How keyword research works

Quibo scores every keyword it discovers and surfaces the most attractive ones first:

• How many people search it: monthly Google search volume for the site's language and market.
• How hard it is to rank: a 0 to 100 difficulty score (lower is easier).
• What's already ranking: we take a snapshot of the pages a neural web search returns for the keyword and look for shortcuts. Forum threads (Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange) among the top results mean a beatable page; a Wikipedia page among the top three means a hard one. The snapshot is a proxy for Google's page one, not a live Google result. Informational queries get a small boost because new content ranks for them more easily.

These combine into the Opportunity score, the default sort of the table: high volume and low difficulty win, a weak page one pushes a keyword up, a page one owned by Wikipedia pushes it down.

Each run also labels its results:

• Gem: in the top quarter of that run by opportunity, with a beatable page one (difficulty 35 or less, forum results on page one, or no Wikipedia page in the top 3) and at least 50 searches a month. Start here.
• Long-tail: four or more words, or a three-word question. Lower volume, stronger intent.
• Standard: everything else.

What you actually do

1. Click + Discover keywords. Pick the site, type a seed (for example marketing automation, red wine pairing, ceramic frying pan) and set Max keywords this run (5 to 60, default 30). Click Start discovery.
2. Wait a few minutes: a run expands the seed, fetches volumes, takes a search snapshot for every surviving keyword and filters out your own brand terms. The table refreshes on its own when the new rows land.
3. Use the Gems, Long-tail and Standard pills and the volume, difficulty and status filters to narrow the list. Tick the keywords you would actually write about and click Accept, or use the check icon on a single row.
4. The banner above the table counts your accepted keywords against the articles you have left. Click Plan this month to generate. See Monthly generation.

That's it. No formulas to tune, no knobs to turn. The defaults work well for B2B SaaS, consumer SaaS, e-commerce, and service businesses. If you have a special case, contact us.

What a run does behind the scenes

Each run expands the seed into related concepts using your brand profile, pulls suggestions and related keywords with their volume and difficulty, mines the top-ranking pages for long-tail phrases, takes a snapshot of page one for every candidate, and drops anything clearly off-topic for your brand. Phrases already in the library for that site and language are skipped, so a run never creates duplicates.

A run stops at Max keywords this run or at your monthly keyword quota, whichever comes first, and only the rows actually inserted count against the quota. Owners, admins and editors can run discovery.

Research runs per month

Each plan includes a fixed number of discovery runs per billing cycle, on top of the keyword quota:

• Solo and Starter: 1 run a month.
• Growth: 2 runs a month.
• Agency and Business: 4 runs a month.
• Lifetime tiers 1 and 2: 1 run a month. Tier 3: 2 runs. Tiers 4 and 5: 4 runs.
• Free: 1 run. Like the rest of the free quota, it does not refresh.

The counter next to + Discover keywords shows how many runs you have used this month. Once they are spent the button is disabled until your next billing cycle, which resets the counter together with the article and keyword quotas. Runs are also rate limited to 5 every 5 minutes. Manual keywords never use a run.

Used vs. not used

Plan this month takes the highest-opportunity accepted keywords for each site, up to the count you set, and marks them used. Used keywords are never suggested again. Accepted keywords the plan did not reach stay accepted for the next plan; discovered and rejected keywords stay in the library with their scores and sort alongside the next run's results. See Monthly keyword cycle.