Hands-On Keyword Insights Review 2024 [Full Content Workflow]

With such drastic changes in Google’s algorithm recently, climbing search engine rankings requires more than just tossing in a few focus keywords.

Topical authority – that ‘expert’ status Google loves – comes from a well-planned keyword clustering strategy.

The Keyword Insights tool is created specifically for that: it aims to pinpoint relevant topic clusters so you can dominate the SERPs in your niche.

In this honest, hands-on review, I’ll share my experience with this AI keyword generator, tell you how it compares to other SEO tools, and share a lot of samples.

AI Keyword Research Tool

Keyword Insights Overview

4.9

• Keyword research with smart AI filtering
• Unique keyword clustering approach
• Lots of useful features around SERPs

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Quick summary of my experience with Keyword Insights

I spend most of my days testing different AI tools, and many of them are just copies of one another, presented in different wrappers.

Keyword Insights is nothing like that – I was impressed on day one of my trial by their (actually effective) smart filtering, stayed for keyword clustering, and I keep discovering new helpful use cases (as they keep adding new features).

Overall, I would recommend everyone who cares about organic SEO traffic to give Keyword Insights a try. If somehow you aren’t impressed, all you lose is a dollar.

Get a 4-day trial for $1

What is Keyword Insights?

Keyword Insights is an advanced keyword research tool that uses AI (artificial intelligence) and SERP (search engine results page) analysis to identify similar keywords and group them into clusters based on user search intent.

This helps you create content strategies that comprehensively cover specific topics, establishing your website as an industry authority to both your users and search engines.

Who is Keyword Insights for?

Anyone involved in content creation and search engine optimization can benefit from using Keyword Insights, including:

• Bloggers who want to boost their organic traffic and build topical authority.
• Freelance writers who want to win more clients with compelling pitches and create content aligned with search intent.
• Content managers & editors who need to develop data-driven content strategies, identify content gaps, and optimize existing content for search.
• Agencies and SEO professionals who are looking for opportunities to improve their client’s rankings by optimizing for topical relevancy.

When your content covers all aspects of a topic, it signals to Google that you’re the real deal. Let’s see how Keyword Insights AI makes it happen!

Keyword Insights features

As you log into Keyword Insights, you normally start on a screen where you have access to all existing features.

This is also where you end up if you click “+ New” to create a new project from the left menu.

Currently, you can access all the Keyword Insights features from that left sidebar, which is handy.

This might change when they add more features. (Right now, I see at least 8 new features in the app marked as “coming soon,” so the tool is clearly being actively developed and improved.)

Before we dive into each feature in detail, if you want a quick overview, here is a demo video directly from the founder of Keyword Insights, Andy Chadwick:

The Keyword Insights tool is able to take you through the whole cycle of content production, but you are welcome to only use features that complement your existing process.

Here is the workflow that developers of Keyword Insights recommend:

Find keywords -> Cluster keywords -> Create content briefs -> Create content

Let’s look at these steps one by one!

1. Keyword Discovery

If you used a keyword research tool before, you’ll be familiar with this process, but you may find a few features that will surprise you.

The Keyword Discovery tool allows you to surface a long list of terms related to your niche, which you can then cluster in the next step to build a topical map for your website.

There are several ways to do keyword research with Keyword Insights:

• Keyword – Find all search keywords related to this seed keyword.
• Domain – Find keywords a particular domain is currently ranking for. You can look at your own domain or do competitor keyword research with this.
• URL Prefix – Surface keywords a particular website section is ranking for, for example, example.com/blog or coolphotography.com/reviews/lenses.

It is recommended to use a short one- or two-word seed keyword. This way, you’ll have a lot more room to find new untapped keyword opportunities.

Keyword overview

The keyword overview tool tells you everything you need to know about your seed keyword.

This includes:

• search volume
• cost per click
• how competitive this keyword is
• related categories
• preview of the search results page

Keyword Insights shows you a snapshot of the SERP and there is a toggle which will show a simplified view as a list of top ranking URLs.

This may be helpful to include in a report if you are doing website audits for clients or just for your own quick reference.

In the Keyword Overview step, you’ll also see whether this keyword is currently trending or dying.

This is based on the free Google Trends tool that pulls information directly from Google Search to visualize interest in a particular topic over time.

Keywords list

While keyword overview is helpful, the whole point of using this AI keyword planner tool is to find new keywords – which is what the “Keywords list” tab is for.

One search attempts to find 5,000 keywords. If you want more, you can click Discover, and the tool will use another search credit to generate additional 5,000 keywords.

Sometimes, you’ll see fewer than 5k, which usually means that it’s either a very narrow niche or a new topic that doesn’t have a lot of data yet.

For each keyword, you’ll see the average search volume, CPC, and level of competition (Low/Medium/High).

You can get a more focused list if you filter by any of these parameters. Filtering also allows you to include or exclude specific keywords.

But what makes this keyword research tool really stand out from the crowd is that it has an AI Smart Filter!

What’s so special about AI Smart Filter?

It lets you filter keywords in ways that you can’t with traditional filters.

In fact, you can use natural language for filtering, which makes the process very easy and intuitive even if you are not tech-savvy.

Here are some examples of things you can do with a smart filter:

• Find or remove keywords that include numbers
• Remove keywords that include brand names
• Only show keywords that mention a color

For the sake of this example, I asked Keyword Insights AI to “include only keywords that mention animals.”

I actually think it did really well!

As you can see, there is no “passport photography” or “wedding photography” in the results. Almost all keywords are highly relevant to animal photography.

For example, it found “cat photography,” “birding photography,” and “wildlife photography,” which can potentially be sub-niches on an animal photography website.

It also surfaced general animal-related keywords like:

• “funny animal photography”
• “black and white photography of animals”
• “best camera for animal photography”

When you are satisfied with your filtered keyword list, you can save it as a subset for future clustering or reference.

Give it a recognizable name. You’ll be able to choose this list for clustering in the next step.

You can also Export a list of keywords as an Excel file or directly to Google Sheets.

Now that we have our extensive list of keywords, let’s look at clustering.

2. Keyword Clustering

In the blogging communities (at least those I’m part of), Keyword Insights is known as one of the best keyword clustering tools in 2024.

Many people have been doing keyword clustering manually for ages, and AI tools like this, which save you hours and hours of research, feel like a breath of fresh air.

What does keyword clustering even mean?

If you don’t know what keyword clustering is, it’s basically grouping all similar keywords together to avoid duplicated content and cannibalization.

That said, Keyword Insights tool has a different approach to this compared to other AI SEO tools I’ve tested.

Normally, tools like Scalenut or NeuronWriter do a semantic analysis of each of the top ranking pages and identify keywords that they have in common.

(That’s super useful for on-page optimization, by the way – it tells you exactly which terms to include on your own page so search engines recognize your content as relevant and potentially rank.)

So, what does Keyword Insights do instead?

Keyword Insights looks at SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for different keywords and groups keywords with similar search intent.

When you use clustering on a bid set of keywords, Keyword Insights groups them all into clusters based on the search intent.

Let’s say you have found a thousand keywords that seem like a good idea for your blog.

It is unlikely that they are all different enough to become 1,000 articles.

For example, “cute summer outfit ideas,” “summer fashion inspiration,” and “what to wear in the summer” are simply different ways users are asking the same question, and one well-written article may be enough to match the search intent of all these searches.

After clustering your 1000-keyword list with Keyword Insights, you may end up with 50 to 200 solid articles that will likely rank for multiple keywords each.

This reveals another benefit of clustering: you can naturally include some of those similar keywords in your article and potentially rank on Google for all those keyword variations instead of just your target keyword.

Since we are now on the same page on what keyword clustering is, let me walk you through the process of how it’s done in Keyword Insights.

How to do keyword clustering in Keyword Insights

When you click on Keyword Clustering in the left menu, you’ll be guided through a 3-step process.

The first step is to give your project a name and choose the target location and language.

If you click on Advanced Settings, you’ll see some additional tweaks you can do before keyword clustering starts.

All of these are already set to the recommended settings, so feel free to keep it as is.

Conveniently, each non-obvious setting has a little question mark near it, which gives you a short explanation of the feature.

If you are a nerd like me and like to understand how algorithms work, you can read more about it in the Keyword Insights documentation.

Another thing to do during this step is to enable Get Rankings.

This is a really cool feature!

If you toggle this on, Keyword Insights will check your website for every single keyword on the list and tell you which of your pages rank for that keyword and your position in search results.

For this example, I chose a random photography site that ranks for our topic.

Here are two ways you can use this information:

• Identify keyword gaps. Find the relevant keywords that bring you search impressions, but you don’t have a specific piece of content for them.
• Spot potential cannibalization issues. Keyword Insights will tell you if more than one article is ranking for a particular keyword cluster, which might be confusing to search engines.

The best part? This feature doesn’t cost any additional credits.

The only time to not use it is when you are starting a website from scratch and don’t have any ranking content to evaluate.

Finally, there is a toggle to include or not include the search intent.

This will let you filter clusters by intent.

For example, you can find all the transactional topics you are missing out on.

Or, say, filter all informational topics for which you rank on page 2 (it can be an easy win if you improve your article a bit).

This is useful, but it doubles the number of credits used for clustering. Personally, I think it’s not worth it, which is why I’m keeping this toggle off in most cases.

You can save your settings as a preset to skip all these steps in the future.

For clustering, you can take a list of keywords you created during the Keyword Discovery phase or bring your own sheet of keywords from Ahrefs or any other tool.

In step 2, all you need to do is give Keyword Insights your list of keywords for clustering.

You can either:

• Upload a file (or several) from your computer. For example, if you have a list of keywords from Ahrefs or some other keyword research tool.
• Choose a list from your previous Keyword Discoveries. Here, you can also choose a subset of keywords if you had saved a filtered list during the research phase.

You can even do both and combine the keywords from Keyword Insights with keywords from external platforms into one clustering report.

In step 3, just review the details and confirm your order.

The tool will tell you how many credits will be used and how many you have left.

Results of clustering with Keyword Insights

Keyword clustering may take a while, depending on the number of keywords.

The cluster I was building as an example for this post took about 40 minutes.

You are not supposed to stay on the page – Keyword Insights will send you an email when your clusters are ready.

(You can also find all your clusters in your Projects dashboard.)

My filtered list of 2634 keywords related to photography resulted in 367 clusters.

You can Export this report as an Excel file or Google Sheet.

There are two ways to look at clusters: All Clusters and Topical Clusters (tabs at the top).

Clusters can be viewed as Cards or as a Table.

Here is an example of a cluster card:

Each keyword cluster has the following information:

• How many keywords are in the cluster
• Combined search volume of all keywords
• Opportunity volume (a more realistic traffic estimate by Keyword Insights)
• Personalized difficulty score of this cluster (how hard it is for your website to rank for these keywords)
• Your average ranking position for this cluster
• Your page (or several) that rank for this cluster
• A list of keywords with corresponding search volume and ranking URL (if any)

And this is what a table of clusters looks like:

Now, what’s Topical Clusters?

Keyword Insights groups your cluster by topic so you can create a good topical map for your website and build topical authority.

You can see them as a table (topically related lists of clusters).

Or you can visualize them as bubbles.

Keyword Insights colors every bubble based on your coverage of this topic.

For example, if you rank on page 1, it’s a green bubble, and if you don’t rank at all or don’t have any content, it’s a red bubble.

If you click on any bubble, Keyword Insights will zoom in on it to give you more information on each keyword in that cluster.

Regardless of how you prefer to look at the clusters report, you will have the following options for each keyword:

• Create a content brief
• Start writing an article with AI Writer Assist
• Take it to the SERP explorer

We’ll look at all these options in the following sections.

3. Content Briefs

Content briefs are great if you hire writers or if you want a structured approach to writing your own content.

In short, this feature saves you a lot of time you’d spend browsing SERPs.

I used to do manual research, and it would sometimes take me hours to just outline one article with all the headings I wanted to add and questions I wanted to answer.

The Content Brief feature in Keyword Insights does a lot of what I would do but in a much more time-efficient manner.

(I still recommend taking a brief look at SERPS yourself before you write any piece of content to get a feel of the competition.)

There are multiple ways to create a content brief in Keyword Insights.

You can do this directly from the previous step (clustering) or just go to Content Brief in the left menu.

Here, you need to insert your keyword and choose the target country and language.

The process is already familiar to us from the keyword discovery phase.

Here is how a content brief looks in Keyword Insights:

The first thing you see is SERPs.

Here, Keyword Insights pulls the top 20 currently ranking results and some basic details about each page, such as the word count and the number of headings.

On the right side of the screen, there is an outline editor where you can work on your outline as you look at competitor’s structures, Reddit and Quora answers, and the “People also ask” tab.

After using it for a while, I can say the outline editor is very intuitive compared to other AI content creation tools I’ve used.

It lets you add a competitor’s heading in one click, edit a heading, add a new one, easily change the heading level, shuffle the headings with drag and drop, and more.

You can also group the competitor headings by similarity to see the sections they have in common.

Besides the insights from SERPs, you can look at questions from Reddit, Quora, and People Also Asked and also drag them into your outline:

You can also ask Keyword Insights to AI-generate the outline if you want to have the first version faster instead of creating it from scratch.

Personally, I love to always create my own outlines, so I don’t use this feature.

Another helpful bit is that you can auto-generate a meta title and description for your article.

I would write my own title, but the description is fine.

When you are ready to send your content brief to a writer, you can simply export it into a Google Doc and fill some general instructions like tone of voice, etc.

If you are writing content yourself, or if your writer has access to Keyword Insights (you can have multiple users on the Professional or Premium plan), just click the button to send your article to the next step – Writer Assist.

4. AI Writing Assistant

Whether or not Keyword Insights is a good writer is out of the scope of this review, but here is a sneak peek of how it looks.

There are 3 tabs: Research, Write, and Optimize.

Research is the exact same information you see in a Content Brief, just in one tab.

Write has various use cases, such as Paragraph Answers, Introduction, Bullet Points, Pros and Cons, and more. There is also an AI Chat assistant you can interact it, like you would with ChatGPT.

Optimize is not as sophisticated as in NeuronWriter or MarketMuse, but it will tell you if anything is missing, such as not enough headings or images. Here, you can also see which cluster terms you haven’t included yet.

In the Optimize tab, you will also see your readability score and how much of your content seems to be AI-generated.

Other things I like about Keyword Insights

SERP tools

I see Keyword Insights continuously adding new features to the platform, and everything they add helps make your content creator life easier in some way.

In particular, their two SERP tools make total sense:

• SERP Explorer serves a similar purpose to a VPN – it lets you look at raw search results for a keyword for a particular country.
• SERP Similarity is useful when you have two or more keywords and aren’t sure if you should write one article or several. It compares the search results for every query and tells you how many of the same pages rank at the top (if any).

Useful tutorials

Another thing I like about Keyword Insights is that even though they offer quite a lot of features, they make it really easy to understand which setting does what.

Every time you aren’t sure about something, there is a handy hint or a full video tutorial on how to use it and what it’s for.

This makes onboarding that much easier and I always appreciate it when companies care about their customer journey like that.

Free tools

If you just have a free account with Keyword Insights (not even the $1 trial account), you have access to some of the tools, such as:

• SERP Explorer
• Reddit Insights
• SERP Similarity
• Title AI

Done-for-you keyword research

While they are building a helpful product for content creators, they also understand that not everyone wants to spend time on keyword research and clustering.

That’s why they offer a managed service where they analyze your website, do the whole planning process themselves, and give you a full content strategy.

I haven’t personally used this service because keyword research is one of my favorite parts of being a blogger. But I know many people who hate this process and would happily delegate it if they could.

So, if you are like that, make sure to check it out. (If their service is as good quality as their tool, I’m sure it’s worth it.)

Keyword Insights pricing

Depending on your content needs, you can use Keyword Insights in two ways:

• Get a monthly subscription
• Use the essential features on the pay-as-you-go model ($7.99 for 1K credits)

There are three plans available on a monthly or annual basis:

• Basic plan: For $58 per month you get 12,000 clustering credits, 50,000 AI-generated words, can run a keyword search 5 times, and generate 10 content briefs and 10 writer assist pages.
• Professional plan: For $145 per month you get 36,000 clustering credits, 250,000 AI-generated words, can run a keyword search 10 times, and generate 30 content briefs and 30 writer assist pages. You also get to bring one more person on board, such as a writer, an assistant, or your partner.
• Premium plan: For $299 per month you get 100,000 clustering credits, 500,000 AI-generated words, can run a keyword search 20 times, and generate 60 content briefs and 60 writer assist pages.

Plans seem to be well-balanced, so you should choose based on your monthly content quantity needs.

You will get 20% off if you pay annually.

Does Keyword Insights have a free trial?

Keyword Insights offers a $1 trial where you have 4 days to explore the platform.

During the trial period, you’ll be limited to:

• 3 keyword searches
• 6,000 keyword clustering credits
• 5,000 AI-generated words
• 1 content brief generation
• 1 writer assist

You will also get 4-day PRO access to competition research features like SERP similarity and SERP explorer, which is normally only available on the Professional plan or higher.

Room for improvement

While I think this tool is impressive and way ahead of some competitors, there are some minor inconveniences I discovered during testing:

Final verdict: Is Keyword Insights worth it?

I think Keyword Insights is absolutely worth it if you’re ready to take your content strategy to the next level. The keyword clustering feature alone saves hours of research and helps you build topical authority.

This tool makes it so much easier to reduce overwhelm, identify keyword opportunities, avoid content duplication issues, and nail that search intent sweet spot.

Even if you choose to get an initial list of keywords from other sources, Keyword Insights gives you the structure and focus you need to truly dominate your niche.

Overall Rating:

4.9 / 5

Pros

• Powerful keyword clustering
• Smart AI filtering
• Search intent identification
• Content outlines & briefs
• AI-assisted writing
• Easy, intuitive interface

Cons

• No unlimited plan
• Inconsistent AI filtering
• Other minor UX things

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