Moz Keyword Explorer – A New Keyword Planner Alternative

If you’re looking for an Adwords Keyword Planner Alternative then look no further than the Moz Keyword Explorer. It’s a new product just released from Moz and it looks great.

Best of all it free to use if you only have a few keyword searches you need to complete per day.

A New Keyword Planner Alternative

If you’ve been using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner, then first let me say you’ve got way more patience than me and secondly, you now have a new keyword planner alternative. Yay!

So let’s see how it rates.

The Moz Keyword Explorer

As with all products from Moz, they’re well-polished and very user-friendly. In fact, when you first visit the Moz Keyword Explorer page, you immediately see a tutorial video playing under the search bar.

A nice touch indeed.

After entering a keyword or phrase the results are returned very quickly, and I only waited a few seconds for the results page to appear. (It’s possible that Moz is caching data to improve the speed)

In this example, I entered a search term of ‘yoga’.

The overview section quickly indicates what opportunities lie for this search term. Although it’s important to know the volume and difficulty for the keyword, it’s the last figure that’s worth focusing on.

Moz calculates the ‘Potential’ for the search term, and bases this figure on the results for Volume, Difficulty and Opportunity.

With a higher number meaning more opportunity for Search Engine Optimization.

Next, we have the Keyword Suggestions and you can easily expand the list for the full 1000 results. These results can then be sorted or drilled down further.

The volumes aren’t the exact numbers you might see from Adwords, but Moz assures us the data is 95% accurate.

NB: When performing keyword research a range is usually suitable anyway.

Alongside the Keyword Suggestions is the Search Engine results, so you can see the websites that are currently ranking for these terms. This list can also be expanded.

Finally, we have the Mentions or citations for the search results. These are handy if you’re looking at opportunities for backlinks, but as I’ve already demonstrated, these aren’t as useful as they once were.

So that’s the interface in a nutshell, and sometimes simple is better.

And if you’ve used the Adwords Keyword Planner before, you’ll appreciate the improvements.

Here’s a quick video showing the Moz Keyword Explorer in action…

So if you’re looking for an Adwords Keyword Planner Alternative, then this Moz  product is perfect for low volume users. However, if you need to do more than 5 searches a day, the cost of the full product, warrants a comparison of the alternatives.

Moz Keyword Explorer vs Long Tail Pro

On first impressions, the Moz Keyword Explorer tool seemed like a real winner and had the potential to replace my Long Tail Pro keyword tool, but then I looked at the subscription costs. Whoa back!!!

Clearly the Moz keyword tool is targetted at agencies who work with high volumes and can afford high overhead costs. Starting at $600/yr doesn’t make this product viable for the beginner blogger who’s just trying to start out on the right foot.

You should definitely use the free keyword searches available to you, but when you’re wanting more daily searches, then take the free 10 day trial of Long Tail Pro before jumping into a long-term commitment with the Moz Keyword Explorer.

Long Tail Pro has unlimited searches, and right now you get the Long Tail Pro Platinum version for the same low cost as the Standard version. Bargain!

I use my keyword research tool daily and sometimes I’m bringing back a number of results, especially when working with clients or starting new blogs, so I’m not planning on switching anytime soon.

If you’ve tried the Moz Keyword Explorer, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Feel free to leave them in the comments below.