Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer: Discover Keyword Ideas

Knowing which keywords are important to your domain is essential to driving growth. To this end, Ahrefs offers a complete suite of keyword research tools. They’ve also included innovative metrics that can help you make better decisions. Clickstream data, for example, allows you to better understand how users interact with relevant search engine results pages. To top it all off, Ahrefs’ data comes from 10 major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Amazon.

The most complete keyword research tool on the market

Keywords Explorer runs on the world's largest third-party database of search queries.

• Thousands of Keyword Suggestions

  Never run out of keyword ideas. Keywords Explorer runs on a huge database of more than 7 billion keywords, updated with fresh data every month.

• 171 countries supported

  Not from the U.S? No problem. Keywords Explorer gives you data for 171 countries.

• 10 Different Search Engines

  Google isn’t the only search engine around. By processing large amounts of clickstream data, we can estimate keyword volumes for places like YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Baidu, etc.

• Accurate Search Volumes

  We use clickstream data to refine our search volumes on a monthly basis, ensuring they're always up to date.

• Keyword Difficulty Score

  Find the “low-hanging fruit” among your keyword ideas. Our KD score calculates how hard it will be to rank for your keyword based on the current top-ranking pages.

• “Clicks” Metric

  A high search volume doesn’t mean people click on the search results. Ahrefs is the only tool that shows the estimated number of clicks for your keywords.

• See the “Parent Topic” for your target keyword

  A single page can rank for hundreds of closely-related keywords. Parent Topic determines if you can rank for your target keyword while targeting a more general topic on your page instead.

• Advanced SEO Metrics

  Get SEO metrics no other tool will show you: Return Rate, Clicks per search, % of clicks, % of paid clicks, and more!

• SERP Overview & Positions History

  Get a quick look at the SEO metrics and ranking history of the top-ranking pages. Assess the SERPs and understand why these pages rank as they do.

• Keywords Lists

  Save and segment keywords into lists for future reference.

Get thousands of keyword ideas with accurate search volume numbers

Enter up to 10,000 keywords in one go and you'll see the search volumes for these keywords.

Clickstream data allows us to refine our search volume numbers every month, ensuring that the metric is always accurate and up-to-date.

When entering multiple keywords, Keywords Explorer will take 10 of the most popular keywords and generate thousands of ideas in six different ways:

• Phrase match — phrases that contain your target keyword.

• Having same terms — ideas that contain all the terms in your target keyword (in any order).

• Also rank for — keywords for which the top-ranking pages also rank for.

• Search suggestions — queries suggested via ‘autocomplete’ when searching for your target keyword.

• Newly discovered — search queries that were added to our database recently.

• Questions — phrased as a question.

Get keyword ideas for ten different search engines, including YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yandex, Baidu…

Google is not the only search engine around; it’s merely the largest. With clickstream data, we can estimate the popularity of search queries in nine other search engines:

Whether you're marketing on YouTube, Amazon, Bing or other search engines, you now have a source of reliable keyword data you can trust.

Easily find and prioritize the best keywords using a variety of filters

Filter by search volume, Keyword Difficulty, the presence of SERP features in the search results, and more.

Check “Keyword Difficulty” score

Keywords Explorer helps you determine how hard it would be to rank in the top 10 search results for a given keyword. It does this by calculating a Keyword Difficulty score from 1 to 100, with 100 being the hardest.

The Keyword Difficulty score is based on a weighted average of the number of referring domains to the top 10 search results.

Use advanced metrics for deeper insights

Keywords Explorer helps you determine how hard it would be to rank in the top 10 search results for a given keyword. It does this by calculating a Keyword Difficulty score from 1 to 100, with 100 being the hardest.

• Clicks — shows the average monthly number of clicks on the search results for your target keyword.

• Clicks Per Search — shows how many different search results people click, on average, after searching for this keyword.

• % of Clicks — shows what percentage of searches for a given keyword result in clicks on the search results.

• % of Paid Clicks vs Organic Clicks — shows how clicks on the search results are distributed between paid and organic results.

• Return Rate — a unique Ahrefs metric that compares which keyword gets more repeat searches using a relative scale.

Final Verdict

Ahrefs boasts a number of powerful features that help set it apart, including a proprietary web crawler second only to Google in size and speed. While price points are broadly aligned with those of similar products, best-in-class link analysis, powerful research tools, and knowledgeable user support help make Ahrefs one of the best options for understanding and improving your domain’s online presence.