The goal of any online business is to convert as much as possible. That can only be accomplished by having a solid website and optimized content. However, in order to rank high and drive lots of organic traffic, you first need to perform keyword research.

Keyword Research will allow you to figure out your website’s mission, and the best keywords to rank for. This can be either performed manually or by using certain tools to make it easier. Although the three paid keyword research tools we’re showcasing in this article are not the cheapest, they will generate better results, putting you on top of your SEO game.

This guide was first published in 2019 and we keep it current, because the tools have aged better than the advice around them. All three are still on the market, but the job has changed: results pages are now crowded with AI summaries, video carousels and forum threads, and every vendor below has reshuffled its plans and limits at least once. So the sections that follow cover two things — what each tool does, and what to actually do with the numbers it hands you.

Before you open a tool: a six-step keyword research process

A keyword tool is only as good as the process wrapped around it. Run these six steps in order and the reports below stop being a wall of numbers and start being a content plan.

Define the job of the page. Write one sentence describing who the page is for and what they should be able to do after reading it. If you cannot write that sentence, no keyword will rescue the page.
Collect seed terms without a tool. Pull 10 to 20 starting phrases from sales notes, support tickets, your on-site search log and the questions clients ask on calls. These are the words buyers actually use, and they are usually not the words the industry uses.
Expand every seed. Feed the seeds into your tool of choice and export matching terms, related terms and question variants. Aim for breadth here; filtering comes later. A first-pass list of several thousand rows is normal.
Group by intent, not by wording. “cheap running shoes” and “running shoes under 100” are the same job, so they belong to the same page. The fastest sanity check costs nothing: search both phrases and compare the top ten results. If the same URLs appear in both, one page can serve both.
Score each group for business value. Give every cluster a 0 to 3 score for how directly it leads to a sale — a 3 is someone comparing providers, a 0 is someone doing background reading. Publish across the whole range, but never let the zeros take over the calendar.
Check whether you can realistically win. Look at who ranks today: their authority, the depth of their pages, and whether the results are dominated by marketplaces, large publishers or forums. If page one is eight national brands and a discussion thread, spend the effort somewhere else this quarter.

Only after step six does the price of a tool matter. The three below differ mainly in how much of steps three to six they do for you.

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

If you’re willing to invest some money in developing your website, Ahrefs is the best option for you. Ahrefs has one of the most extensive keyword research tools, their explorer providing far more than just keyword ideas.

The Explorer gives thousands of keyword suggestions from ten different search engines, supporting most countries. You can get accurate data regarding each keyword. Search volumes and even estimates of click-through-rates will help you pick the best keyword for your goals.

You can also access SERP and SEO Metrics, being able to better understand your competition. The Ahrefs Keywords Explorer will give you accurate difficulty scores to better find a suiting term for your website’s authority. Unique from this point of view, the explorer gives you an estimate of the number of backlinks needed to rank in the top ten SERP positions.

Although slightly pricier, the Ahrefs tool comes with a lot more than just the Keywords Explorer. When this article was first published, the entry plan started at $99 a month; the plans, limits and credit allowances have been restructured several times since, so check the current pricing page before you budget. Whatever the tier, a single membership gives you access to a package of multiple other tools that can improve your SEO initiative. Perform keyword research, study your competition, set up alerts, and get data about your site and content, all in one place.

Where it earns its keep is in the reports most people never open. A short checklist for getting more out of it:

Start in Matching terms, then switch to the questions view. Questions are where you find the sub-headings for a page you have already planned, rather than ideas for ten more pages you will never write.
Read traffic potential before search volume. Volume is what one phrase gets; traffic potential estimates what the whole page could get if it ranked, because the top result usually ranks for hundreds of variations. A term with modest volume can sit inside a topic worth many times that.
Watch the clicks metric. A growing share of searches end without anyone clicking a result, because the answer is on the results page. A high-volume term with few clicks is a vanity target.
Look down the top ten for the weakest domain rating. One genuinely weak page in the top ten tells you more about your chances than any single difficulty score.
Open the SERP overview before you commit. Look at what type of page ranks — product, comparison, tutorial, forum. Publishing the wrong format for the intent is the most common reason a well-optimized page never moves.
Pair it with the content gap report. Feed in three competitors and see which terms they all rank for and you do not. That list is usually more useful than any brainstorm.

A worked example. Say you sell project management software to architecture practices. The seed “project management for architects” returns the obvious head term, but the questions view surfaces the practical worries behind it — how to track drawing revisions, how to bill by RIBA stage, how to share files with contractors. The head term becomes one product page; the questions become a cluster of supporting articles that link to it. The parent topic column tells you which of those questions deserve their own page and which are simply sub-headings on a bigger one.

Jaaxy

Jaaxy, although following a rather simple concept, can provide you with some important statistics regarding keyword research. The tool will give you a huge number of keyword suggestions based on your needs, and many other insights.

You can easily discover the most profitable niches that suit your field of expertise. Millions of niches with a low competition level are still buried on the internet. Through Brainstorm and Affiliate Search features you will be able to get valuable insight into these new niches.

You can spy your competitors to understand more about their websites and rankings. Moreover, the SiteRank feature from Jaaxy will allow you to track all of your SERP rankings, in one place. Another useful feature of Jaaxy is the Quoted Search Result. QSR tells you the total number of sites trying to rank for the same keyword as you.

QSR is the reason people keep the subscription. It is a count of pages competing for the exact phrase, so it answers a different question from a difficulty score: not “how strong is the competition” but “how many people have even bothered”. On a young site with few backlinks, a low QSR combined with a sensible traffic estimate is one of the few realistic openings you have. Use it as a shortlist filter, then confirm by looking at the actual results page — a low QSR is meaningless if the pages that do rank are institutional sites nobody will outrank.

The Pro version has historically started at $49 a month, providing you with the ideal tools to start a new website. There is also a free entry point that lets you run a limited number of keyword searches — 30 when this article was first written — so you can test Jaaxy before buying anything.

Whichever tool you settle on, pick one as your reference for planning and stay with it, then let Google Search Console be the referee once the page is live and collecting real impressions. Estimates are for deciding what to write; your own impression data is what tells you whether the decision worked.

SECockpit

SECockpit is the ideal tool for SEO professionals that want to make the most out of their websites. The number of features this tool has might be overwhelming at first but, very helpful when it comes to ranking high in SERP.

The tool takes a huge number of keywords and distills the list down to only the most profitable ones. The list comes along with a large number of data regarding the keyword and your competition.

That filtering is the whole point of it. It leans on Google’s own keyword data — served today through Keyword Planner inside Google Ads, the platform that used to be called AdWords — and layers its own competition analysis and filters on top. If you work through keyword lists in the thousands, the practical workflow is: import the raw list, build a saved filter that reflects what winnable looks like for the site in question, and let the tool cut the list down before a human ever reads it. Keep a separate filter preset per client, because the threshold that makes sense for an established brand will throw away everything usable for a six-month-old site.

The pricing, although similar to the other tools, comes with more variations. At the time of the original review you could get a personal account for as low as $49 a month, even if it came with many limitations, while the pro account at $99 had the best price-to-performance ratio. A short free trial is normally available.

Side-by-side comparison

Tool	Best suited to	Standout feature	Learning curve	Free access
Ahrefs Keywords Explorer	Agencies and businesses that also need backlink, competitor and rank tracking data	Traffic potential and parent topic, plus an estimate of the backlinks needed to reach the top ten	Moderate	Limited free tools; full data needs a paid plan
Jaaxy	Affiliate marketers and niche site builders hunting long-tail openings	QSR, a direct count of pages competing for the exact phrase	Low	A small number of free searches
SECockpit	SEO professionals processing very large keyword lists	Aggressive filtering that distills thousands of keywords into a shortlist	Steep at first	Short free trial

Prices move and feature sets move faster, so treat the table as a starting point for a shortlist rather than a spec sheet. Every one of these tools offers some form of trial or entry tier; run the same three seed keywords through each of them and see which output you can act on fastest.

Which one should you choose?

You run or manage several sites and also need link data. Ahrefs. The keyword tool alone is arguably not worth the subscription; the combination of keywords, backlinks, content gap and rank tracking in one login is.
You are building a content site on a small budget. Jaaxy. Its long-tail suggestions and QSR filter are built for exactly the situation where you have no authority yet and need terms nobody is fighting over.
You do research for clients at volume. SECockpit. The setup cost in learning the filters pays back the first time you have to turn 5,000 raw keywords into a defensible shortlist in an afternoon.
You are not sure yet. Start with Google Search Console and Keyword Planner, work through the six steps above by hand for one page, and buy a tool when the manual version becomes the bottleneck. Plenty of sites rank without ever paying for keyword data.

The metrics that matter — and the ones that mislead

Search volume is an average estimate, not a forecast. It is rounded, it is often seasonal, and it says nothing about whether those searchers will click anything at all.
Keyword difficulty is a model, not a fact. Each vendor calculates it differently, mostly from the backlink profiles of the current top ten. It is a sorting aid, never a verdict.
Clicks and click-through rate matter more every year. Answers shown directly on the results page absorb a share of demand, so a term with high volume and low clicks is worth less than the raw number suggests.
Intent beats both. The format of the pages already ranking tells you what Google believes the searcher wants. Match it or accept that you are arguing with the whole results page.
Business value is the metric nobody exports. A term that brings ten qualified buyers is worth more than one that brings a thousand students.
Seasonality is easy to miss in an annual average. Google Trends will show you in seconds whether demand is flat, rising or concentrated in two months of the year.

Free data to use alongside a paid tool

Google Search Console. The only source of real data about your own site. Two reliable opportunities live in the Performance report: queries with impressions but a poor click-through rate, which usually need a better title and description rather than more content, and queries sitting in positions five to fifteen, which are often one round of improvements away from the top of page one.
Keyword Planner in Google Ads. Built for advertisers, but the source most tools ultimately draw on. Ranges get vague without an active campaign, yet it remains useful for spotting commercial terms and comparing relative demand.
Google Trends. For seasonality, rising terms and comparing two phrasings of the same idea.
Bing Webmaster Tools. Free keyword research data and a second opinion on your own impressions, which is more useful than it used to be now that other assistants and answer engines lean on that index.
Your own inputs. On-site search logs, the subject lines of support emails and the first ninety seconds of any sales call will give you phrasing no tool can generate, because it has not been searched enough to register anywhere.

Common keyword research mistakes

One keyword, one page, over and over. Building near-identical pages for “SEO agency Bucharest” and “SEO company Bucharest” splits your own signals. One page, both phrases.
Sorting by volume and starting at the top. The biggest term is where every competitor with a bigger budget already lives.
Ignoring what already ranks. If page one is nine product listings, an essay will not break in, no matter how good it is.
Treating the list as permanent. Demand shifts, competitors publish, results pages get new features. A list is a snapshot.
Researching keywords with no plan to publish. A spreadsheet with 4,000 rows and no editorial calendar has produced exactly nothing.
Forgetting the pages you already have. Updating and consolidating existing content usually beats a new article, and Search Console tells you which pages are close.

Frequently asked questions

Do I really need a paid keyword research tool?

Not to start. Search Console, Keyword Planner, Trends and a careful look at the actual results pages will carry a small site a long way. You need a paid tool when you are making decisions often enough that manual research costs more in hours than the subscription costs in money — typically when you manage several sites, or you publish weekly and need to prioritize.

How many keywords should one page target?

One intent, many phrasings. A well-built page will pick up dozens or hundreds of related queries on its own, so the useful question is not how many keywords you assign but whether every phrase in the group could be answered by the same page without the reader feeling redirected.

Is keyword difficulty comparable between tools?

No. Each vendor uses its own formula and its own index, so a 30 in one tool is not a 30 in another. Use difficulty to rank keywords against each other inside a single tool, and use the actual results page to decide whether to commit.

How often should keyword research be redone?

A full refresh once or twice a year is enough for most sites, with a monthly look at Search Console to catch queries you are picking up accidentally. Do an unscheduled refresh whenever you launch a product, enter a new market, or notice a page dropping for terms it used to own.

Does keyword research still matter when so many answers appear on the results page itself?

It matters more, but the target moves. Purely informational definitions are increasingly answered without a click, so the terms worth writing for are the ones where the reader still needs your page: comparisons, pricing, local intent, anything requiring judgement or a decision. Keyword research is how you tell those two categories apart before you spend a week writing.

What about keywords with no recorded search volume?

Zero-volume does not mean zero demand; it means demand below the reporting threshold. Long, specific questions are often exactly the ones your best-qualified visitors type. Cover them as sections within a larger page rather than as standalone articles, and let the page collect the whole family of variations.

Conclusion

Keyword Research is an essential phase in the creation of any website that ranks. Without it, you might never reach your desired audience. The three paid keyword research tools mentioned above can help you find effective ranking terms faster and easier.

Just remember that the tool is the cheap part. What decides whether the research turns into traffic is the process around it: honest seed terms, grouping by intent, an honest look at who already ranks, and the discipline to publish and then improve. If you would rather hand that cycle to someone else, it is exactly what our SEO services are built around.

3 Best Paid Keyword Research Tools in 2019