Keyword Research

Keyword Research turns a few seed keywords into a list of ideas with search volume, cost per click, difficulty and search intent. It groups close variants the way Google counts them, looks up volume for a single city or region, and keeps the keywords you choose in a saved list with tags. It runs on your own DataForSEO account and is available on every plan.

Before you start

1. In App Settings → Backlinks, under Backlink APIs, enter your DataForSEO Login and DataForSEO Password and click Save Settings.
2. Open Rankings & Visibility → Keyword Research in the sidebar. The Essentials view hides it: click Show all tools at the bottom of the sidebar, or press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on a Mac) and type Keyword Research.

Finding keywords

1. On the Find keywords tab, type up to 20 Seed keywords, separated by commas.
2. Pick the Country. It starts from your audited site’s domain ending, or the United States, and fills in the Language, which you can change.
3. Choose how many Ideas to get: 100, 200 or 500.
4. Click Find keywords.

The results are sorted by volume, highest first:

A search costs about $0.02 for 100 ideas, $0.04 for 200 and $0.07 for 500 at DataForSEO’s prices in October 2026. Results are kept for 24 hours, so running the same search again within a day costs nothing.

Close variants

Google reports one volume for close variants, such as singular and plural forms. With Group close variants on (the default), each group gets one row with the largest volume in the group, not a sum, and the variants are listed under it. Adding their volumes together would count the same searches several times. To save a single variant, untick Group close variants first.

Volume for a city or region

1. After a search, start typing a place in Volume for a city or region and pick it from the list. The places come from Google Ads for the chosen country.
2. Click Get city volume.

A new column, named after the place, shows each keyword’s average monthly volume there. One lookup covers every keyword in the results and costs about $0.09. Google Ads cannot look up keywords longer than 80 characters or 10 words; those are skipped and counted in the status line.

Local volume helps when your customers are in one place: a keyword with modest national volume can still be the one people search in your city.

Saved keywords and tags

1. Tick the keywords you want, type Tags (comma-separated, for example a client name or a topic) and click Save selected.
2. Open the Saved keywords tab to see the list. Filter it with Tag, change a keyword’s tags with edit, and remove one with ×.

A saved keyword keeps its volume, CPC, difficulty, intent and, if you looked it up, its city volume. Saving the same keyword for the same country again updates its numbers and adds the new tags. A keyword can have up to 10 tags of up to 40 characters.

CSV exports every result of the current search; the Saved keywords tab exports the whole saved list with its tags. Connected AI assistants can read your saved keywords over MCP. To follow a keyword’s Google position over time, add it to the Rank Tracker.

Troubleshooting

Next: Local geo-grid for Google Maps.