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Keyword research
What a search returns, what each option costs, and how to read difficulty and intent without kidding yourself.
A research run takes one or more seed phrases and returns related keywords with the numbers you need to decide whether a page is worth writing.
What comes back
| Column | What it is | How much to trust it |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | Average monthly searches in the chosen market | Directionally right; treat 1,600 and 1,900 as the same number |
| CPC | What advertisers pay per click | A good proxy for commercial value |
| Difficulty | 0–100, how hard the top 10 looks | Ours, not the vendor's — see below |
| Intent | Informational, commercial, transactional, navigational | Usually right, occasionally comic |
What it costs
Keyword research is one of the things credits pay for. Cost is a base charge for the call plus a per-row charge, and the estimate is on the search button before you press it.
| Rows | Credits |
|---|---|
| 100 | 12 |
| 250 | 21 |
| 500 | 36 |
| 1,000 | 66 |
The default is 250 because it is nearly always enough, and because defaulting to 1,000 would make us more money per search while making your list worse.
Your plan's monthly research allowance covers this — Starter's 400 credits is roughly twenty default searches — and anything past the allowance comes from a credit pack you buy outright. Rank tracking is separate and never costs credits.
Options that change the price
Behind More options:
- Rows — as above. The button updates as you change it.
- Market — country and language. Some markets support the full metric set; the ones that do not are flagged in the picker and return rows without difficulty or intent.
- Real clickstream volumes — measured rather than modelled search volumes. More accurate, and exactly twice the price. Off by default, and the multiplier is written next to the toggle rather than buried in a pricing page.
Reading difficulty honestly
Difficulty is a 0–100 score with three bands:
- 0–29, easy — a good page with a few relevant links has a real chance
- 30–69, medium — you need genuine topical authority or a distinctly better page
- 70–100, hard — plan for months, not weeks, and only if the phrase is worth it
That banding is ours. Every tool computes difficulty differently, nobody publishes their formula, and a "42" here is not a "42" somewhere else. Use it to rank your own candidates against each other, not to compare notes across tools.
Markets without full metrics
Some country and language pairs do not support the vendor's full metric endpoints. Those markets still return keywords and volumes, but difficulty and intent come back empty rather than guessed. Empty is the honest answer; a fabricated number that looks like data is worse than a blank cell.
Saving results
Saving costs nothing and is what turns a search into work you can come back to. A saved keyword is one row per phrase per market, so the same phrase saved for the UK and the US is two rows with two sets of numbers — which is correct, because they are two different things.
Next: rank tracking.