What Is KeySearch? Keyword Research on a Small Budget
By Joris van Huët · KeySearch's own site
The short answer: If you run one site or a handful and want a difficulty score on every keyword without paying for a full suite, KeySearch does that for $24 a month on its Starter plan, with 200 keyword searches a day and 80 tracked keywords (pricing, checked on 24 October 2026). It is built for publishers, bloggers and small businesses; a team auditing a large site outgrows it.
Disclosure: I may earn a commission through some links on this site. It does not change what this page says.
Three checks before you subscribe:
- Annual saves two months. Starter costs 12 x $24 = $288 a year on monthly billing and 12 x $20 = $240 billed annually; Pro is 12 x $48 = $576 against 12 x $40 = $480, per the pricing section checked on 24 October 2026.
- Bring your seed list and three competitor domains. KeySearch pulls the keywords those competitors already rank for, as its competitor keywords guide shows.
- Choose the 80 keywords you will track before the trial ends: the ones tied to a page and a sale, not vanity terms.
What KeySearch does
The centre is keyword research with a difficulty score from 0 to 100, colour-coded into six competition levels, as the competition levels guide explains. Behind each score is a SERP table with Moz Page Authority and Domain Authority, linking domains and estimated traffic for the top 10 results, per the SERP table guide.
Around that sit an Explorer for any domain's keywords, a Competitor Gap tool, an SEO auditor, an AI content assistant and rank tracking. Pro adds Foresight, which the homepage describes as an AI engine that reads your site's niche, authority and rankings and suggests keywords to target.
Who it fits, and who it does not
It fits a founder or small team doing SEO themselves, asking which ideas their site can rank for. The competition levels guide is frank: a site younger than 6 to 12 months should leave "moderate" keywords alone.
It fits less well a larger site. The audit covers 2,000 pages a month on Starter and 5,000 on Pro, per the pricing section, and the homepage FAQ lists team collaboration as a Pro feature.
Prices, checked on 24 October 2026
| Starter | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Billed monthly | $24 a month | $48 a month |
| Billed annually | $20 a month | $40 a month |
| Keyword searches a day | 200 | 500 |
| Tracked keywords | 80 | 200 |
| Audited pages a month | 2,000 | 5,000 |
| Foresight | No | Yes |
USD, from the pricing section of the KeySearch homepage, checked on 24 October 2026. Both plans start with a 7-day free trial that you can cancel at any time, according to the same page.
KeySearch against Keywords Everywhere, Semrush and Ahrefs
Keywords Everywhere answers a smaller question, how much demand a keyword has, inside your browser, from $84 a year for 100,000 credits (pricing, checked on 24 October 2026). KeySearch adds the difficulty score, competitor research and the rank tracker.
Semrush and Ahrefs are the suites above it, from $139 and $129 a month on monthly billing (Semrush pricing, Ahrefs pricing, checked on 24 October 2026), for teams that need larger site audits and AI visibility tracking. KeySearch's homepage calls Semrush overkill for most users, which is a vendor grading its own homework; the useful test is your own keyword list against KeySearch's limits.
Getting started
How to use KeySearch follows its own tutorials from a seed keyword to a tracked shortlist.
FAQ
How does KeySearch score difficulty?
With more than a dozen metrics about the ranking pages, according to the SERP table guide. A separate Links Score uses linking domains alone, and the guide calls it a secondary reference.
Why do some keywords have no score?
The keyword database is far larger than the SERP database, so only keywords checked before have a score. Click the eyeglass icon to run the check; scores older than 30 days appear dulled, per the long-tail guide.
Does KeySearch cover YouTube?
Yes. Both plans include YouTube research, which the homepage describes as finding YouTube keywords and analysing the top-performing videos in your niche.