Ubersuggest: 3 Steps to Quickly Increase SEO Traffic

Contrary to what its name promises, Ubersuggest probably won’t recommend you a reliable Uber driver (or maybe it will if you do a proper keyword research). What it can do, however, is provide you with a plethora of fresh keyword ideas.

It’s popular, it’s uber-cool, and all of its features are completely free.

What is Ubersuggest?

For a bunch of bloggers and marketers out there, Ubersuggest is one of the favorite free keyword research tools. Short of keyword ideas? In just a few clicks, this tool will provide you with hundreds of keyword suggestions, from head terms to long tail and LSI keywords.

ubersuggest logo

At first glance, its name and interface suggest something of supreme quality. Here is the dictionary entry of the prefix ‘uber’ (or ‘über’, as the Germans would originally spell it):

uber dictionary entry

Does it live up to what its name promises? A few words about the man behind the tool first.

Neil Patel’s Uber SEO Expertise

In 2017, Ubersuggest was acquired by the world-renowned marketing and SEO expert Neil Patel. Recognized by former President Barack Obama as top 100 entrepreneur under 30, Neil is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, Quick Sprout, Crazy Egg, and Hello Bar.

After the acquisition, Neil Patel relaunched it as a part of his website. Ubersuggest was totally revamped and given a new user interface. It’s become more intuitive and user-friendly, while the new interface is easier to navigate and clutter-free.

neil patel tweetThe internet marketing community was skeptical at first – the majority of it thought Ubersuggest would now become an expensive premium subscription tool. Neil Patel, however, has kept it free, and it’s likely to remain so. In addition to the new look and features, Neil’s name has also added some extra credibility to the tool.

When talking about Neil Patel’s expertise, you can also learn how they increased their website lead capture by 500% using LeadQuizzes!

How Does Ubersuggest Work?

On the surface, it’s all pretty straightforward.

First, you go to Ubersuggest and enter a keyword you’d like suggestions for in the search box. We’re going to search for the term ‘online quizzes’.

ubersuggest search 

Then, it gives you an option to choose the source from which to get the results (Web, Image, Shopping, YouTube, News). The source you choose is likely to be your target market as well. We choose ‘Web’ because that’s where most of our content is based. 

ubersuggest source

Next, you can select the language of your search, along with different country variations.

Screen Shot 2018-04-13 at 11.12.40 AM

Finally, hit the ‘Look Up’ button and that’s it – in a few moments, keyword suggestions will start flooding in.

ubersuggest search results

In our example, the term ‘Online Quizzes’ has generated 858 keyword ideas. As you can see above, detailed metrics are not really Ubersuggest’s strong suit, as it offers just some basic metrics like monthly search volume (22200), CPC (cost per click – $0.26), and Adwords competition (0.19).

You can also choose whether to show the suggestions from Google Keyword Planner or Google Suggest (or both). Additionally, you can further refine the results by applying some of the Ubersuggest filters.

So, the stuff on the surface is pretty obvious, but what’s under the hood?

Ubersuggest is based on the similar core principle as many other keyword research tools. In the simplest of terms, it takes the keyword you entered, puts it through Google Search while adding different prefixes and suffixes, and displays the results. Ubersuggest keyword suggestions are by default imported from both Google Keyword Planner and Google Suggest.

How to Use Ubersuggest to Find Profitable Keywords

Above, we’ve shown you how to conduct a basic keyword search using Ubersuggest. And that’s something you would have, no doubt, figured out on your own, without much effort. Now, we’re going to take the game to a somewhat higher level and show you how to actually perform keyword research to find potentially profitable keyword ideas.

1. Get Long-Tail Keyword Suggestions Using Ubersuggest

What exactly are long-tail keywords? These are usually longer (three, four, or more words) and more specific keywords that users are more likely to use when on the verge of making a conversion. These are also some of the most important pages when link building. Some studies have shown that almost 70% of website traffic comes from long-tail keywords.

leadquizzes stats

Remember Neil Patel, the guy behind Ubersuggest? By leveraging long-tail keywords, he managed to generate 20,000 monthly visitors and grow their search traffic by 51% in just 3 months. In Patel’s words, long-tail keywords are how you outrank the competition.

A simple, manual, and time-consuming way to get some long-tail keyword suggestions is to take advantage of Google’s own suggestions feature. Just type your base keyword into the Google search box and wait for the suggestions to appear.

google search

Or save time using Ubersuggest. Since it pulls out keyword ideas from both Google Keyword Planner and Google Suggest, it’ll save you the time and effort of doing the search manually and then looking for the volume data and other metrics in the Keyword Planner.

2. Get LSI Keyword Suggestions Using Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest can also be useful when it comes to obtaining LSI keyword suggestions. What’s LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and why is it important for your SEO strategy? Although it may sound that way, you don’t really need a degree in Computer Sciences to understand the basic concept behind it.

SEMPO defines LSI as an algorithm that ‘uses word associations to help search engines know more accurately what a page is about.’ As search engines cannot naturally process language as human beings do (yet), LSI helps them understand a user’s search intent behind a particular keyword and add context to certain content. What does it mean in practice?

For example, if you search for the word ‘aviator’, the results will display tons of completely unrelated results – from Ray-Ban sunglasses and flying equipment, to the 2004 movie starring DiCaprio. Let’s say your page is about the movie. Search engines will use LSI keywords (like ‘movie’, ‘Leonardo DiCaprio’, ‘drama’, etc.) to add context to your page and show more relevant search results to your visitors.

If you Google your keyword, and then scroll down to the bottom of search results and look at the footer, you’ll often find some additional keyword ideas there. Often, Google will include some LSI keywords there as well.

Screen Shot 2018-04-16 at 2.38.19 PM

Or, you could use Ubersuggest to find the same suggestions (and much more), in a somewhat simpler way, with just one click. Of course, not all the keyword results will be LSI or long-tail keywords, but you should be able to find a bunch of those. By default, Ubersuggest orders the search results alphabetically, so you may have to refine the results a bit in order to find the right keywords for your needs. 

3. Use Ubersuggest in Combination with Other Tools

For the best results, we suggest combining Ubersuggest with other, metrics-richer keyword research tools. One of the best tools to combine with Ubersuggest, and the one we at LeadQuizzes use as well, is Ahrefs. In fact, you may want to find out how we used Ahrefs to grow our SEO by 959% and add $122K in sales in just one year!

ahrefs keyword overview

One of its features we find the most useful is the Keyword Difficulty analysis. It shows how difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword and it is useful to determine whether it’s worth attempting to rank for a particular keyword or how much effort it’s going to require to do it.

We’ve already covered the basics of performing an Ubersuggest search above. So, after choosing your base keyword (it can be your product type or category, your niche, etc), complete those basic steps again, hit ‘Look Up’, and you’ll get a results page with your Ubersuggest keyword suggestions. It is a list of related keywords ideas, along with some basic metrics.

As you can see, there are hundreds of keyword ideas to choose from. But not all are relevant to your business. Ideally, you would like to pick out keywords that satisfy at least some of the following criteria:

  • Medium or high search volume
  • Low keyword difficulty
  • Low Adwords competition
  • Matches the user’s search intent
  • Good CPC (for Adsense)

Out of these five metrics, three can be found in Ubersuggest. You’ll find the keyword difficulty score in Ahrefs (or similar paid tools), while you’ll need to rely on your own deduction skills to determine the user’s search intent. Of course, in this case, you could probably do everything using a paid tool such as Ahrefs, but you may prefer Ubersuggest’s simplicity and accessibility (in addition to its sleek user interface).

Ubersuggest vs. Google Keyword Planner

Both are free. Both do what they advertise. Which one should you choose?

ubersuggest vs. google keyword planner

The main difference may be in the fact that Google Keyword Planner is more focused on paid search results, while Ubersuggest may provide you with keyword suggestions more relevant to your search. When it comes to the actual metrics, there has been some discussion in relation to the unreliability of Google search volume numbers and there are some indications that Google Keyword Planner has been restricting the amount of data it shows about the individual keywords.

Although the volume data in Ubersuggest is actually pulled out from Google Keyword Planner, its simpler, and more user-friendly, interface makes it more accessible. That’s probably the main reason a lot of people actually prefer Ubersuggest over Google’s tool.

Also, if you’re looking for some quick, casual, on-the-go keyword research, Ubersuggest comes in handy, as it doesn’t require registration or log-in. Just type in your query and hit the search button.

As both Ubersuggest and Keyword Planner are free to use and based on the same keyword database, the choice ultimately comes down to the user experience. So, we recommend that you try out both and see which one suits you better. Of course, if you’re a more advanced user, you should consider some of the paid options.

While the industry giants like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz, offer a wide range of additional features, they do come at a price. Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect Ubersuggest to compete with those, in terms of comprehensiveness of data and features, but then again, it still offers many of the same features, completely free.

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