Keyword Surfer vs Keywords Everywhere: Which to Choose?

Content marketing relies on a keen understanding of keywords and how to use them when creating content. Language, and the way we use it, is very complex, but technology is catching up and there are a lot of tools available to help you figure out what keywords to aim for, and what might not be worthwhile.

Two of the biggest tools I see mentioned all the time are Keywords Everywhere and Keyword Surfer. The question is, if you have to pick one, which one do you go with? I’ve used them both quite a bit, so read on to get my insights, as well as an alternative I think you’ll like.

A Rundown of Keywords Everywhere

First, the overviews. I’m starting with Keywords Everywhere for one simple reason: I’ve covered it before on this blog. So, I’m going to keep this section brief; if you want a deeper rundown, check out my review and guide to Keywords Everywhere here.

The short version is this: Keywords Everywhere is a browser plugin that harvests keyword and search data from a bunch of sources (like Google Analytics or Moz) and presents it to you as you browse. It’s best used on places like the Google Search Results Page, your Google Analytics dashboards, YouTube, and various social networks like Instagram, Pinterest, and X. It’s also handy for e-commerce sites and can display data on eBay, Etsy, and Amazon pages.

Keywords Everywhere uses a credits system, where one keyword’s data is one credit. But that can mean a single Google search can use up a couple dozen credits with all of the results on a page, which is why credits are relatively inexpensive. The top-tier plan is $80 per month for eight million credits to give you an idea of the scope. The cheapest plan is $2.25 per month for 100,000 credits, which might last you quite a while if you’re not an agency like me.

They also have a free version, but it’s basically useless, so ignore it. Keywords Everywhere is functionally a paid tool.

Personally, I like Keywords Everywhere. It doesn’t pull in any truly unique data, so if you use Moz and Google’s various data sources and Ahrefs and all those other big tools, you don’t need Keywords Everywhere. But, it’s a powerful source of convenience. Instead of having to paste keywords into half a dozen tools for a dozen URLs and dig down rabbit holes to find interesting data, you get all of it put right in front of your face.

Keywords Everywhere is usually mentioned in the same breath as Keyword Surfer, so how does that tool stand up? Well, I’ve used both, so here’s the rundown on Surfer.

A Dive Into Keyword Surfer

Keyword Surfer comes from Surfer SEO, which also produces a handful of other tools, mostly AI tools these days. They have AI tools to generate content, AI tools to detect generated content, and AI tools to hide AI content and make it look less AI. Just covering all the bases, eh guys?

None of that is why I’m here, though. Keyword Surfer’s keyword research tool, the eponymous surfer itself, is a lot like Keywords Everywhere. It’s a browser plugin, but instead of working for Firefox, Edge, and Chrome, it’s Chrome-only. What kind of data can it show you?

• Keyword search volume estimates.
• Keyword cost per click.
• Related and similar keywords.
• A keyword overlap score for keyword clusters.
• The word count for content that ranks for a keyword.
• Various traffic metrics, such as geographic distribution, for a keyword.
• Backlink data for a result for a keyword.

Some of this is unique to Surfer, while others are the same data Keywords Everywhere offers, largely because it pulls from most of the same sources. There are a few interesting data points they gather as well, like the number of times the specific keyword is used on a given page (keyword density, in other words, which has largely fallen out of favor in the last few years.)

You can also save groups of keywords into a collection, so you can keep that data on hand to reference over time and see how it changes.

You might notice that there are a bunch of things Keywords Everywhere offers that Keyword Surfer doesn’t. That’s a quirk of how these two tools function, and I’ll explain it a bit more in the comparison later.

The short version is that Keyword Surfer is a free tool, so they limit what they can offer. It’s meant to be a gateway into their premium product, the Topical Map, but since that’s an entirely separate tool, I’m not considering it just “the paid version of Keyword Surfer” for the purposes of this post.

Keyword Surfer also doesn’t do a lot of the extras that Keywords Everywhere does. They don’t give you data on Amazon, eBay, YouTube, or any of those other sites. It’s all just data on Google search results pages. Surfer also doesn’t pay attention to things like Google’s “people also asked” boxes; you’d have to click through to the results pages for those queries yourself.

In fact, you can think of Keyword Surfer as a sort of entry-level tool for this kind of research. The search volume and trend data can be pretty handy, though it’s questionably accurate since search volume is such a messy metric in the first place. Geographic filtering can be handy if you’re a brand that can only really operate in a given country. CPC estimates are fine, though that information is pretty free to gather anywhere.

Overall, the biggest benefit to Keyword Surfer is that it’s free, and the biggest downside is that it’s very much a limited tool meant to encourage you to sign up for their main tool, which functions in an entirely different way and isn’t really comparable to Keywords Everywhere.

Keyword Surfer or Keywords Everywhere: Which is Better?

For my money (hah), Keywords Everywhere is the better tool.

What does Keyword Surfer offer that Keywords Everywhere doesn’t?

• Keyword overlap, which can be handy, especially when Keywords Everywhere is more focused on more detailed data on specific keywords instead of broader analysis.
• Word count and keyword density for pages in the results. This can be useful information to know, for example, that your competition for a keyword is all 1,000-word posts and it would be easy to outdo them.

That’s about it, really. They have a handful of features to improve and “humanize” ChatGPT now, but frankly, those kinds of tools are a dime a dozen right now, and they don’t really offer anything compelling enough for me to care about those features. Plus, and this is the critical part: if I’m looking for keyword research and information, I don’t want my tool also trying to get me to use ChatGPT. That’s a different part of the process and involves different tools to me.

Meanwhile, what does Keywords Everywhere do that Keyword Surfer doesn’t? A whole lot, actually.

• Enhanced data for Google’s added widgets, like the People Also Searched For box.
• Better analysis of long-tail keywords.
• Competitor gap analysis so you can find holes in their coverage, though there’s a big asterisk on this one I’ll get to in a moment.
• Better trends and bulk trend charts. It’s not as good as dedicated trend-chasing apps like Glimpse Trends, but it’s there.
• More SEO metrics like keyword difficult estimates.
• Metrics pulled from sources like Moz and YouTube’s analytics.
• Integration with platforms other than Google, like YouTube, Instagram, eBay, Etsy, and Amazon
• Integration with other search engines, including DuckDuckGo and Bing.

That’s a lot!

Tempering Expectations

Here’s where I bring down the mood a bit: these two tools are actually closer than you might expect based on everything I’ve said already.

There are three main reasons why I say this.

The first is pricing. Surfer is free while Keywords Everywhere is paid, and while Keywords Everywhere isn’t super expensive, it’s still an expense. Now, they’re pulling some data from paid tools like Moz, so it’s worth it if you aren’t already paying for those tools yourself, but if you’re in a budget crunch or growth hacker mode, even that relatively small expense can be significant. This is the least of the three reasons.

The second is scope. For example, look at me. Between Topicfinder here and my content marketing agency, I can make use of a lot of keyword data. But what I don’t really do is make use of product and video data from e-commerce platforms or YouTube. Those features are nice, but they’re irrelevant to me. That narrows the effective scope of the tool significantly.

Obviously, if you run a storefront with products where product research and product-focused SEO are relevant, then it’s way more useful. For me and for more “pure content” marketers like me, it’s less useful. You also likely have other product-centric tools that outdo Keywords Everywhere since, at the core of it, Keywords Everywhere is still a keyword tool, not a product research tool. They’re more interested in the ad copy of the product listing than they are in the performance details of the product.

The third is focus. Keywords Everywhere gives you great data… about a specific, narrow keyword. But, as we all know, a blog post doesn’t rank for just one keyword. You can target one keyword, but the way language works – and the way Google works with their language processing – is more on a conceptual and keyword cluster level.

What this means is that Keywords Everywhere gives you a lot of information that is surprisingly difficult to contextualize. If you search for a variation of a keyword, you get the data for that variation. You don’t get a comparison to the more popular and relevant related keywords unless they’re in Google’s People Also Searched For box, which isn’t a guarantee. In a way, it encourages missing the forest for the trees.

To be clear, this isn’t necessarily a fault of the tool, it’s a fault of the granularity of the kinds of data we can process in a glance. If they tried to genericize everything it would be just as useless in the other direction. The biggest issue is just that you need to be aware of what you’re seeing and how to use it, and not everyone knows how to do that.

Which Should You Use: Keyword Surfer or Keywords Everywhere?

In my mind, Keywords Everywhere is the better of the two, as long as you know how to use it properly and have the budget to make use of it in the way it deserves. But, up above I told you that I had an alternative you’d like, so let’s talk about it.

Think about the broader internet as an ocean and the opportunities for content (like keyword ideas) as fish in that sea. Keywords Everywhere is sort of like casting a fishing line and hooking something. It’s a fish you catch, but it’s not necessarily the biggest or best fish around.

Topicfinder is the tool I made for first-order keyword research for my own content marketing agency. I like to think of it like fishing with dynamite. One search with Topicfinder is like throwing a stick of TNT into the water and watching what comes to the top. You’ll have your pick of the best options around.

The analogy kind of falls apart a bit, though, because I like to couple Topicfinder with another tool: Ahrefs. If you imagine that TNT just stunned all the fish, and they’re ready to swim away, you then use Ahrefs like a speargun to hook and reel in the specific sites or opportunities you want to know more about.

With Topicfinder and a good research tool like Ahrefs in hand, you can be a lot deeper, a lot more accurate, and a lot more contextually relevant than you can with something as cursory and surface-level as Keywords Everywhere or Keyword Surfer. Why not check it out? I offer a free trial for a reason.

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