How to Do Keyword Research With Ubersuggest: Every Report, Limit and a 7-Step Workflow

What Ubersuggest's keyword research covers

Keyword research is the core of Ubersuggest, and it is spread across several tools under one Keyword Research menu. Keyword Overview sizes up a single term. Keyword Ideas turns a seed into hundreds of variations. Bulk Analysis scores a list you already have, Keyword Visualization draws the ideas as a map, Keyword Lists store what you find, and AI Prompt Ideas shows what people ask AI tools. Every idea carries search volume, intent, SEO difficulty and paid data. The app's own advice is to start with Keyword Ideas and branch out from there. That is sound.

Know the budget before the first search, because every keyword search counts against your daily reports: 3 on Free, 150 on Individual, 300 on Business and 900 on Enterprise ^[1]. A content planner running 40 searches a day fits Individual easily. A team of five sharing Business averages 60 each, which gets tight during a big planning sprint. Since up to three seeds fit in one search, grouping them saves two reports every time. Extra searches come in blocks of 500 for $5 a month. Credits, which pay for refreshes, are a separate budget covered further down.

Sizing up a single keyword

Keyword Overview is the one-page report for one term. It shows search volume for the five most relevant locations, cost per click, paid difficulty and SEO difficulty, then adds a 12-month volume graph, searcher age ranges, organic click data and a search intent funnel. The volume graph compares desktop and mobile searches over the last 12 months, and it is stacked, so the top line is the combined total. Read the gap between the lines, not the top line, to see how much demand comes from phones.

The location breakdown lists global volume and the top five countries, each with its share of the total. The help center's example is a keyword that is hard to rank for in the US but moderate in Japan, which suggests starting with Japan. Check it first. AI Keyword Overview layers AI insight over the classic metrics for one keyword in depth: SEO Difficulty, backlinks of the top pages, prompt intent, search intent, an AI summary and content trends. One catch applies. Lifetime users do not get the AI summary, while monthly plans get the full report.

Keyword Ideas, where the real work happens

Enter a keyword, pick a location and a language, and Keyword Ideas returns a list of keywords you can rank for ^[2]. A single seed usually produces hundreds of ideas, depending on how broad the topic is. You can search by keyword, with up to three seeds at a time, or by website, which returns the keywords a domain already suggests. Short, broad seeds uncover more ideas with high search volume, so start there and note the overall volume and the top questions before you narrow. Broad first, narrow later. The report then splits into five tabs, and each finds terms the others miss.

• Suggestions shows the most common terms related to the seed, drawn from Google's autocomplete predictions.
• Related reveals what else the same audience searches for. These terms make good supporting articles in a cluster.
• Questions lists the most frequently asked questions, ranked by search volume and starting with what, why, how, when, where or can.
• Prepositions catches phrases like coffee for runners or coffee without caffeine, which the app calls specific long-tail keywords. Low volume, clear intent.
• Comparisons shows the versus searches people make, a sign they are close to choosing.

Questions target featured snippets and FAQ blocks, and they map directly to how people prompt AI tools. Each one answered in a short section with a clear heading can win a featured snippet that a new site would never win on the head term. Comparison keywords often carry higher CPCs than the head term, because advertisers know the searcher is close to buying. An honest versus page can be worth more to a business blog than five general articles.

Reading the metrics: intent, difficulty and CPC

Intent appears as a single letter, I, N, C or T, for informational, navigational, commercial or transactional. The help center counts search intent among the most critical parts of keyword analysis, and the practical rule is simple: match the page type to the label. A transactional keyword wants a product page, not a blog post. CPC shows what advertisers are willing to pay for a keyword in Google Ads and other paid search, and a high CPC typically signals strong commercial intent. Paid difficulty measures competition among those advertisers. For a business blog, CPC is a proxy for value.

SEO Difficulty estimates how hard it is to reach page one, based on the authority of the pages already ranking. The help center describes 10% as relatively easy and 70% as competitive, and it points newer sites at scores between 0 and 40, leaving higher scores as long-term targets. The score weighs domain authority, backlink profiles and the content relevance of the ranking pages, and Page Authority now feeds the formula too. It changes over time. Because difficulty is a model of the page one competition rather than a measurement of it, the help center still advises a manual look at the current top ten before you commit. Trust, then verify.

Narrowing hundreds of ideas to the ones you can win

Filters turn hundreds of ideas into twenty. You can filter by search volume, CPC, SEO Difficulty, search intent and words to include or exclude, and the global keyword guide adds word count and SERP features. Its targeting advice is to filter for a difficulty of 40 or lower, since those keywords are generally easier to rank for, and to favor keywords of three or more words, which usually convert better.

First Page Potential

First Page Potential does the next cut for you ^[3]. Run a Keyword Ideas search, enter your website in the First Page Potential box, and the list filters itself to the SEO Difficulty range your site should focus on, showing which keywords have the best chance of page one today. The target comes from your site's Domain Authority. Entering a subpage gives the same result, because the whole site is analyzed, and the feature is not available in global searches. For a site with low authority, the suggested ceiling will be low. That is the point.

Check the results page before you write

View Search Results shows each ranking page with its position, estimated monthly visits, domain authority and social shares, and it flags featured snippets and People Also Ask. It covers the first ten results, with more pages and CSV export. If the top ten are giant brands with high authority, skip the keyword. If small sites rank, write a better page. Two minutes per keyword saves months. You can refresh these results to the latest date in Keyword Ideas and Keywords by Traffic, but each click uses two credits, and Keyword Lists show results without letting you refresh them.

Volume versus winnability

The help center's sweet spot is a relevant keyword with a low difficulty score and a search volume of at least 500. The app frames it differently: a term "with 200 monthly searches you can rank for beats one with 20,000 you cannot". Small sites should lean on the second rule. For a site with low authority, a keyword with 300 monthly searches, a difficulty of 25 and clear commercial intent will often bring more customers in its first year than a keyword with 5,000 searches it never reaches. Winnable beats popular.

Global data, zero volume and other quirks

Choose All Locations in Keyword Ideas or Keyword Overview to see worldwide numbers, with up to three keywords per global search. The help center says global volume and CPC come directly from Google rather than from averaging or summing regional figures. The difficulty and updated columns turn gray, though, because SEO Difficulty relies on local ranking data. Global search is for demand. Local search is for competition. Plurals, misspellings and different word orders can also share the same volume, because volume is aggregated statistically, so build one page per intent rather than one per variant.

Some numbers look wrong but follow rules. Regulated medical and financial subjects, drugs, sensitive health topics, weapons, politics, minors and adult content show zero volume by design, and the help center notes that "These restrictions align closely with Google Ads policies". Zero is a policy, not demand. When a keyword seems to be missing altogether, the usual cause is a plan limit on viewing and export, or a low-traffic page with no keyword data. Searching the term directly in Keyword Overview often brings it up.

Visualization, Bulk Analysis and keyword lists

Keyword Visualization draws suggestions as an interactive wheel with the same five branches, plus zoom, rotate and a table view. Hover over a keyword for volume, difficulty, paid difficulty and CPC, and export the wheel as an image. It is rationed: 2 searches a day on Free, 10 on Individual, 20 on Business and unlimited on Enterprise, with limits resetting at midnight UTC. Use it sparingly on lower plans. Bulk Analysis scores a list in one go, returning search volume, SEO Difficulty, paid difficulty and CPC for one location and language, with CSV export. You paste keywords, or upload a CSV on higher plans.

The app page advertises 1,000 keywords at once, but only Enterprise gets that, and on Individual the same 1,000 keywords take 20 batches. Keyword lists let you watch keywords without adding them to rank tracking, in as many named lists as you need, and they hold keywords beyond the CSV export limits. Free users get 3 lists of 30 keywords. There is no automatic clustering, so the help center's method is one list per cluster, filled from Keyword Ideas. Its example splits Healthy Eating into Nutrition Basics, Meal Planning and Recipes, each a pillar page with supporting articles.

A seven-step workflow from seed to tracked keyword

1. Start broad. Enter up to three short seeds in Keyword Ideas and note the overall volume and the top questions.
2. Mine a competitor. In Competitive Research, open Keywords by Traffic and enter a rival's domain to see the keywords it ranks for. Their rankings are your shortlist.
3. Expand. Run the best competitor terms through all five Keyword Ideas tabs and add promising ones to a list as you go.
4. Filter. Keep difficulty at 40 or lower and run First Page Potential with your domain.
5. Check the results page. Open View Search Results for each finalist and drop the ones owned by giant brands.
6. Build a master list. Export the finalists to CSV, copy them or save them to a keyword list, noting the intent and page type each one needs.
7. Track the winners. From the project dashboard, open rank tracking, click Add Keywords and import the master list from CSV.

Rankings update weekly on every plan, and each project tracks 125 to 300 keywords by plan, so track what you publish rather than every idea you found. If you are testing before paying, spread the first steps across a week: broad seeds on day one, a competitor on day two, filters on day three, results pages on day four and the master list on day five. By day seven you can decide on a plan.

Credits, caps and the free plan

Daily searches are one budget. Credits are the other ^[4]. Paid plans get 250, 500 or 1,000 credits a month and free users get 10, replenished on the first day of each month. A difficulty refresh costs 1 credit per keyword and updates SEO Difficulty only, not volume or CPC. Refreshing search results costs 2 credits and refreshing AI prompt data costs 5. On Individual, refreshing difficulty for 100 keywords and search results for 50 keywords would use 200 of the month's 250 credits, leaving room for only 10 AI prompt refreshes before the counter resets. An extra 500 credits cost $5 a month.

Suggestions and exports scale too. Individual gets up to 20,000 keyword suggestions per search, Business 50,000 and Enterprise 100,000, though the pricing page frames the same numbers as suggestions per month. Filters matter more than caps. CSV exports run 2,000 rows on Individual, 5,000 on Business and 10,000 on Enterprise. AI Prompt Ideas, which currently uses ChatGPT prompts, returns 25 to 75 prompts per search by plan. Treat them as long-tail questions; they often become your best FAQ sections.

The free plan is a sampler. It allows 3 searches a day, 10 credits a month and 2 visualization searches, and keywords cannot be added straight to rank tracking or lists from reports. Three seeds a day is a slow research pace, so treat Free as a way to learn the screens rather than to build a content plan. The plan-by-plan math sits in our Ubersuggest pricing guide.

Beyond the app: the Chrome extension, Claude and ChatGPT

The Chrome extension shows volume, CPC, SEO difficulty and paid difficulty under any Google search, with 40 free searches a day, and it works on YouTube and Amazon too. It cannot save keywords. Use it to validate, then move to the app, as our Chrome extension guide explains. Ubersuggest also reaches AI assistants. Its MCP server includes 7 keyword research tools, the ChatGPT app shows keyword research in an interactive table, and the Claude plugin's keyword-research skill returns a prioritized keyword list with volume, difficulty and intent, grouped into clusters.

How it stacks up, and where the pages disagree

Database size is where rivals pull ahead. Ahrefs claims 29B keywords filtered in its database, Semrush includes keyword research on its $139 SEO plan, and Ubersuggest's home page claims a 2.2B+ keyword database. The larger databases matter most in niche and non-English markets. For mainstream English topics, Ubersuggest covers the ground. Other figures on Ubersuggest's own pages measure different things, so rely on the home page.

Other pages disagree on limits. The bulk article and the app page advertise 1,000 keywords at once, though only Enterprise gets 1,000. The difficulty refresh article gives Individual 200 refreshes and Enterprise 700, while the pricing file gives 250 and 1,000 credits ^[1]. When figures clash, trust the pricing file. If a limit decides your plan, ask support by email whether Individual credits are 200 or 250 a month. Keep the reply.

The bottom line

Keyword research is Ubersuggest's strongest feature: five idea tabs, honest difficulty filters, First Page Potential and AI prompt research, at $29 a month. Credits and daily caps are the real limits, so group seeds three to a search and spend refreshes only on keywords you plan to target. For bloggers and small businesses, it is enough. For huge niche databases, Ahrefs goes deeper. For the full verdict on the product, read our Ubersuggest review.