A year ago, in April of 2015, I pitched a project internally at Moz to design and launch a keyword research tool, one of the few areas of SEO we've never comprehensively tried to serve. The pitch took effort and cajoling (the actual, internal pitch deck is available here), but eventually received approval, with one big challenge... We had to do it with a team already dedicated to the maintenance and development of our rankings collections and research tools. This project wouldn't get additional staffing — we had to find a way to build it with only the spare bandwidth of this crew.
Sure, we didn't have the biggest team, or the ability to work on the project free from our other obligations, but we had grit. We had passion. We wanted to prove ourselves to our fellow Mozzers and to our customers. We had pride. And we desperately wanted to build something that wasn't just "good enough," but was truly great. Today, I think we've done that.
Meet our new keyword research tool, Keyword Explorer:
If you want to skip hearing about it and just try it out, head on over. You can run 2 free searches/day without even logging in, another 5 with a free community account, and if you're a Pro subscriber, you've already got access. For those who want to learn more, read on!
The 5 big, unique features of Keyword Explorer
Keyword Explorer (which we've taken to calling "KWE" for short) has lots of unique features, metrics, and functionality, but the biggest ones are pretty obvious and, we believe, highly useful:
- KWE takes you all the way through the keyword research process — from discovering keyword ideas to getting metrics to building a list, filtering the keywords on it, and prioritizing which ones to target based on the numbers that matter.
- KWE features metrics essential to the SEO process — two you're familiar with — Volume and Difficulty — and three that are less familiar: Organic CTR (formerly "Opportunity"), Importance, and Priority. Organic CTR estimates the relative CTR of the organic web results on a SERP. Importance is a metric you can modify to indicate a keyword that's more or less critical to your campaign/project. And Priority is a combination of all the metrics built to help you prioritize a keyword list.
- Our volume score is the first volume estimation metric we know of that goes beyond what AdWords reports. We do that using Russ Jones' volume bucket methodology and adding in anonymized clickstream data from ~1 million real searchers in the US. From there, Russ has built a model that predicts the search volume range a keyword is likely to have with ~95% accuracy.
- Keyword suggestions inside KWE come from almost all the sources we saw SEOs accessing manually in their research processes — Keyword Planner data, Google Suggest, Related Searches, other keywords that the ranking pages also ranked for, topic-modeling ideas, and keywords found from our clickstream data. All of these are available in KWE's suggestions.
- Import and export functionality are strongly supported. If you've already got a list of keywords and just want KWE's metrics, you can easily upload that to us and we'll fetch them for you. If you like the KWE process and metrics, but have more you want to do in Excel, we support easy, powerful, fast exports. KWE is built with power users in mind, so go ahead and take advantage of the tool's functionality however works best with your processes.
These five are only some of the time-saving, value-adding features in the tool, but they are, I think, enough to make it worthwhile to give Keyword Explorer a serious look.
A visual walkthrough
As an experiment, I've created a visual, slide-by-slide walkthrough of the tool. If you'd rather *see* vs. read the details, this format might be for you (Slideshare's embedding is having issues today, but you can find the presentation on their site).
And, for those of you who prefer video, we made a short, 2 minute demo of the tool in that format, too:
Of course, there's a ton of nuance and complexity in a product like this, and given Moz's dedication to transparency, you can find all of that detail in the more thorough explanation below.
Keyword Explorer's metrics
KWE's metrics are among the biggest data-driven advances we've made here at Moz, and a ton of credit for that goes to Dr. Pete Meyers and Mr. Russ Jones. Together, these two have crafted something extraordinary — unique metrics that we've always needed for SEO-based keyword research, but never had before. Those include:
Keyword volume ranges
Nearly every keyword research tool available uses a single source for volume data: Google AdWords' Keyword Planner. We all know from studying it that the number AdWords provides is considerably off from reality, and last year, Moz's Russ Jones was able to quantify those discrepancies in his blog post: Keyword Planner's Dirty Secrets.
Since we know that Google's numbers don't actually have precision, but do indicate a bucket, we realized we could create ranges for volume and be significantly more accurate, more of the time. But, that's not all... We also have access to anonymized clickstream data here at Moz, purchased through a third-party (we do NOT collect or use any of our own user data via, for example, the MozBar), that we were able to employ in our new volume ranges.
Using sampling, trend data, and the number of searchers and searches for a given keyword from the clickstream, combined with AdWords' volume data, we produced a volume range that, in our research, showed ~95% accuracy with the true impression counts Google AdWords would report for a keyword whose ad showed during a full month.
We're pretty excited about this model and the data it produces, but we know it's not perfect yet. As our clickstream data grows, and our algorithm for volume improves, you should see more and more accurate ranges in the tool for a growing number of keywords. Today, we have volume data on ~500mm (half a billion) English-language search queries. But, you'll still see plenty of "no data" volume scores in the tool as we can access considerably more terms and phrases for keyword suggestions (more on suggestion sources below).
NOTE: KWE uses volume data modeled on the quantity of searches in the US for a given term/phrase (global English is usually 1.5-3X those numbers). Thus, while the tool can search any Google domain in any country, the volume numbers will always be for US-volume. In the future, we hope to add volume data for other geos as well.
An upgraded, more accurate Keyword Difficulty score
The old Keyword Difficulty tool was one of Moz's most popular (it's still around for another month or so, but will be retired soon in favor of Keyword Explorer). But, we knew it had a lot of flaws in its scoring system. For Keyword Explorer, we invested a lot of energy in upgrading the model. Dr. Pete, Dr. Matt Peters, myself, and Russ had 50+ reply email threads back and forth analyzing graphs, suggesting tweaks, and tuning the new score. Eventually, we came up with a Keyword Difficulty metric that:
- Has far more variation than the old model — you'll see way more scores in the 20s and 30s as well as the 80s and 90s than the prior model, which put almost every keyword between 50–80.
- Accounts for pages that haven't yet been assigned a PA score by using the DA of the domain.
- Employs a smarter, CTR-curve model to show when weaker pages are ranking higher and a page/site may not need as much link equity to rank.
- Adjusts for a few domains (like Blogspot and Wordpress) where DA is extremely high, but PA is often low and the inherited domain authority shouldn't pass on as much weight to difficulty.
- Concentrates on however many results appear on page 1, rather than the top 20 results.
This new scoring model matches better with my own intuition, and I think you'll find it vastly more useful than the old model.
As you can see from one of my lists above (for Haiku Deck, whose board I joined this year), the difficulty ranges are considerably higher than in the past, and more representative of how relatively hard it would be to rank in the organic results for each of the queries.
A true Click-Through Rate opportunity score
When you look at Google's results, it's pretty clear that some keywords are worthy of pursuit in the organic web results, and some are not. To date, no keyword research tool we know of has attempted to accurately quantify that, but it's a huge part of determining the right terms and phrases to target.
Once we had access to clickstream data, we realized we could accurately estimate the percent of clicks on a given search result based on the SERP features that appeared. For example, a classic, "ten-blue-links" style search result had 100% of click traffic going to organic results. Put a block of 4 AdWords ads above it, though, and that dropped by ~15%. Add a knowledge graph to the right-hand side and another ~10% of clicks are drawn away.
It would be crazy to treat the prioritization of keywords with loads of SERP features and little CTR on the organic results the same as a keyword with few SERP features and tons of organic CTR, so we created a metric that accurately estimates Click-Through-Rate (CTR), called "Organic CTR."
The search above for "Keanu" has an instant answer, knowledge graph, news results, and images (further down). Hence, its Organic CTR Score is a measly 37/100, which means our model estimates ~37% of clicks go to the organic results.
But, this search, for "best free powerpoint software" is one of those rare times Google is showing nothing but the classic 10 blue links. Hence, its Organic CTR Score is 100/100.
If you're prioritizing keywords to target, you need this data. Choosing keywords without it is like throwing darts with a blindfold on — someone's gonna get hurt.
Importance scores you can modify
We asked a lot of SEOs about their keyword research process early in the design phases of Keyword Explorer and discovered pretty fast that almost everyone does the same thing. We put keyword suggestions from various sources into Excel, get metrics for all of them, and then assign some type of numeric representation to each keyword based on our intuition about how important it is to this particular campaign, or how well it will convert, or how much we know our client/boss/team desperately wants to rank for it.
That self-created score was then used to help weight the final decision for prioritizing which terms and phrases to target first. It makes sense. You have knowledge about keywords both subjective and objective that should influence the process. But it needs to do so in a consistent, numeric fashion that flows with the weighting of prioritization.
Hence, we've created a toggle-able "Importance" score in Keyword Explorer:
After you add keywords to a list, you'll see the Importance score is, by default, set to 3/10. We chose this number to make it easy to increase a keyword's importance by 3X and easy to bring it down to 1/3rd. As you modify the importance value, overall Keyword Priority (below) will change, and you can re-sort your list based on the inputs you've given.
For example, in my list above, I set "free slideshow software" to 2/10, because I know it won't convert particularly well (the word "free" often does not). But, I also know that churches and religious organizations love Haiku Deck and find it hugely valuable, so I've bumped up the importance of "worship presentation software" to 9/10.
Keyword Priority (formerly "Potential")
In order to prioritize keywords, you need a metric that combines all the others — volume, difficulty, organic CTR, and importance — with a consistent, sensible algorithm that lets the best keywords rise to the top. In Keyword Explorer, that metric is "Priority."
Sorting by Priority shows me keywords that have lots of search volume, relatively low difficulty, relatively high CTR opportunity, and uses my custom importance score to push the best keywords to the top. When you build a list in Keyword Explorer, this metric is invaluable for sorting the wheat from the chaff and identifying the terms and phrases with the most promise.
Keyword research & the list building process
Keyword Explorer is built around the idea that, starting from a single keyword search, you can identify suggestions that match your campaign's goals and include them in your list until you've got a robust, comprehensive set of queries to target.
List building is easy — just select the keywords you like from the suggestions page and use the list selector in the top right corner (it scrolls down as you do) to add your chosen keywords to a list, or create a new list:
Once you've added keywords to a list, you can go to the lists page to see and compare your sets of keywords:
Each individual list will show you the distribution of metrics and data about the keywords in it via these helpful graphs:
The graphs show distributions of each metric, as well as a chart of SERP features to help illustrate which types of results are most common in the SERPs for the keywords on your list:
For example, you can see in my Rock & Grunge band keywords, there's a lot of news results, videos, tweets, and a few star reviews, but no maps/local results, shopping ads, or sitelinks, which makes sense. Keyword Explorer is using country-level, non-personalized, non-geo-biased results, and so some SERPs won't match perfectly to what you see in your local/logged-in results. In the future, we hope to enable even more granular location-based searches in the tool.
The lists themselves have a huge amount of flexibility. You can sort by any column, add, move, or delete in bulk, filter based on any metric, and export to CSV.
If your list gets stale, and you need to update the metrics and SERP features, it's just a single click to re-gather all the data for every keyword on your list. I was particularly impressed with that feature; to me it's one of the biggest time-savers in the application.
Keyword Explorer's unique database of search terms & phrases
No keyword research tool would be complete without a massive database of search terms and phrases, and Keyword Explorer has just that. We started with a raw index of over 2 billion English keywords, then whittled that down to the ~500 million highest-quality ones (we collapsed lots of odd suggestions we found via iterative crawls of AdWords, autosuggest, related searches, Wikipedia titles, topic modeling extractions, SERPscape — via our acquisition last year — and more) into those we felt relatively confident had real volume).
Keyword Explorer's suggestions corpus features six unique filters to get back ideas. We wanted to include all the types of keyword sources that SEOs normally have to visit many different tools to get, all in one place, to save time and frustration. You can see those filters at the top of the suggestions page:
The six filters are:
- Include a Mix of Sources
- This is the default filter and will mix together results from all the others, as well as ideas crawled from Google Suggest (autocomplete) and Google’s Related Searches.
- Only Include Keywords With All of the Keyword Terms
- This filter will show only suggestions that include all of the terms you’ve entered in the query. For example, if you entered “mustache wax” this filter would only show suggestions that contain both the word “mustache” and the word “wax.”
- Exclude Your Query Terms to Get Broader Ideas
- This filter will show only suggestions that do not include your query terms. For example, if you entered “mustache wax,” suggestions might include “facial grooming products” or “beard oil” but nothing with either “mustache” or “wax.”
- Based on Closely Related Topics
- This filter uses Moz’s topic modeling algorithm to extract terms and phrases we found on many web pages that also contained the query terms. For example, keywords like “hair gel” and “pomade” were found on many of the pages that had the words “mustache wax” and thus will appear in these suggestions.
- Based on Broadly Related Topics and Synonyms
- This filter expands upon the topic modeling system above to include synonyms and more broadly related keywords for a more iterative extraction process and a wider set of keyword suggestions. If “Closely Related Topics” suggestions are too far afield for what you’re seeking, this filter often provides better results.
- Related to Keywords with Similar Results Pages
- This filter looks at the pages that ranked highly for the query entered and then finds other search terms/phrases that also contained those pages. For example, many pages that ranked well for “mustache wax” also ranked well for searches like “beard care products” and “beard conditioner” and thus, those keywords would appear in this filter. We're big fans of SEMRush here at Moz, and this filter type shows suggestions very similar to what you'd find using their competitive dataset.
Some of my favorite, unique suggestions come from the "closely related topics" filter, which uses that topic modeling algorithm and process. Until now, extracting topically related keywords required using something like Alchemy API or Stanford's topic modeling software combined with a large content corpus, aka a royal pain in the butt. The KWE team, mostly thanks to Erin, built a suitably powerful English-language corpus, and you can see how well it works:
NOTE: Different filters will work better and worse on different types of keywords. For newly trending searches, topic modeling results are unlikely to be very good, and on longer tail searches, they're not great either. But for head-of-demand-curve and single word concepts, topic modeling often shows really creative lexical relationships you wouldn't find elsewhere.
SERPs Analysis
The final feature of Keyword Explorer I'll cover here (there are lots of cool nooks and crannies I've left for you to find on your own) is the SERPs Analysis. We've broadened the ability of our SERP data to include all the features that often show up in Google's results, so you'll see a page much more representative of what's actually in the keyword SERP:
Holy smack! There's only 3 — yes, THREE — organic results on page one for the query "Disneyland." The rest is sitelinks, tweets, a knowledge graph, news listings, images — it's madness. But, it's also well-represented in our SERPs Analysis. And, as you can see, the Organic CTR score of "7" effectively represents just how little room there is for organic CTR.
Over time, we'll be adding and supporting even more features on this page, and trying to grab more of the metrics that matter, too (for example, after Twitter pulled their tweet counts, we had to remove those from the product and are working on a way to get them back).
Yes, you can buy KWE separately (or get it as part of Moz Pro)
Keyword Explorer is the first product in Moz Pro to be available sold separately. It's part of the efforts we've been making with tools like Moz Local, Followerwonk, and Moz Content to offer our software independently rather than forcing you to bundle if you're only using one piece.
If you're already a Moz Pro subscriber, you have access to Keyword Explorer right now! If you're not a subscriber and want to try it out, you can run a few free queries per day (without list building functionality though). And, if you want to use Keyword Explorer on its own, you can buy it for $600/year or $1,800/year depending on your use.
The best part of Keyword Explorer — we're going to build what you want
There's lots to like in the new Keyword Explorer, but we also know it's not complete. This is the first version, and it will certainly need upgrades and additions to reach its full potential. That's why, in my opinion, the best part of Keyword Explorer is that, for the next 3–6 months, the team that built this product is keeping a big part of their bandwidth open to do nothing but make feature additions and upgrades that YOU need.
It was pretty amazing to have the team's schedule for Q2 and Q3 of 2016 make the top priority "Keyword Explorer Upgrades & Iterations." And, in order to take advantage of that bandwidth, we'd love to hear from you. We have dozens (maybe hundreds) of ideas internally of what we want to add next, but your feedback will be a huge part of that. Let us know through the comments below, by tweeting at me, or by sending an email to Rand at Moz.com.
A final note: I want to say a massive thanks to the Keyword Explorer team, who volunteered to take on much more than they bargained for when they agreed to work with me :-) Our fearless, overtime-investing, never-complaining engineers — Evan, Kenny, David, Erin, Tony, Jason, and Jim. One of the best designers I've ever worked with — Christine. Our amazingly on-top-of-everything product manager — Kiki. Our superhero-of-an-engineering-manager — Shawn. Our bug-catching SDETs — Uma and Gary. Our product marketing liaison — Brittani. And Russ & Dr. Pete, who helped with so many aspects of the product, metrics, and flow. You folks all took time away from your other projects and responsibilities to make this product a reality. Thank you.
Very proud of the team for continuing to deliver products the community will derive a great of value from.
Yes, there are lots of KW tools out there, and not everyone will love this one. But—yes, I am biased—what makes me so happy about this tool is it was created by a company that puts the needs of community before the needs of the brand. That means, it's delivered to exceed the current needs of the audience, AND will continue to improve as the team gathers more and more feedback.
I've only played around with it for a few days, but already I love it, especially for how it has opened my eyes for/to some opportunities I wasn't aware of.
RS
Fantastic tool--I can't wait to dig into it today! I also wanted to take a moment and thank Moz for putting their subscribers first--you could easily make all subscribers pay extra for this, but instead you grandfather past subscribers into the tool with a pretty healthy search limit. Thank you Moz (and Rand)--you guys are the best!
Thanks! If our existing customers can use our tools to grow their businesses, they will use our services more. We see it as a win-win mutual growth strategy. And just plain old fair.
And that is why I've been using Moz for the better part of 6 years now!
Wow, Rand (and all of Moz)!
Here are the two major pain points that I have encountered in all of my SEO work for years:
1. Identifying long-tail keywords (in the AdWords tool or elsewhere)
2. Getting search volumes for those long-tail keywords (in the AdWords tool or elsewhere)
I'm about to dive into the new feature in my company's account, but it seems as though it will go a long way to addressing these issues. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this development -- this is beyond awesome and yet another feather in Moz's cap.
I can only imagine how much work this project took among the R&D and marketing and other teams. So, just from this one person, I wanted to say congratulations and thanks for releasing this new feature. Great work!
Thanks Samuel! Really thrilled to hopefully help out with some of those problems. AdWords' hiding keyword data was a big reason we took this on (as was a lack of needed metrics like CTR Opportunity, customizable importance, better Difficulty scores, etc).
Please let me know if there's features or functionality you'd like to see in the tool - we've got a team of folks working on the next generation of upgrades.
This is wicked cool & beautiful. Life just got a whole lot easier.
A first blush suggestion... I'm looking at the 1,000 results. It'd be nice to have a filter available that allows users to narrow the results. For example, to only see results that include the word Seattle.
That's a great idea!
Russ, the number or queries made is confusing. Right now I see "179 of 300 keyword queries available," but I've only made a handful of searches. Does activity other than searches count against this number?
Thomas - we sort of have that now, where you can filter by "only includes" in the filter drop down. That said, adding a custom filter to let you input (or exclude) a term would be great, too. We also have a system for grouping keywords by related topics that should help a lot - that feature is, I believe, one of the first we'll be adding.
Saw that right after I hit enter <G>.
HELLO I think Moz just made keyword research something to get pumped about again. I am looking so forward to using this tool and thanks for all who contributed to this. I have to say many SEO's may think that Moz is not the key source to doing a good job for clients but its my go to and now I have even more of a reason to push people in this direction. \m/
Its indeed great news, I tried it and it was useful. Any update coming for voice search keyword research?
Very impressive guys/ gals,
What a strong addition to your already stellar suite of tools. Extremely user friendly and engaging in the SERP data, the metrics are very impressive and incredibly easy to read from a visual standpoint. Also, comparing the terms against terms... beautiful.
It would be very helpful if the KW research tool would suggest where the opportunity and potential exists within a term or set of terms. Does the competition have thin content, low quantity links, low quality links, duplicate meta within target keyword pages, etc. Something like this would be pretty helpful when targeting a set of terms in understanding exactly what to focus on when looking to outrank. In any case, we are looking forward to utilizing this tool in our daily research.
Big thank you to everyone who, i'm sure, drank many red bulls on this project. : )
You read our minds! We have already been brainstorming 2.0 features and hopefully our savvy customers will keep bringing more ideas to us. Thanks!
Russ,
Absolutely! KWE is amazing already but with a complex, targeted feature like that, I would never sleep. So, you may want to hold off for now.
Awesome job you guys!
Just had a play with it. This is FANTASTIC. 15,000 keyword queries available to play with each month. SO awesome.
Thanks, guys! This was much needed.
Congratulations Rand, Pete, Russ and everyone involved. The industry has needed an upgrade on the Adwords Keyword planner for a longtime :-)
The tool has huge potential and I love some of the filters already. A couple of bits of feedback -
1) The layout of the old keyword difficulty tool is much easier to view at a glance than the new 'SERP Analysis' layout (imho).
The keyword difficulty tool is in tabular form with clear columns separating the metrics, so you can quickly view the DA or LRD of the top 10 without really thinking. In the new format, the numbers are quite small, they are under the site/URL, and for me at least, harder to view and quickly make a comparison. Please don't be too quick to get rid of the old keyword difficulty tool as the simplicity is still wonderful :-)
2) The volume for 'car insurance' in the UK with the filter set as 'include mix of results' is 118k-300k, for the filter 'only include keywords with all of the query of terms' it's 300k-1m. I thought the filter only changed the suggestions (ie, show keywords in my query), but does it also change the match type ('car insurance' now includes all variations with the words)? Or is this a hiccup?
Looking forward to seeing the tool develop further!
Cheers.
Dan
Thanks for the feedback Dan - solid points. On #1, I think we'll need to create a more tabular, analysis style view for more metrics in the future. The SERPs view has its own purpose, but you bring up a good and important use-case. On #2 - that's super weird. We'll look into it. Thanks for the heads up - it shouldn't change volume, as all the volumes come from the same place.
Nice! Really loving the tool :) Really appreciate it and also when I plugged in a keyword this popup came right along asking me to check it out to understand the metrics.
What would have been more cooler is, doing a case study instead of going into the technical details like it is accurate 95% of the time, logarithmic , exponentially high, so on and so forth. Ok, I understand what it means but how useful it is to me!. instead it could have been a real case study/walk through kind of a thing where he could have actually used a real case study.
Like Ok, For moz, Seo tools is a really important keyword for us to rank, I'm going to enter this now here and I see all these metrics after I enter them and all I'm going to care for now is potential, the higher the better. So SEO tools has a potential of 66 and the difficulty is pretty high at 71 but the opportunity is also high at 83, so maybe I would want to add this keyword to my list.
Instead of explaining how these metrics are calculated technically and going through the nitty gritties it would just been better how the user(me or anyone with pro account) can get more for the money I pay. So that would actually make me use the tool more rather than me understanding how these metrics are calculated technically.
Just my 2 cents and great work team :)
Wow, Congratulations to you and the team on this Rand! So far, I love the UX of this new tool! It's so clean and easy to browse. Thanks for dreaming this up and bringing it to life, I'm looking forward to running comparisons to see how the data measures up to my existing toolset.
I notice that there is no interface option to do research for specifically local data. When I do a search for something like "pizza delivery," I get results for Seattle. I know the pizza in Seattle is good, but even if they do deliver to the east coast, it will get cold. For local research, would you recommend just tacking on city/state to the query?
--Mark
Hi Mark - thanks for the kind words! And yes, for now, I'd say just add a city to get much more locally relevant results. In the future, we're hoping to do more to get very geo-specific with the queries so we can be even better for local keyword research. But, even today, if you do add "Seattle" to "Pizza Delivery" you get some pretty darn good results: https://moz.com/explorer/keyword/suggestions?q=sea... (not too shabby, eh?!)
Yeah, I actually just tried it out and it works wonderfully. Thanks again! I feel like this is one of those moments in SEO where someday I'm going to be in rocking chair explaining to some young whippersnapper (In my best Grandpa Simpson voice), "In MY day, we had to use 5 different tools just to get this data!" haha
You aren't kidding. When I was at Angular before Moz, it was all about combining multiple keyword sources, multiple difficulty measurements, traffic data from keyword planner, there was nothing even close to "Opportunity" and then shoving it together in a spreadsheet and guessing how it all works together.
Thank you Rand and Moz Team, after many existing tools I found this tool as very easy and simple to use.
Honestly, I was going to let my Moz subscription go, but this product convinced me to move away from SEMrush, whose interface has gone through so many changes that I'm giving up on it.
SEMRush is a pretty awesome product, but I'm thrilled (obviously) that you're sticking with Moz Tomek. Let me know if there's anything we can add or upgrade to help!
Hey Rand, If we compare to both then can you give me roughly score to who one get better result ?
Rand, would you be willing to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of KWE when compared to SEMrush?
Looks awesome! Is this data available via the Moz API? Can't see any mention of it in the docs.
Hi, Loving the new tool so far. Will help me reduce the switching back and forth, etc.
A UX comment: for the bar graphs; for some the 'low' score is best e.g. difficulty and then for others a 'high' score is best, e.g. opportunity. While 'low difficulty' makes sense, and 'high opportunity' also makes sense, the graphs are inconsistent.
Suggestion: these are amended so that the visual 'reads' consistently. e.g. could read left to right => a graph with all high bars on the left is the hottest keyword on the planet (low difficulty, high opportunity, etc). Am sure there are other ways to present this visually also.
Thanks
Jane
Woaw! Great tool!
This tool will help the research work of our keywords become more optimized, and there are many more choices!
Thanks!
So far its awesome. Thank you guys for another great resource. I can't wait to dig in a bit more. This will be incredible as you all continue to build on it.
There are 2 things that would be very useful to the processing of this data:
Is there any plan to dig into the details of how you all are computing the metric values? I'm not talking about what you all are defining them as (Rand did a great job explaining them), but more detail on how the metric is established so I can quantify them against my own calculations I've been using.
Thanks again!
Hi Sarah - thanks! Actually, the CSV import does support those columns when you create a list. Details here: https://moz.com/help/guides/keyword-explorer#frequ... (actually it looks like we still need to add that info to the FAQ, but importance, at least, is supported on column import - I'll talk to the team).
Regarding #2 - Dr. Pete has a blog post that's being published next week with details about how we calculate each metric and the following week, Russ Jones will have a big post out about we get more accurate volume ranges than Google :-) (for the US at least).
Awesome!
Thanks Moz team - this is fantastic. Look forward to using for our clients as well as to more updates. Big thanks for keeping this as user-friendly as possible - i think you did a great job on that (for what is a very complex tool)!
So Glad I'm a Pro-User...
REALLY well done guys. Addresses some of my biggest complaints.
Great tool, we will certainly use in our daily work. Bravo!
This looks fantastic congratulations to the Moz team. This is going to be a lot easier than collecting data from a million different sources! Was just curious will this continue to be included as part of Moz Pro or will we need a separate subscription for this tool?
It's available both ways - you can buy standalone, or it comes bundled with Moz Pro at the $149/month+ subscription levels.
Just one word : wahouuu!
Congrats on the launch! Looking forward to playing with this!
Congratulations Rand and the entire team at Moz! This is a huge tool in terms of how it can help SEO's break free from the monotony of using several tools together to arrive at a list of keywords. With KWE, now one can get a comprehensive view of the keywords they should target (or not), and take better business decisions for their SEO campaigns. This is going to save time and $. A huge thanks to the team at Moz for building this awesome tool!
Great tool,
May I ask how it works for non english query?
Is data such as clickstream and volume reliable for non english queries?
Thanks
Hi Emanuele - right now, our volume data for non-US queries isn't available, but we're working on that for the future. In the meantime, I'd suggest using AdWords KW Planner volumes for the specific country/language you're seeking.
HI this asad i am customer of member of MOZ .Com i need help how my keyword get best optimatization please
Thanks Rand, Looks like, going to be great tool.
I'm super happy this has been released! I can't wait to get using it, and I'm very thankful it's included in the existing subscription for Moz too. It adds immense value!
I love this, amazing job. Vote for next addition to filter by location. Keep up the great work.
I got excited just seeing that I could try this tool for free, I was using semrush on one of the companies that i manage but i can see that this tool has a lot of good features that i could show them.
Thanks Wizard
Fantastic addition. I was wondering why Moz didn't yet have all these tools all shoved into one platform... Can't wait to try :) Thank you!
Hi,
I try to research keywords for our website: https://lize.vn/. However, because our keywords are Vietnamese words, your tool can not identify it. Which languages does this tool support?
P/s: For English words, it's one of the best tools I've used.
Best regards,
Glad you like the new KWE tool! Right now, KWE is US-centric and the corpus is English-language centric right now. Hopefully in the future, we'll be able to expand it. :-)
Wow!!! That's a great idea!!!!
Very nice tool, If this tool is for free then its definitely beat Google keyword planner. Unfortunately they provide only 5 keyword queries for free users.
But over all it is good tool!!!
Thank-you rand for sharing this information with us...
This looks super useful and nearly identical to my manual system in spreadsheets (I copy and paste difficulty scores from moz and volume from adwords). The one thing it's missing from my sheets is the current ranking for each keyword. Are there plans on combining this new tool with the analytics tool? Apologies if someone has already asked this!
This tool is definitely going to provide tons of value, Thanks Moz !
What a great tool! I learned about it a couple of weeks ago and have been using it extensively--much appreciated.
Feature Request: I would love to have the option for "Worldwide" in addition to "Country".
Please consider this for future update.
Thanks!
Gwen
Yeah - that's a solid idea that we can hopefully implement in the future. We're a little country-specific now due to our data sources, but I think long-term something we can do.
This tool is great, it definitely helps you create a properly targeted online campaign. Use this tool for the keywords volume and difficulty. Check the top sites back-links and build your own if the difficulty is reasonable to pursue!
I wrote an article on the online buyers journey where I mentioned this tool as it allows you to identify what keywords will grab your prospects attention.
Thanks a lot for adding another keywordtool onto the live techie jungle we live in. One can never have too many keywords=)
Thanks Rand for making things easier in SEO and providing the helpful tips in your other blogs. I have also started writing blogs and I would really appreciate if you can have a look at my blogs and give me a feedback. My blogs are on https://br8kthroo.com/. Your feedback would be really appreciated :)
Thanks for the write up Rand and a great tool. After a few weeks of use, I think it is one of the best keyword tools on the market. Will have to be a staple in the arsenal from now on.
Checking it out now - nice :-)
I can only wholeheartedly agree with all of the aforementioned superlatives from my fellow commenter and kudos to the extensive work that has clearly went into the development. I am however unable to subscribe at this time because it is only US centric...and I'm gutted about that! I hope there are plans to expand to the UK soon. I had been using a tool called Long Tail Pro platinum but their keyword competitiveness feature hasn't been working so I've regrettably cancelled. Therefore I was so excited to see your kw difficulty and opportunity metrics. Absolutely love how that critical data is presented. It's incredibly intuitive. UK market next please! Future customer patiently waiting :-)
I think this product fills a gap not provided by Moz before. The only question I have is to do with search volume. For example, when using Google Keyword Planner to find UK search volume for keyword "nursing jobs" I get 2,900. With the Keyword Explorer I get 9k-11k. I know Keyword Planner isn't incredibly accurate but that is a considerable discrepancy. Am I missing something?
Apologies if this is to do with the US-centric search volume again. If so, is there any idea of timing for UK search volume? This is a amazing product but only really usable inside of the US until local data is pushed out.
In the next few weeks (4-6), we hope to have a fix that gets local search volume for many regions, including the UK. You're correct that, right now, the tool only has US search volume, which is why you see the off numbers. Sorry about that!
Amazing, thank you for the clarification. This is going to save me a LOT of time in the future so I reckon I'll be all right waiting just a little bit longer!
I'll second that. 4-6 weeks...no pressure on the dev team :-) Let's call it 6 weeks, under promise over deliver!
Great tool, thanks. I always like to use many of differents tools for one great result
Thank you for this magnificent new tool. Looks great!
Doing SEO in French-speaking Switzerland (a market niche for SEO, for sure), I see how important it is to have local data. I think it is fundamental to have the volume bracket figure based on targeted country search queries given by AdWords Planner. It would be better to have this country target figure (even without the enhanced figure you calculate using others US-based sources as you explain in this article) than a figure that is US-based and therefore irrelevant for the market in a given country.
In my case, the customers of my clients are located in Switzerland. Trafic from outside Switzerland has usually no commercial value. For this reason, only the search volume from within Switzerland is important and can help take the right decision for keyword targeting.
SEO is much less developed in Europe than in the US (I have lived on both sides of the Atlantic). I think that there is a serious opportunity for Moz to grow the important of its position on the global market if Moz does develop thoroughly its tools for (at least) the important languages (Spanish, German, French, etc.) and can provide quality data for those non English-based languages.
I know it is highly complex. This is why Moz concurrence does not it either. But where is the greatest market share for Moz, if not where its concurrence has not yet gone?
Yours,
Pascal Hämmerli
This functionality is largely already taken care of with TermExplorer (among other tools). However, it does look nice so it'll make for nice surface level reports but like most Moz tools (see OSE) functionality and depth are done better by competitors. Hopefully improvements are made to make it worthy of the echo chamber hype. Hopefully that happens sooner than later for Moz because much like Moz analytics etc they are late to the dance
Hi Jack, thanks for your response. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by Moz Keyword Explorer. I am personally well versed with the vast majority of keyword tools out there and I don't think there are any that offer this combination...
1. 2 Billion+ keyword corpus
2. 500 Million+ SERP crawled corpus
3. Keyword Opportunity metrics based on real clickstream data and SERP features
4. Keyword relationship based on multiple semantic and word-relation algorithms
Just to name a few. It really is worth a look.
Size is impressive up to the limits of relevance. Example would be apple and its X amount of apps...lots of useless apps (lots of useless keywords too), it's great that the database is larger but the same way Moz defends OSE against say a Majestic (quality, quantity, value of deepness of data) applies here.
Actual SERPS are heavily influenced by personalization right? so generic outputs on what a generic serp looks like to an otherwise naked (data wise) visitor is.....a very close to average point of data in practice.
I will try it for sure but I think you're a little late to party with this one, and a few nickles short of your aim is to sell outside of the fanboy/fangirl bubble.
SEO is clear that you have to work with appropriate tools.
Thank you so much!
Great work Rand and the whole Moz team! It's great to have all of this functionality in one place. I'm looking forward to being able to view UK search traffic data in future.
Great tool. Have already used it and it seems to provide good hints even for small low search volume keywords.
Hi Rank.
I have been long waited to to see this tool, well it work fine and much better than google keyword planner. But it is very limited for those who looking for free.
Wow !! good news......... Thanks Rand
Great work Rand! One of best tool for finding keywords variations. Missing App Store keywords section for (ASO) App Store Optimization like Keyword Tool .io
Great stuff! Although I've found it substantially inconsistent with ad words search volume? Adwords could say 14800 monthly searches for a keyword and this tool will be 201-500? I found this for 'flights to melbourne' with both geo settings for Australia.
Looks like search volume is from the US (even when you select a different county eg. Australia).
"NOTE: KWE uses volume data modeled on the quantity of searches in the US for a given term/phrase (global English is usually 1.5-3X those numbers). Thus, while the tool can search any Google domain in any country, the volume numbers will always be for US-volume. In the future, we hope to add volume data for other geos as well."
Unfortunately, all our volume scores are US-centric right now. But, over time, we hope to add data for other countries as well.
Thats awesome. We are currently predominantly using Google keyword planner, looking forward to trying out this. Looks great!
This looks very promising. I've been seriously debating if we should build such a tool ourselves, I'm glad we didn't :) However I also have some feedback.
Cheers, Remko
Hi Remko - I'll try to answer all of these in order:
A) Yes - as I noted in the post and as the tooltips in the app note, KWE is US-centric and the corpus is English-language centric right now. Hopefully in the future, we'll be able to expand it.
B) It does pull from Google Suggest, but we don't go through each second letter of the alphabet for each word/phrase. Certainly something we could consider for the future, and maybe a good way to start tackling non-English suggestions (those would already have overlap in English, but likely wouldn't in non-English languages since our corpus doesn't cover them).
C) Interesting... We may be able to show source in the tool if there's lots of demand for that. I think the backend does record the original place we picked it up.
D) For non-English queries, I agree that KW Difficulty isn't great. It's better in English, and better in the US, but there's probably still room to improve. That said, it's best used as a relative number, not an absolute. If you add many keywords to a list, then compare their relative difficulties, you're likely to see results that make more sense.
E) It's easy to input in bulk! Just create a new list and you can upload or manually enter/paste keywords in and that will be the start of your list. From there, you can click the search icon on any keyword to expand.
F) That was actually one of the features we had to cut for launch, but should make it in soon! You'll have the ability on the list page to give us your site/domain and we'll tell you if you already rank anywhere on page 1 for the keywords on your list.
Thanks for the great feedback and suggestions!
Hi Rand, thanks for responding. Ok, so to sum up, these would be must haves for local markets, in my case The Netherlands:
Some should haves:
More things I thought about, we always use these sources when doing manual keyword research:
The way I see it, we should input one or multiple seed keywords, URL and competitor URLs, and Moz should provide all the above data :)
One other feature in particular that I'm missing is that, like I said, a business usually has multiple seed keywords. The way ALL keywords tools work, is that we need to input 1 keyword and the tool returns some results. The problem is that we need to do this over and over again and IF we are able to input multiple keywords, the tool treats them as if they belong together (like KWP).
In an ideal world, IMO, we could input, say, 10 keywords and Moz would give separate results for all of them, save them automatically so we could check them out one 'theme' at a time.
Thanks!
This can be deleted.
I look forward to exploring with the new tool. I like how Moz are evolving as Google & search in general do likewise.
We will have to try this tool, it seems like a great alternative to Google adwords
Awesome Job Thanks @Rand
impressive features and presentations! thanks!
The word Explorer proveine to know more thoroughly this unique and necessary tool that every day human being is given.
Such a great tool to find the right combination of keyword as per products or topic. Highly appreciated you and your team work. I am also going to publish a post about this NEW KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOL Designed by MOZ ;) and will try to describe about the unique features of this tool.
Wow Rand, those are really good news for the SEO world! I can't wait to see how this tool evolves. Personally, I think that the best part is that it's gonna be a tool made by and for the public (obviously with an amazing technique group), and it's always nice to see how companies like MOZ care about us.
Keyword Explorer great and helpful tool. thanks for sharing Rand :)
Thanks for sharing this informative post.. This tool will be useful to us..
Cool!!!
Cheers to Moz ......thanks for sharing Rand :)
(removed link)