Keysearch Review (Keyword Research on a Budget)

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My review of Keysearch, an affordable keyword research tool that helps you find low-competition keywords and track your SEO efforts (coupon code below).

Keysearch is a web-based keyword research tool that offers a wide range of features to help you find low-competition keywords, spy on your competitors, track your SEO efforts, and more.

Compared to other, more expensive keyword research tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs, Keysearch stands out as being very affordable. But is Keysearch good enough to take your SEO efforts to the next level?

In this Keysearch review, I will take you through the main modules and features of this keyword research software tool, and I will share my unbiased thoughts.

Keysearch Starter	Keysearch Pro
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To purchase a Keysearch license, you can choose between a Starter and a Pro plan. The Starter plan is quite generous, so I recommend beginning with that and upgrading later if you’re happy.

Both plans offer the same features, but you get more credits to spend with the Pro Plan. Payments are processed via PayPal or Card and you can cancel your subscription anytime.

To do this review, I will talk you through the main modules of Keysearch, and I will share my honest and unbiased verdict on each.

The Keyword Research module offers an extensive set of features related to keywords, difficulty scores, and competitor analysis.

When you enter this module, you start by submitting a keyword and let Keysearch spit out the top 10 ranking for that keyword, plus a very long list of related keywords. You can select a specific country or all countries.

On the right-hand side of the screen, you’ll see that long list of keywords with search volume, CPC, PPC, and Difficulty Score. Click on the Check button and Keysearch will regenerate all data based on that specific keyword including score.

On the left-hand side of the screen, Keysearch displays the top 10 ranking for that keyword, including metrics such as PA/DA, links, and some on-page SEO elements. It also shows you the search trends in the previous 12 months.

Deep Analysis

The Deep Analysis button, as the name suggests, gives you even more data about that keyword and the sites ranking for it.

It also includes a table with a long list of LSI keywords, presented in three columns (one, two, and three words). You can use these LSI keywords, or synonyms, in your articles in an attempt to avoid keyword stuffing.

It’s useful to have all of that data readily available without having to go and collect it all from external tools. Whether you really need all that information is debatable.

Difficulty Score

One of the core features of the Keyword Research module is the Difficult Score. It’s a metric between 1 and 100 that indicates how difficult it would be to rank for a particular keyword.

This score is heavily based on the data presented in the table on the left part of the screen. Data such as Moz PA and DA, external links, title, description, and URL. The table includes colors, with red indicating a challenge and green indicating an opportunity.

The problem I see with this scoring and coloring system is that bloggers (with limited SEO skills) take it as gospel. The columns we see in that table with the top 10 are just a few very basic metrics. In reality, there is a lot more involved in solid SEO and keyword research.

If you really want to know how strong or how weak the competition is (ranking for a keyword), you will need to go into all these articles and do a much deeper analysis. You will also need to have a closer look at their websites as a whole.

How strong is their on-page SEO? How in-depth is their content? Do these articles have a proper structure? What niches are these websites in? Are these websites well-structured? How old are the websites? How many articles do these websites have? Have these websites been updated consistently? Do these articles provide answers to user queries? And so on.

The Quick Difficulty feature is similar to the research module but has a different purpose. It allows you to bulk-submit keywords and Keysearch will bulk-check the difficulty scores for you and present them on the screen.

Before I say anything else, I must note that Keysearch can process bulk requests very easily and quickly without any issues.

It’s a useful feature as long as you understand what the data means. However, the issue with this feature is the same as I explained above. SEO is not a matter of ticking a few boxes.

Don’t think that when you put a keyword in the title, in the description, in the headers, and sprinkled throughout the article, this article will rank in Google.

And if there are a few sites with a high Moz DA in that top 10, this doesn’t mean you can’t rank for that particular keyword. Of course you can.

The My Lists module keeps track of all the keywords that you’ve saved over time. It’s a useful feature in the sense that you can come back here to quickly re-analyze keywords from the past.

The list quickly tells you the search volumes, CPC, PPC, and Difficulty Score of given keywords in that list. You can have as many lists as you like. You could use lists for blog posts for example, with each blog post having a list of keywords.

What’s also great is that you can quickly select a bunch of keywords from your lists and export them over to the Rank Tracker. More on that feature further below. You can also export these lists to CSV and PDF.

You can easily create lists and add keywords to My Lists using the Save Keywords button on the Keyword Research home page.

The purpose of the Brainstorm module is to give you more niche and keyword ideas. Keysearch does this by displaying the latest Twitter Trends, Amazon Movers, and Google Trends. You can, of course, click on all links on this page and navigate to Twitter, Amazon, and Google respectively.

Twitter Trends and Google Trends speak for themselves and are nice to have, but I found the Amazon Movers part quite interesting. This list basically gives you products in different categories that are selling well right now. This is particularly useful if you’re an Amazon Associate and you’re looking for new products to review and promote on your websites.

You can also type in words in the search bar at the top of the screen and Keysearch will spit out keyword suggestions for Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, and eBay. You can then click on any suggestion and Keysearch will give you the option to dive deeper into this keyword and calculate the difficulty score.

Deep Dive is one of the newest modules in Keysearch that looks quite promising.

In this module, you enter a keyword (typically the same keyword you entered in the Keyword Research module), and Keysearch presents a screen with a list of keywords (the main keyword and related keywords).

For each keyword, it shows the most important metrics plus a list of pages that rank for that keyword. This data gives you a quick overview of the value of the keywords and how competitive they may be.

The Keysearch Explorer module is an extensive feature that was clearly inspired by similar modules in Semrush and Ahrefs.

It lets you submit a domain (or a page URL) and Keysearch spits out all types of different data related to that domain, such as domain strength, backlinks, referring domains, competitors, and organic keywords.

From there, you can get more detailed reports on each of these items.

It’s a great module with lots of useful data, but what frustrates me is that there is a big focus on a number called Score To Target, which is the keyword difficulty score Keysearch believes you should target.

As mentioned above, I really don’t like that scoring system because it’s misleading. These scores are calculated based on outdated SEO concepts.

Some bloggers do take that score very seriously though, and genuinely believe they should never target keywords with a higher difficulty score than that Score To Target. That leads to missed opportunities, which is a big shame.

Apart from that, it’s a pretty strong module with great data insights.

The Backlink Checker lets you check backlinks for the whole domain as well as for individual pages. This is useful as part of your competitor analysis exercise for a new article you are planning to write, or for existing articles that you want to build new links to.

However, I did find quite a lot of discrepancies between how many backlinks Keysearch finds for domains, and how many two of their competitors (Ubersuggest and Semrush) can find.

Examples

1. The first example is semrush.com:

Keysearch finds 13.8 million backlinks and 954K referring domains:

Ubersuggest finds 31.6 million backlinks and 161K referring domains:

Semrush finds 35.5 million backlinks and 172K referring domains:

2. The second example is keysearch.co:

Keysearch finds 13K backlinks and 2.4K referring domains:

Ubersuggest finds 25K backlinks and 2.8K referring domains:

Semrush finds 34.8K backlinks and 4K referring domains:

As you can see, these differences are quite significant. I tested around 10 domains and the results were all very similar.

The Organic Keywords feature allows you to submit a domain URL as well as a page URL, and Keysearch spits out a long list of all the keywords this particular URL is ranking for in Google.

This is also a relatively new feature, and in my opinion, it’s a feature that any keyword research tool needs to have.

In the above example, we’re seeing the keywords a certain article on reviews.com is ranking for. If you’re planning to write an article about the same topic, this report will help you find the right keywords to target.

If you submit a URL of a page on your own site, it allows you to identify new keyword opportunities. For example, you can optimize your content for keywords that aren’t yet ranking on the first page of Google.

One drawback of this feature is that it lacks filters that a tool like Semrush does offer. It’s quite helpful if you can filter through a long list of keywords, rather than having to browse through the lot.

I’m not a fan of this module. Most keyword research tools have a feature like this, but I find it somewhat gimmicky and never end up using it.

The module does the job, though. You can submit 1-3 target domains and compare that with 1 other domain. Keysearch will then show all keywords the three sites are ranking for but the 1 domain doesn’t.

You can use this data to then create a content plan targeting those keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but you aren’t.

Some people swear by this feature, but I don’t. I use other ways to get competitor and keyword data. Also, I find the date in this module hard to navigate. It’s one long data dump with not many options to filter through them.

The URL Metrics section is pretty straightforward. Simply submit one or more URLs and Keysearch will return a set of standard metrics per URL.

Examples of these metrics are Page and Domain Authority, total backlinks, and ranking keywords. It also includes social media stats but they don’t always appear to be correct. The table with all the data can be conveniently exported to CSV and PDF.

One funny thing I noticed is that the number of total backlinks in this section does not match the number in the Backlink Tracker module. So obviously they are coming from different sources.

The Rank Tracker module lets you submit keywords per URL and then Keysearch will keep track of their rankings over time.

This is useful when you have certain articles written around main and long-tail keywords and you want to know how well the articles are going as time goes by.

Based on that data you can then decide to optimize these articles or to let them sit and let Google do its job.

This is of course much easier than having to go into Google every day or week to see how your chosen keywords are tracking.

I must point out here that with the Starter Plan, you can track 80 keywords, and with the Pro Plan, you can track 200 keywords.

This module is okay. What you need to do is submit a URL (domain or article) and Keysearch will render a report with all sorts of mostly on-page SEO elements that are either good or bad.

It’s the basic on-page SEO stuff like title tag, meta description, alt attributes, internal links, outbound links, and so on. It also includes Google PageSpeed Insights results at the bottom.

This module is not groundbreaking by any means, but it does the job and it’s nice to have quick access to.

I never recommend people use these tools because they can be quite misleading. An SEO audit should always be done by an expert, not by a keyword research tool. An expert will then use more professional tools, such as Screaming Frog and Ahrefs to help with their audits.

I hope this Keysearch review has provided you with some useful insights.

There are two modules I didn’t review (or rate very highly): YouTube and Content Assistant. I don’t care about YouTube, and for Content Assistant, I use other (more specialized) tools. I don’t need these modules in Keysearch, but others may benefit from them.

So, would I recommend Keysearch?

Yes and no.

Yes:
Because it’s very affordable. The tool is what it is. You get quite a lot of features for a reasonably low price.

But you need to be able to put things in perspective. Don’t take the scores and colors as gospel. In fact, I’d recommend you ignore those things altogether.

Use Keysearch only for fact-based data. Use it to track rankings, find new keyword ideas, see SERP snapshots of keywords, find keywords other websites are ranking for, etc.

Keysearch can certainly be a helpful tool if you use it for these basic tasks.

No:
Because Semrush and Ahrefs are much better tools. No doubt. But they are also much more expensive.

The datasets in those tools are much bigger, and the data, in general, is more reliable. The Backlink Checker is also not as advanced as it is in Semrush and Ahrefs.

In short:
Keysearch is an affordable keyword research tool, great for beginner or budget bloggers, but it does have its flaws. As long as you understand what to use it for and how to put the data it produces in the right context, Keysearch can be very helpful.

Once you have a bigger budget available, I strongly recommend upgrading to Semrush or Ahrefs. Using these professional tools can take your SEO and organic rankings to the next level.

Use coupon code BP30 for an exclusive 30% discount.

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