Google Keyword Planner Alternative: Why Do We Need It Now?
Google Keyword Planner is a tool each of you is using, probably.
Apparently, about one month ago in August, Google made significant changes to it. The changes caused an outcry among SEO professionals and website masters since their keyword research got affected in a very negative way. My workflow was affected, too, and now I am looking for decent free alternatives to Google Keyword Planner.
Advertisers with lower monthly spend may see a limited data view in the Keyword Planner. For example, you may see values such as 0, 1-100, 100-1K, 1K-10K, 10K-100K, 100K-1M, 1M+ in the average monthly searches column. In addition, other advertisers may trigger the limited data view by reaching a limit on the number of searches for search volume data.
Thus said, Google changed the keyword volume information by combining the volumes of similar terms for accounts that don’t advertise much. The change made the result to be much less helpful for people doing keyword research.
I guess if you’re doing keyword research, you probably don’t have any ads running on your account. So you end up with inaccurate and not very useful information.
This is how it looks now:
You are no longer able to see individual estimates and it prevents you from understanding which of those has the highest volume and which the lowest. It makes it very hard to choose which keywords to target based on keyword volume. It’s also very misleading by making you think that the search volume is higher than it is in reality.
Here is an example.
As you can see, both “keyword research” and “google keywords” show the same volume range in Keyword Planner.
Meanwhile, if we check it in one of the tools I will talk below (Keywords Everywhere plugin), we will see that the actual volumes differ by two times!
In this case, Keyword Planner gives very misleading results that are actually just plain useless.
As you could read above, Google said the change happened for accounts that don’t advertise much. I guess if you’re doing keyword research, you probably don’t have any ads running on your account.
I think that in the future it will get even worse. My guess is that Google will eventually stop showing these ranges at all to the users who do not want to spend a certain amount of money on Adwords.
Apart from that, the change impacted tools that use the Google Keyword Planner as a data source, like Long Tail Pro.
In addition, it looks like new accounts that had never used Keyword Planner or AdWords before won’t be able to easily access the tool without providing some kind of payment info.
I tried to access the Planner from a Google account that had never used it (or AdWords) and I couldn’t. After going to the Google Planner URL, I was redirected to the AdWords website. On that page, I had to setup an AdWords campaign, provide advertising keywords, then provide my payment info… this was the step where I gave up.
No matter how I tried to access Keyword Planner, I ended up in the same setup process as at the beginning.
What to do? Well, we can use alternatives to Keyword Planner and luckily for us, there are quite a few of them that are free.
Google Keyword Planner Alternative: 3 Free Tools
Hehe I like how it sounds: “three free” 😀 So yeah let’s take a look at them.
Ubersuggest
This is an online keyword suggestion tool that is well known for its reliable data and ease of use. Also, it is totally free!
I like Ubersuggest the best so far. However, its downsides may eventually make me to go to a better tool, which won’t be free, probably.
Pros:
comprehensive keyword search that gives a lot of nicely organized results
shows the monthly search volume and CPC for suggested keywords
possible to filter by the ending of suggested keywords
Cons:
does not show competition, ranking, or other advanced SEO metrics
hard to filter out keywords that have zero volume
lack of professional metrics makes it less suitable for a serious keyword research
This is a professional online keyword research tool that works on a freemium model. I think that about 10 requests per day are free.
If making 10 requests is enough for you that you will be very satisfied with the tool.
Pros:
shows the monthly search volume, CPC, trends and much more
shows keyword difficulty (how difficult it would be to rank a keyword in organic search)
possibility to filter suggested phrases
Cons:
free plan has limitations in terms of the amount of data to show and the number of searches
Try it yourself:
Final Thoughts
So yeah, Google blows us up once again.
I really liked Keyword Planner and am disappointed to see degraded.
But what can we do? Accept and adapt. That’s why I looked into Google Keyword Planner alternative and found those three tools that can provide the necessary info without charge.
I think I will be using Ubersuggest in combination with the Keywords Everywhere plugin (to quickly see the keyword volume) and Google Trends (to estimate the volume distribution in time.) Google Trends is not super good when it comes to investigating keywords but it can give you some idea about seasonality.
If I need something more serious, I think I will go with SEMRush. Their paid plans are not cheap but they are chock-full of great features that are much more than just plain keyword research.
What do you think guys? Do you have a favorite tool you use instead of Keyword Planner? Tell me in the comments!
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