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SEO tools guide, screen by screen

A guide to every OpenSEO tool: keyword overview, keyword ideas, SERP checker, backlinks, competitors, AI visibility and local rank grids, screen by screen.

The SEO tools sit under SEO tools in the app's sidebar, and work without a project. Each one is a single view: you search once and everything it shows loads together. This guide goes through every tool screen by screen. The screenshots are of the real app.

How a search works

The search row: keyword, country, city or state, language and the Analyse button — What to look up, then the market, then the button.

Every tool starts from one row: what to look up (a keyword, a domain or a URL), the country, a city or state where the tool can use one, and the language. Press Enter and every lookup the view needs runs at once. Each call and its cost is listed afterwards in Settings and usage, and your monthly limit caps what the tools can spend.

The search and the market are part of the page address, for example /tools/keyword-overview?q=standing+desk&country=us&lang=en. Reload it, bookmark it or send it to a colleague and you get the same view. The back button returns to the previous search. Running the same search again within the cache period is free.

What the address of a view holds
Part	Meaning
q, domain, url, target	What is looked up: a keyword, a domain, a page or a backlink target.
country	Two-letter country code, such as us or de.
lang	Search language, such as en or de.
loc	A city, state or region inside the country (optional).
tab, view and filters	Which part of the view is open, and how it is filtered.

When you change the country, city or language, the choice is remembered. The next tool you open starts in the same market.

Keyword overview

Everything about one keyword. Search it, and four cards sum it up:

Four cards: keyword difficulty, search volume, traffic potential and search volume by country — Difficulty, volume, traffic potential and volume by country for standing desk in the United States.

Keyword difficulty, 0 to 100, with roughly how many linking sites the pages in the top 10 have. The average Domain Rating of the top 10 is shown next to it.
Search volume per month, the last 12 months as bars, the cost per click in Google Ads and how much advertisers compete for it.
Traffic potential: the traffic the top result gets from all the keywords it ranks for, or an estimate from this keyword when that is not known, with the top result itself.
Search volume by country: the same keyword in five other large markets, to see where the demand is.

Keyword ideas

Four columns: terms match, questions, also rank for and search suggestions — Click any keyword to open its own overview; View all opens the full list in Keyword ideas.

Terms match lists keywords that contain the topic, Questions the questions people ask, Also rank for what the ranking pages also rank for, and Search suggestions Google's own autocomplete. Below the cards, the volume of the last few years is charted month by month.

SERP overview

The top Google results with SERP features in place and authority metrics for every page — Words, Domain Rating, URL Rating, backlinks, linking domains, traffic, its value and keywords of each page.

The results page as Google lays it out. Blocks such as an AI overview, People also ask, a local pack or product listings take their place in the numbering, so you see where the organic results really start. Each result shows how many visits this keyword sends it. Click a site's name for its domain overview, or the icons for the page analyser and its backlinks.

Authority metrics are always included: every page shows its Domain Rating, URL Rating, backlinks, linking domains, traffic, the value of that traffic and how many keywords it ranks for.

City and state level

The search row with Austin, Texas chosen — Pick a city, state or region inside the country, or clear it with × to use the whole country.

Local search volume in Austin, Texas next to the figure for the whole United States — Local volume next to the national figure.

Keyword volume, the live results and Google suggestions are available for a city or state. Difficulty, intent and keyword ideas stay national, which is all the data provider has below country level. Domain, backlink and competitor data is always for the whole country.

Keyword ideas

Hundreds of keywords from one seed: matching terms, related searches and Google suggestions in one list, with volume, difficulty, cost per click, intent, advertiser competition and a 12-month trend. The tabs above the list switch between all ideas and each kind, including questions. The filters, words to include, intent, minimum volume, maximum difficulty and minimum words, work on what is loaded and cost nothing.

With a city or state chosen, the 100 ideas with the most volume also get their local volume. Tick rows and Save selected to add them to a project, or Export CSV.

Keyword difficulty checker

Paste up to 1,000 keywords, one per line or separated by commas, and pick the country. Each gets a difficulty from 0 (easy) to 100 (hard), and the list is split into easy (under 30), medium (30 to 49) and hard (50 and up), with the average for the whole set. Click a band to show only those keywords, tick rows and Save selected, or Export CSV. Keywords with too few searches have no score. In a project, Use my saved keywords fills the list for you.

SERP checker

The same results table as in the keyword overview, on its own, with authority metrics for every page and a device choice: desktop or mobile. It starts with the top 10 and goes as deep as the top 100 (pages 1 to 10). Use it to check a results page in a city, or on phones, without the rest of the overview.

SEO audit

A full SEO audit of any domain on one page. It starts with what to do first: findings in order of importance, each with the number it rests on. Below them are the domain's traffic, authority and ranking spread, then the opportunities: keywords ranking 4 to 20 that a top-3 spot would pay off for, a keyword gap with its closest competitor (kept to its topic and to difficulty 60 or less), and a backlink gap: sites linking to the two closest competitors but not to it. Top keywords and pages, the backlink profile and the competitor list close the page.

It reads search data and does not crawl pages, so it works for any website. For technical problems on your own pages, run a Site audit.

Domain overview

Domain Rating, organic traffic, organic keywords, backlinks, referring domains and paid keywords

Any website at a glance, in the market you pick: Domain Rating, estimated organic traffic and what it would cost in ads, how many keywords it ranks for, its backlinks and referring domains, and its paid keywords.

A bar chart of keywords by Google position with new, improved, declined and lost counts — Blue bars are the top 10. Movement compares with the provider's previous update.

Top keywords of zapier.com with position, volume, traffic, share, CPC and ranking URL — The 100 keywords that bring the most traffic. Top pages and Competitors are one tab away.

Top keywords lists the keywords that bring the most traffic, with position, volume, the share of the site's traffic and the ranking page; filter by text or position. Top pages lists the pages with the most traffic and how many keywords each ranks for. Competitors lists the sites that rank for the same keywords, each a click from the keyword gap.

Website traffic checker

Paste up to 100 domains and pick the country. Each one's estimated monthly organic traffic from Google, its share of the group's traffic, its organic keywords, and its paid traffic and keywords from Google Ads. The figures are estimates from rankings and search volumes: good for comparing sites, not exact visit counts. Click the arrow next to a site to open it in the domain overview.

Website authority checker

Enter up to 10 domains to compare their Domain Rating (0 to 100), referring domains and backlinks. Authority is worldwide, so there is no country to pick, and each site costs $0.02. In a project, Traffic and authority puts both checkers on one page as tabs, sharing the same list of sites.

Page analyser

One page, inside and out. Paste its address to see its authority and links, then its on-page basics:

Status, title, meta description, H1 and content checks — Titles over 60 characters and descriptions over 160 may be cut off in results; both are flagged.

Keywords the page ranks for, with position, volume, traffic and CPC — Every keyword this page ranks for in the top 20.

Further down, its strongest backlinks, one per linking site, with a link to the full backlink report.

Backlink checker

For a domain, a subdomain or one exact page (enter the full URL). The totals show backlinks, referring domains, the dofollow share, broken links and the spam score. Backlinks are worldwide, so there is no market to pick.

Charts of backlinks and referring domains over time and links gained and lost each month — The link profile over time, and the links gained and lost each month.

The strongest backlinks with linking page, anchor, target, type, authority and dates — The strongest live link from each linking site. The other tabs: referring domains, anchors, top linked pages and link intersect.

Link intersect takes competitors and lists the sites that link to them but not to you, those linking to the most competitors first: the likeliest to link to you next. It is also in the tools list as Backlink gap.

Competitors and keyword gap

Enter your domain to see the sites that compete with it in Google, with how many keywords you share and their traffic. Click one, or a suggested competitor, for the keyword gap:

Keyword gap between todoist.com and ticktick.com — Keywords only the competitor ranks for, and keywords you both rank for, loaded together.

SERP competitors takes a list of keywords instead and shows which domains rank most for them. For the full workflow, see Size up a competitor.

AI Overview checker

Paste up to 100 keywords and, optionally, your domain. For each keyword the checker reads Google's first page ($0.01 a keyword) and shows whether there is an AI Overview, how many pages it cites, whether one of them is on your domain, and every other SERP feature on the page. Features you appear in are marked green.

The sites AI Overviews cite most across the keywords, next to how often each SERP feature appears — The domains Google's AI answers cite most across your keywords, and how often each feature shows.

Page-one rank is your organic position on the first page; a dash means you are not on it. In a project, the rank tracker also records AI Overview citations on every check: open a tracker and its AI Overviews and features tab.

AI visibility checker

Type a question your customers would ask an AI assistant. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity answer it with web search on; tick Grok, Meta AI or DeepSeek to add them. In Your site, brand, enter your domain and any names your brand goes by, separated by commas, such as upliftdesk.com, Uplift.

The most cited sites, with the assistants that cite each one and their place in each list — Sites more assistants cite come first, then those cited higher in their lists.

One column per assistant listing its sources in order — Each assistant's sources in the order it gave them. Hover a site to see where else it appears.

Links are cleaned before they are compared: tracking parameters are removed, and Gemini's redirect links are followed to the page they point at. A site is cited when one of its pages is a source, and named when your domain or brand appears in the answer's text. To ask the same questions regularly and follow the trend, use AI visibility in a project.

Local rank checker

Enter what people search on Google Maps, a country and a city or area, then the grid: 3 × 3, 5 × 5 or 7 × 7 points, 0.5 to 5 km apart. Each point runs a Maps search biased to that spot and keeps the top 20 businesses.

A grid of rank numbers next to the businesses ranked by top-3 coverage — The selected business's rank at each point; north is up and the centre is outlined.

The table ranks every business by how many points it holds a top-3 place, with how many it appears in at all, its average rank, rating and reviews. Click any business to see its grid: every business's place is already in the results, so it costs nothing. To check one business on a schedule, run geo-grids in a project.

What a search costs

Each view runs several lookups, so its price is the sum of theirs. Results are cached for a day or more: searching the same thing again, reloading, or going back is free until then. Refresh fetches fresh data, and Settings and usage lists every call with its cost. See Costs, caching and limits.