of using KeySearch, we’ve learned how to use it in the most effective way, so here are some of our tips
Consider search intent
This is a basic concept, and yet so many bloggers and beginner SEOs seem to fall into the trap, but you generally learn this over time, with experience.
Google’s AI measures all kinds of real-time SERP data, including clicks, dwell time, exit rate, bounce rate, etc, meaning that they can quickly determine if a page is satisfying the user’s query.
Any page that doesn’t satisfy a query will not rank for that term for long, and hence any SEO efforts made to rank for the query will be wasted.
With that being said, KeySearch gives you all of the top-ranking competitors in a clear table, so you can visit the blogs and see why exactly those pages are ranking (from a content perspective), and whether it suits your business to consider creating similar content to compete.
Exact-match optimization can beat authority
We see this time and time again!
Featuring your target keyword in an exact-match form (meaning using the keyword word-for-word) in your title, description and URL can help you rank above all of your competitors, despite the fact they have higher DA, PA, etc.
In the example above, we can see a website with a domain authority of 26, competing with sites that have a considerably higher DA.
However, this generally only works if your competitors have not fully optimized these core on-page aspects.
KeySearch gives you a quick way to see if the keyword search has competitors ranking who have optimized their page, if you see lots of No’s under the Title, DESC and URL columns, then it’s time for you to rank!
Long Tail Keywords are best
For those who may not be aware of what long-tail keywords are, they are simply longer phrases of keywords, usually more than 3 words, which ultimately have lower organic competition, and lower monthly search volumes than short-tail keywords (less than 3 words).
Let’s provide an example:
Long Tail Keyword:
Best Keyword Research Tool (1000 monthly searches – 54 Competition)
Short Tail Keyword:
Keyword Research Tool (4400 monthly searches – 60 Competition)
Now, in these examples, the displayed keyword difficulty tool’s score shows that organic SEO competition levels are very high. Let’s choose some less competitive keywords which also demonstrate the importance of choosing long-tail keywords over short-tail.
Long Tail Keyword:
KeySearch Review (260 monthly searches – 19 Competition)
Short Tail Keyword:
KeySearch (880 monthly searches – 27 competition)
In both of these cases, when targeting the long-tail keyword, you are also optimizing your piece of content to rank for the shorter-tail keyword too.
However, Google will initially rank your content for lower search volume keywords like ‘keysearch review’, and depending on the real-time data that they collect, from users interacting with your page, it will determine whether you will get access to rank highly for the short tail keyword.
And determining the ability to rank on the first page of Google for relevant keywords is exactly where a keyword difficulty checker comes in handy.
Data Export
It should also be noted that all of this data within the keyword list and the SERP analysis can easily be exported, into a TXT, CSV, and PDF format.
This is perfect for those who want to export a long list of keyword suggestions or competitive analysis data.
Competitor Analysis
We’ve touched on some overall competitor analysis functions that Keysearch has to offer within the Keyword Research tool.
However, KeySearch has an entire suite of tools dedicated to doing more in-depth competitor analysis. These tools are as follows:
- Backlink Checker
- Organic Keywords
- Competitor Gap
- URL Metrics
- Page Analyzer
Backlink Checker
KeySearch’s backlink checker is a really handy tool, and it was a shock when our agency signed up and found out that it contained backlink analysis features, to help indicate the overall domain strength of a site, with minimal effort.
Granted, these are not as advanced as competitors like Ahrefs, but they are still excellent and are great for quickly seeing your competitor’s backlink profile.
We regularly use the tool to find new domains to invest in, and also when evaluating a new niche to enter.
Let’s look more at the interface
So as you can see, you enter the domain/URL, and then select whether you want the entire domain or the particular URL evaluated.
Once you click search, you’ll be provided with lots of data, including:
- Domain Strength: Metric measured out of 10 to denote the power of the site’s backlink profile
- Anchors: The text used to hyperlink to the target domain/URL
- Backlinks: Overall number of backlinks linking to the target domain/URL
- Referring Domains: Overall number of referring websites linking to the target domain/URL
- DoFollow/NoFollow: Ratio of DoFollow to NoFollow links
- List of Backlinks: A full list of all of the backlinks which are linking to the target domain/URL
All of this data can be exported into a CSV, Excel, and PDF format.
Organic Keywords
KeySearch’s organic keywords tool is exceptionally good in helping you determine what keywords your competitors are ranking for, alongside more helpful information.
Once a domain/specific URL is entered, and the search button is clicked, the keyword tool provides the following data in columns:
- Keyword: The keywords that the domain or specific URL is ranking for
- Position: The position of the ranking URL for that particular keyword
- Volume: The monthly search volume of the particular keyword
- Traffic: The estimated amount of traffic provided to that URL, due to ranking for that keyword
- CPC: The Cost-Per-Click cost of that keyword (paid search)
- URL: The ranking URL
All of this data can be exported into a CSV, Excel and PDF format.
Competitor Gap Analysis
Keyword gap analysis is a strategy which is often overlooked, and yet, can be incredibly useful.
It’s the process of looking at your competitors and seeing what they are ranking for, that you currently aren’t ranking for, AKA the gaps in your content.
Keysearch’s gap analyzer tool is really great at quickly providing you with a list of these keywords, as you can see below.
Once you enter the domain that you want to inspect (competitor), and the domain that you want to compare it against (your site), you’ll be presented with all of the keywords that you competitor ranks for, that you currently do not.
It also shows the search volume, CPC, competitors’ ranking position, and the competitor’s ranking URL.
All of this data can be exported into a CSV, Excel, and PDF format.
URL Metrics
The URL Metrics tool gives you the ability to enter up to 20 URLs at any time, and get data on all of these URLs at once, in a list format.
This data includes:
- PA: Page Authority (Moz)
- DA: Domain Authority (Moz)
- DS: Domain Strength (/10)
- Links: Number of overall backlinks (NoFollow/DoFollow)
- Auth: Number of DoFollow backlinks
- Alexa: Alexa Rank
- RS: Rank Strength Metric (/10)
- KW Site: Number of keywords that the website ranks for overall
- Traffic Site: Estimated amount of traffic to the site
- KW: Number of keywords that the URL ranks for
- Traffic: Estimated amount of traffic to URL
- Facebook Shares: Number of Facebook shares
- Pinterest Shares: Number of Pinterest shares
Youtube Research
The YouTube Research tool is almost identical to the ‘Keyword Research’ tool, but made specifically for evaluating the YouTube search engine as opposed to Google.
The example above shows the results for the keyword: How to use keysearch
The main difference between the YT Research tool and the standard Keyword Research tool is that it includes the following SERP analysis data:
- Age: How old the video is in data
- Views: How many views the video has accumulated
- TitleMatch: Whether the title includes the target keyword
- DescMatch: Whether the description includes the target keyword
All of this data can be exported into a CSV, Excel and PDF format.
Rank Tracker
Another great feature is KeySearch’s rank tracker, which is free and included in your subscription plan (which we have a discount code for here).
The starter subscription plan includes rank tracking for 80 keywords, and the pro subscription plan includes rank tracking for 200 keywords.
Additionally, on-top of either plan, you can individually buy the following upgrades:
- +50 keywords tracked (+$7)
- +100 keywords tracked (+$12)
- +200 keywords tracked (+$19)
You may think, $19 to track an extra 200 keywords, that’s expensive, right? Not at all, we use Accuranker as our agency keyword rank tracker, and it costs $108 to track 1000 keywords, and that’s the smallest package that they offer.
Content Optimization Tool
Content optimization is simply the process of optimizing your content for SEO and ranking purposes.
This includes structuring the content, with optimized headings, and that the paragraph content includes plenty of LSI keywords, which are synonyms and help Google understand the content easier, whilst also making sure the content is long enough to fully discuss the content matter.
KeySearch quite simply takes the guesswork out of all these variables, and provide actionable advice on how to appropriately optimize your article
The ‘main’ tab includes suggested LSI keywords, the target word count and a progress bar which tells you how far you are from completing your task of optimization.
The ‘keywords’ tab includes all of the relevant ‘related keywords’ that Google is suggests within their SERP results when a query is typed in. Hence, if Google are showing that they consider these terms to be highly related to the searched term, you can simply use this to your advantage and provide Google with content that has everything they want to see.
The ‘questions’ tab includes popular questions around the particular topic, which are great to use as sub-headings throughout the content, to answer these related questions… In the case of keyword tools, a suggested list of sub-headings are as follows:
All of this data can be exported into a CSV, Excel and PDF format.
Opportunity Finder
Once you’ve completed doing on-page optimization for your content, you’ll then be wanting to gain eyes to your content piece, and in order to do this, it needs to rank well.
To get it ranking well for competitive keywords requires backlinks, and in order to acquire these in a whitehat way means that you’ll need to do outreach.
KeySearch has a great outreach opportunity finder tool to help with this
As you can see, you just need to enter a keyword (topic) and KeySearch can display Guest Post, Forum, and Blog opportunities.
It then provides a list of these, with SEO metrics included. This list can then be exported for you to begin the outreach process. Easy enough right?
Keysearch Tutorial
Quick Tutorial Overview
Keyword Research Tool Tutorial
Keysearch Free Trial
One of the aspects we wanted to touch on in this keysearch review is that KeySearch comes with a 1-month free trial, and in this trial, you can experience the full functionality of the tool.
It’s quite unheard of that a keyword difficulty tool would come with such an extensive trial usage period, so that’s certainly a positive.
We’re more than confident that you’ll want to use it!
But don’t forget, if you decide to sign up on a plan, use the 20% off lifetime discount/coupon code, as it applies to the monthly cost.
Keysearch Pricing, Discounts & Coupon Codes
Visit the website here and use the coupon ‘KSDISC‘ at checkout
Standard Pricing Options (Let’s add a discount)
KeySearch – 20% Discount Pricing Options
Starter Plan – $13.6 per month (additional $35 discount available if paid yearly)
Pro Plan – $27.2 (additional $129 discount available if paid yearly)
Therefore, applying a keysearch coupon code, whilst paying yearly can really help to save you $$$.
Conclusion
We use KeySearch every day in our agency and side business’, it’s truly been such a fantastic tool for us to quickly assess niches, keyword opportunities and competitors and we wouldn’t do our job without it.
We rarely use any other keyword research tools, although we have access to quite a variety.
Therefore I can safely say that if you’re an agency, blogger, freelancer, or business owner who is looking to do SEO to gain more organic traffic for their website, you’ll definitely want to look at this tool.
It’s incredibly versatile, and with the help of it’s keyword suggestion phase, it provides an endless amount of low competition keywords that you can target in your future seo strategy. Recently we’ve been using it for blog post optimizations to try and gain more blog traffic. We’ve also been utilizing it on our affiliate marketing sites as well as our ecommerce store’s product/category pages.
We hope that you’ve found this KeySearch Review article useful, and if you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below.
