Keyword Chef Review

If you are a content creator, especially say a blogger or even a YouTuber, being able to find keyword ideas, or the correct keywords for your articles and videos are essential. 

Without the right keywords, you are usually shouting into a void, with no structure or purpose around your content. Now, there is a variety of other keyword tools out there that can help with that.

I have spoken about KeySearch and SERanking in the past, as well as being a huge fan of AnswerThePublic for generating these ideas. Though the first two are more 'all-in-ones', ATP and UberSuggest are both free tools which is limiting. 

You could also talk about UbberSuggest as being a true keyword research tool, though again the free tool is limited and I personally find the paid version a bit cumbersome, and again focuses on the SEO ranking side of things as well.

This brings me to this particular article's focus, Keyword Chef, a tool that solely seems to focus on helping you find keywords based on a seed phrase or word, without trying to do everything else. 

What Is Keyword Research?

To put it simply, keyword research is the name given to the work involved around finding keyword ideas, or content ideas, using a variety of different 'seeds' to provide hundreds, or perhaps thousands of different phrases, words or variations based on that first single idea. 

If you are a content creator, you always want to know what phrases or words people are searching for, to ensure that the content you write or produce is relevant to your audience and that you are answering the right questions that may be asked. 

For example, you may be a food writer, and you want to write a series of articles about cooking different styles of foods within an oven, but where would you start? 

There are hundreds of types of food, and many millions could be cooked in an oven, so you need to do keyword research to find what 'things' people are searching for. 

You can of course use Google to provide these answers, or you can start to write them down yourself, you could probably think of 5 or 6 different 'can you cook X in an oven' questions yourself. But you may start to flag after the ones in your head are done. 

You also wouldn't know the volume in which people are searching for these questions per month, or provide you with a list of keywords.

This is why the keyword research tool was created, designed to help you find low-competition keywords, long tail keywords or even underserved topics that people hadn't thought about.

Why Do You Need Keyword Research Tools?

Taking the example above, you are limited in the answers you are provided when trying to use autocomplete. Of course, search engine results should never be overlooked (and should be part of your SEO research plan), but they are limited.

After you have exhausted the 5 phrases that you thought of, you are suddenly at an impasse. There must be more than 5 foods that people want to learn how to cook in an oven, or perhaps shouldn't cook in an oven, but you can't for the life of you think.

This is where research tools come into play, such as Keyword Chef, the tool we are reviewing and talking about today. Of course, there are other keyword tools out there, which we will talk about at the end of this review.

Unlike simply Googling and waiting for the autosuggest to provide you with a few answers, without any volumes or similar articles, keyword tools usually provide you with a lot more data.

For example the average number of searches for a particular phrase, the highest monthly searches and lowest monthly searches, as well as other possible websites that are currently ranking for those particular phrases.

Some other keyword research tools will also provide you with the amount people are paying for keywords in ads (The image above is from another tool called SE Ranking).

A good keyword research tool should also provide you with ranking difficulty, which is arguably a made-up number that takes in a number of different factors such as Site Authority and topical relevance.

What Is Keyword Chef?

A relatively new tool to the market, appearing at the start of 2021, it was created by Ben Adler, who owns and runs the Affiliate Niche Builders website and Facebook groups.

Ben focuses a lot on building niche sites that have authority. Which can be a bit of a random phrase to say.

Essentially they are sites that focus on certain niches, but provide lots of different articles and not just the run-of-the-mill 'review' & 'review' & review' that a lot of people focus on.

Keyword Chef is completely focused on providing keyword ideas. It doesn't play around with rank tracking or try to determine if people are spending $1 to get in front of you or $0.01 via ads.

It is there to provide you with keywords and keyword variations, based on your initial search query. It does seem to focus on Ben's love of finding long-tail keywords.

How Does Keyword Chef Work?

As with a lot of research tools, keyword chef ultimately works by magic. 

Seriously, it's all wizardry when it comes to understanding how a lot of the work and results are found, but that is part of the fun. 

At the highest level, Keyword Chef takes the search data from a variety of places and search engines, it then compiles and finds other variations and 'wildcard' searches as they call it, running through some 700 different 'recipes' to help find the data you get given. 

You are then served up these results within the Keyword Chef dashboard, designed to provide you with an easy-to-navigate overview.

According to their website, this means that Keyword Chef is only giving you useful and relevant information, or true search intent answers.

Rather than say providing you with 500 junk keywords or pointless search results. For example 'how to melt a cast iron skillet in a volcano' because someone once searched for that in 2003, they are instead giving you 1000 relevant keywords.

This results in a variety of long-tail keywords, low-volume keywords and even clusters of 'best', 'compare' etc.

When you get your results, you are shown 4 columns. Three of these deal with search volume, including the average search volume, highest estimate and lowest estimate. The final one is SERP score, which we will talk about below.

Other Keyword Chef Features

We already know that Keyword chef deals with standard searches by running their recipes, but they also come with additional tools and features that can be used when researching keywords.

Some of these features are great when you are stuck for interesting keywords, or you need help finding long tail keywords or low competition keywords.

Wildcard Search

One of these features is the 'wild card' searches, essentially allowing you to swap out words or phrases for a * or wild card. 

They then find additional searches that may not show up in traditional ways or using standard keyword research tools, because they don't fit inside of the normal search criteria. 

For example, the 'can you cook * inside an oven' is a difficult one for many keyword tools, because you are trying to find a variation inside of a phrase.

It's not trying to auto-complete an already near-perfect question, it is having to find all the words or phrases that could fit into that question and provide meaningful answers. 

I have found that certain niches or phrases work much better than others, and you do need some form of structure to get the most out of your wildcard searches. 

You can't, or should I say shouldn't simply throw in words and put a wildcard at the end or the start, as you could just be given thousands of really high-level answers that don't provide any meaningful ideas for you. 

Specific Search Types

As well as the wild card, you can also reduce or narrow your search to a more relevant keyword.

These include a number of keyword filters such as;

• Questions

• Best

• Compare

• How To

Each of these keyword filters will result in only handing you relevant keywords.

Using our example above, we simply searched for 'golf clubs [Best]' which resulted in around 800 potentially profitable keywords. Keyword Chef then lets you narrow that down further by ignoring certain phrases, as such we chose 'Average'. This resulted in using 11 credits to bring back the perfect number of ideas.

SERP Score

Keyword Chef does also provide you with additional data beyond those traditional search volume scores. Sometimes called 'SERP' or even competition, essentially a number or score given to each phrase, indicating how difficult, or easy a phrase may be to rank for. 

Their version looks at the Top 10 or the front page of search engine pages and reviews the websites that are ranking for that search phrase.

If they find 5 websites such as a forum, Q&A site or a platform that isn't geared towards that particular topic in an authoritative capacity, think Quora, Medium or even Amazon themselves at times, then they will give it a number. 

The higher the number, such as a 5, the more chance you have of getting your website ranking in that top slot. The 5 sites that currently hold those spots are simply there because of their overall domain authority, not because they are big in a particular niche. 

For example, Quora is a huge Q&A website, with answers across pretty much every niche, but the answers themselves are rarely in-depth. They also don't provide a lot of information and can be seen as quite shallow or confusing.

A well-crafted article that for example goes into depth about 'Brooklyn style pizza crust vs hand tossed' with images, serious debate and well-thought-out writing has a great chance of outranking that Quora question.

The other 5 that appear are all niche sites, dominos, slicepizzeria and seriousseats. Of course, you still have those 5 to contend with, but it should be easier than trying to just deal with dominos or slicepizzeria, especially if they don't have specific articles.

Keyword Chef Pricing

So, this is one of the 'odd' parts of Keyword Chef, though their pricing model makes sense for what they are trying to achieve. Rather than paying a monthly subscription as you do with say AhRefs or SE Ranking, you pay per report. 

Again, many of the keyword chef competitors are 'all-in-one' SEO tools. These other tools are designed to show you lots of data, usually on a repeating monthly basis, such as competition tracking or rank tracking. As such it makes sense for them to be a subscription pricing module. 

This tool is a stand-alone, separate bit of kit that is just focused on finding you the best high-value keywords or quality keywords for you to use in your articles.

As such, Keyword Chef runs on a 'credit' based system. Whereby each keyword phrase or keyword provided, uses 1 credit.

So if wanted to run a number of keyword searches around the phrase 'how many golf clubs can you fit in a golf bag', you may only use 5 credits. This is because it's a super specific keyword, that may just end up with a small number of exact keywords.

If I ran the phrase 'affiliate marketing *' I would probably be shown a couple of hundred, possibly into the thousands of keywords, because it's a much broader topic.

As the pricing is credit-based, they do at least tell you how many answers you are going to get. For example, the 'affiliate marketing' question I put in, would have resulted in 200 exact match questions, or nearly 700 exact and similar phrases.

As you are given a sample of these target keywords, you can decide if you want to proceed or if you want to try and be more specific in your keyword searches.

Actual pricing ranges from costing roughly $0.0017 per answer provided, to $0.005 per result given, which is a really strange way to think about the results you are getting. 

I started with 1200 credits, which was $20, so far having played around with it a few times, I have just over 700 credits left. With those credits, I have found plenty of long-tail keywords, a few junk keywords (which I just ignore) and even some profitable keywords that have been added to articles or crafted into whole new articles.

As such, I have essentially been given multiple articles and keyword clusters for roughly $10.

Plus, if I do happen to have say 100 credits left, and my report brings back 200, I will get those 200 back, they don't cut me off at 100. You can also get free credits (1000) total by signing up below. 

What I Liked About Keyword Chef

Considering its only goal in life, its one true purpose is to provide you with ideas and keyword phrases that people are actually searching for, I would say it hits that goal pretty well. 

The wildcard searches do take a little bit of getting used to. Once you have understood the types of phrases that work well, or where you should put those wildcard "*s" in, then they really do start to bring out some interesting answers.

I would also admit the simplicity of the keyword chef dashboard is nice. Though I realise this is an odd thing to say about a keyword research tool.

For example, there is a huge difference in the amount of 'stuff' shown when running a search on Keyword Chef vs SE Ranking.

You are just given your list, in an easy-to-see layout, without any graphs, traffic estimations, cost of traffic etc. Just straightforward and to the point. 

The keyword chef support is also a selling point for me, emails have been answered quickly and politely, with straight-to-the-point answers. Plus it doesn't matter how much you have spent if you have a problem they seem happy to answer.

Lastly, I also enjoyed the results I was given, there were results I had not seen from other tools, including AnswerThePublic or UbberSuggest all of which do their keyword research slightly differently. 

If you are new to Keyword Chef, you can also grab yourself some free credits, just sign-up here and you are good to go.

What I Didn’t Like About Keyword Chef

It does take some getting used to with the wild cards, knowing what you are trying to actually search for is a difficult task and essentially comes down to practice. 

Not all the search results were that useful, when running some wild cards, or even 'high level' queries I would get back a list of 10 or 20 zero search phrases that either didn't quite bare a resemblance to what I was trying to achieve or didn't have a full phrase.

For example, I did find a few 'product a vs' whereby the vs product was empty, when running a wild card such as 'product vs *' I then got no results at all, though there were clearly some results and some searches being carried out, because when I went back to Google I could find a few 'product a vs product b'. 

But, considering that was my only real 'issue' with it, and I didn't see it as that much of a problem, I wouldn't hold it against the tool. 

Is Keyword Chef Right For You?

If you are a content creator, someone who blogs, creates videos or maybe just produces written content for a living, then I would say Keyword Chef is a useful tool to have in your pocket. 

I do a lot of my keyword research with SE Ranking, I pay monthly for them to track my rankings and run audits on my sites etc, they have a keyword tool that I can use to find my ideas and articles, and I may as well use it. But Keyword Chef offers me the opportunity to also run ideas through their tool, without costing me a fortune. 

If for example I wasn't 100% convinced with all the variations or answers that SE Ranking provided, I could run a wildcard search through keyword chef and see what I got back from them, costing me about $2 or so if I was to look at it in that way. 

Of course, if you don't use a rank tracking tool or an all in one SEO tool, and you instead use the free searches from UberSuggest or AnswerThePublic to try and get keyword ideas, and you are looking for a tool that provides more answers and keywords, as well as giving you that information on how difficult it may be to rank for, then Keyword Chef is a pretty good place to start. 

For $20 you could essentially get 1200 keyword ideas to go ahead and start crafting content around, which in the grand scheme of things, is a hell of a lot of content. 

Keyword Chef Alternatives

There are a number of different marketing tools out there, including a few free tools or all in one SEO tools.

The more well rounded platforms such as AHRefs or SeRanking will provide you with similar options and functionality. Including the ability to add a seed keyword phrase, long tail keywords, low competition keywords and keyword difficulty.

Unfortunately, they will cost between $20 - $200+ per month, depending on how many times you want to be given your page rankings, or updates to different tools.

Again there are free tools such as UberSuggest and AnswerThePublic. But they are both now limited to just a few searches per day and even limited to search term results that you are given. AnswerThePublic simply provides keyword clusters and long tail keywords, but zero ranking data or keyword difficulty.

Keyword Chef Review Conclusion

A well-rounded, focused tool that simply does what it says on the tin, without shiny bells or loud whistles to distract away from its core principle, which is finding you keywords. 

A slightly different approach to pricing, removing the monthly fee in favour of just paying when you need to use it is quite refreshing to be fair, as it allows me to use this platform as a secondary or additional research tool that I can use alongside the ones I pay monthly for. 

Will it replace the tools I already use? 

No, as the others come with different bells that I require to help run the empire of blogs and sites. But it's definitely one that I will put in my armoury and pull out every time I need to find some fun or obscure keywords to write about, especially if I need to know if I should put tin foil in the microwave...