If you are looking for monumental growth in the search engines, then targeting long-tail keywords is one of the best ways! Keyword Chef is an affordable keyword research tool that will have you finding the easiest to rank long-tail keywords in no time flat!
Keyword research is one of the most important parts of SEO and getting your website seen in the search results. While there are a lot of keyword research tools, they all vary in their performance and ability to help you find keywords you can rank for.
Keyword Chef wanted to create something different to help website owners really maximize their keyword strategy. Their tool focuses on finding quality keywords that people are using with the intent you need to convert. It removes keywords that are too broad and delivers long-tail keywords that you can rank fast.
One of the bonus features is the smart wild card search. This allows you to use an * to find topics within a phrase.
As an example, let’s say I have a blog that focuses on middle age women. I want to do a series of buying guides and am not sure where to start. With Keyword Chef I can enter the phrase “best * for 50 year old women” and I will be given a bunch of results.
Getting Started With Keyword Chef
Keyword Chef offers a 1,000 credit free trial so it is worth giving it a shot. Here is the process for signing up.
Register
Click try for free and you get the following screen. Fill in your information and click register. You will then receive an email to confirm your registration. Then you are ready to get your search on!

The Dashboard
Once you login you will see 2 menu items:
- Discover is where you start your search
- My reports is where you can see your old reports
You can also see how many credits you have on the right with an easy to access buy more button.

Start Your Keyword Research
The discover tab features a few option to run your search:
Wildcard
My favorite option. You must use an asterisk (*) to use this option so it can generate different ideas for you. Examples of input options could be “best * for vegans”, “why is * so difficult”, “how can * help me sleep”.
Questions
Best.
Compare.
How to.
Most.
Alternatives.
Idea. Great opt

Enter your topic of interest in the field and click search. For my example I used homemade *for dogs. If I was a dog blogger I would be able to find great ideas for some DIY posts for my readers with this term.
Once the search is complete – and it took about 2 seconds – you come to a screen that looks like this.

As you can see there are 2 options on the left – one is exact match which shows there are 339 exact match results. These are results that only have homemade * for dogs in the term.
The other option is exact + similar which also gives other terms that might be related. In my results there were terms like which food is best for dogs with allergies and what can I feed my underweight dog. Neither of these terms fit the niche I am going after so I would not choose to use these keywords.
I selected the exact match option and selected the Get Keywords button to import the data. Remember, this will now cost me 339 credits!
You can also import keywords from other sources as well if you prefer to start your keyword research elsewhere. Every keyword you upload will still cost 1 credit and you are limited to 1,000 keywords at one time.
Related Tool: Lowfruits.io
Analyzing Keyword Chef Results
Once the data is pulled in you will get taken to the screen below.
The first thing you will notice is that my 1,000 credits is now 661. So every keyword in the list used 1 credit – I cannot stress how important it is to be smart with your main keyword or you will eat through the credits very quickly.
Let’s cover what we are looking at below.
- Keyword is a keyword option based on your main keyword
- Avg is the average amount of search volume a month for the last 12 months
- High is the highest amount of monthly searches from the past year
- Low is the lowest amount of monthly search from the last year
- SERP will provide a popup with the top ranking pages for the term
Then on the left there are filters you can use to further refine your keywords.
- Filters is the default layout as shown below.
- Keywords allows you to filter by keyword “groups”. For the below example I have groups for food, treats, liver, shampoo and more. You can also search by SERP score or average volume of searches.
- Volume/SERP allows you to just find keywords with a specific range of volume or SERP score.

When you click on the magnifying glass for the SERP icon you get the following details information.
One of the cool features of this is it will give you an idea of how many “easy pages” are ranking that you might be able to outrank. In the example below you will see the magnifying glass turned to a gray circle with a 0 in it. That is telling me that there is probably no easy websites I can outrank.
Of course this will be based largely on my own domain authority, backlinks and other items. But you can use this as a guide to help you determine opportunity.

SERP Scores
Keyword Chef offers there own SERP score feature. The score is determined by looking at the results and finding websites that have been known to be easily outranked. These pages are usually not well optimized – and usually contain forums, social pages etc.
By creating content that is in-depth and well optimized you should be able to beat out many of these pages.
The score will show once you click the magnifying glass icon or click the get all SERPS button (only available with a paid plan).
There will be 3 colors that will show: grey, yellow or green.
Of course green should be the easiest, yellow next and then grey.
You should still review the SERPs yourself to determine the level of ease of which you think you can rank.
In the example below of the SERP analysis you can now see a gray circle with a 2 in it.
This is telling me there are possibly 2 pages in the top 10 that I might be able to outrank for this keyword. As you can see they are both Pinterest pages as identified by the Keyword Chef tool with a green highlight. So I might want to give this keyword a try.
Or I can move on and look for something that has a green or yellow numerical value.

Geo Targeting
Keyword Chef does offer some country specific searches. Gloabl is the default which will show worldwide volume and US SERP results.
By changing your location you can then view the volume and SERP’s for that country. Simply hovering over the globe in the search bar where you enter your keyword allows you the chance to change the country.
While there is country specific searches, the tool itself is only available in English launguage.
Keyword Chef Pricing
The pricing plan is easy – and fair. You are not locked into a subscription plan and can use it when you need with their credit system. Of course the more credits you purchase the cheaper it is!
- $20 is 1,200 credits
- $100 is 10,000 credits
- $250 is 50,000 credits
Each keyword that is found is 1 credit. For each keyword you will see a SERP analysis, estimated search volume.
Because you can eat a lot of credits quick, it is important to maximize your search. Some tips they offer to save credits include:
- Use the wildcard search to deliver long tail results. An example might be best * grill. This will return any phrases that start with best and end with grill.
- Use negative words to prevent unwanted keywords from appearing. An example might be grill – electric. This would exclude any keywords that have electric and grill in them.
- Don’t use broad terms like “grills” this will just return a lot of keywords with no real value.
Free Keyword Chef Trial
Keyword Chef offers you 1,000 credits for free. This includes all data but limits your SERP review to only 30.