KWFinder / Mangools Review [BEST BUDGET SEO SUITE?]

Finding low competition keywords and phrases is the name of the game for a lot of players in the field of content marketing and website growth. Look at massive players such as Jon Dykstra who only uses these and these alone to make a five-figure income every month. This is why we have keyword research tools and this is why the best of them usually cost an arm and a leg 🙂 There are some good up-and-coming tools that are helping out those that don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars a month on such tools and KWFinder is one of them. Today I will go over what I like and don’t like about this tool and whether you should subscribe.

My History with KWFinder

I have been using this tool for several years, after switching from Keysearch, as I felt it had a better feature set for a slightly higher price. KWFinder has been something I have used on a daily basis in my business over that time so I believe I can give you an accurate and realistic review of what is good and what you should watch out for. This is not a BS review saying only good things to ‘get a sale’. I am going to be totally open and honest about what I feel.

What is KWFinder and the Mangools Suite?

Mangools is a suite of programs that provide assistance to content writers and content marketers. They are designed to help with content creation, keyword research, and much more. A lot of people don’t realize this, but there is more to the suite than KWFinder. I think because KWFinder is the keyword research tool in the suite and one that most people use; they tend to forget there are other tools offered! The full suite of Mangools tools are as follows:

KWFinder

A keyword research tool helping you to research and find keywords and phrases for your business, as well as giving you vital information to help you decide whether you should base content on them or not. This includes the competition score for the keyword, which will tell you how likely you are to rank above that competition in Google. You will also get access to the full SERPs (search engine results page) with things such as domain authority and page authority so you can weigh the competition up for yourself. When exploring and finding out about new keywords, KWFinder allows you to use Google autosuggest and find questions from Google’s ‘people also asked’ section on top of their own related keywords section. This gives you more opportunities to find those killer long tail key phrases.

KWFinder also gives you some great ways to manage your keywords, including making keyword lists and importing keywords from other sources. KWFinder has recently added the ability to search for keywords by domain. You could enter in a competitor’s website and get a full list of what they rank for. 

SERP Checker

Mangools also have their SERP Checker tool which, as the name suggests, will help you dive deeper into your SERP data.They have taken the basic SERP data from KWFinder and helped you expand on that slightly to give you more insights as to why certain pages may or may not be ranking. It also allows you to enter in the URL of your own page to see how your metrics compare to the current top 10 in the SERP. For me, the handy part of this tool is that they include an ‘analyze SERP’ button at the top of your regular SERP results in KWFinder. If you click that it will instantly take you over to SERP checker to view it in full detail.

One of my favorite things in SERP Checker is the snapshot feature that actually lets you see the Google SERP. This is great for those that want to see the SERP for a country that you don’t live in. Much easier than messing around with VPNs.

SERP Watcher

This is the portion of Mangools that lets you select and track keywords for your website and update them regularly to find out how they are ranking in Google. This is a great way to track how your content is doing over time and see as a whole how your project is fairing in organic search. It is pretty simple to add new websites and the keywords to track, even letting you import keywords from a list you may have in KWFinder. Other than this, it pretty much does what all other rank tracking tools do. Show you some charts and visual representations of how all your keywords are doing, which ones are and down etc. etc. Nothing overly exciting, but it works, and the interface looks good.

Link Miner

This tool allows you to check a domain to see how many links it has, along with key metrics about each link to help you decide whether they are good quality or not.Again, nothing exciting here, it does pretty much the same as all the other link checking tools. The most important thing here is the accuracy, which seemed to be good when compared with other high-level tools.

Site Profiler

This tool will give you an overview of a site and its metrics. You can find out the domain authority, the links and their anchor type and other typical metrics you would expect from such a tool.

Other Notable Mentions

Mangools has a Chrome and Firefox extension that will link to your account and give you a snapshot of a websites main data in a small window on the right-hand side of your browser. Then if you click on any data, you can be taken to the main tool to get the full picture. Mangools also have a SERPs volatility checker, which will notify you when there is volatility in the Google SERPs (usually down to a core update).

How Much are these Mangool Tools?

The Mangools suite of tools come as one package, so you cannot subscribe to just KWFinder even if that’s all you use. However, luckily the subscription cost is on the lower side when it comes to SEO tools, ranging from $49 to $129 a month. This gets significantly cheaper if you subscribe to an annual plan.

What I Like about KWFinder and Mangools

Data On Point

I have been impressed by the fact that literally all of the data I got back from Mangools and especially KWFinder was on point. I have used some other ‘wannabe’ SEO tools that give back results with some random and unrelated things to the seed keyword. This never happened to me in the long time I have used KWFinder. The quality of the data you get back from your searches is top-notch.

Excellent Keyword Competition

The Mangools KWFinder keyword competition metric is one of the best I have ever come across. I have done multiple videos over on my YouTube channel comparing this feature to many other top tier tools, and KWFinder often comes out on top. They have found a way to accurately define what your competition is for ranking a keyword and have made it into an easy to follow color coded numerical metric. For anyone trying to find low competition keywords to rank for in Google, this tool is vital.

Link Sorting

One genius feature Mangools have added to their Site Profiler tool is the ability to tag your links by their anchor text. It highlights which are branded, naked or other. All of these are color coded to make it easy to see the distribution of anchor text at a glance.

Good Value

Mangools is on the midrange to cheaper side of SEO tools on the market, and they give you a lot of bang for your buck (especially if you pay annually). Add to this the fact that if you take on their free trial Mangools often sends you a discount code for more discount to encourage you to sign up. You certainly get a lot of SEO tool for your money when compared with some of the ‘big boys’ in the space.

Chrome Extension

I have to say I have loved using the Mangools Chrome extension. It is literally like having a mini version of their tools condensed into an easy to see chrome extension window. It has been one of the most well thought out Chrome extensions I have used and makes it much more convenient to use the Mangools suite of tools in my research.

Keyword Lists

The ability to keep keyword lists for all my projects within my keyword research tool really has been a game changer for me. The only downside is it is hard to somehow mark or highlight those phrases that you have already written content for. Other than that minor annoyance, it gives me a great place to see all the keywords I plan on using in my business.

Account Limits Clearly Tracked

I love this UI tweak that Mangools have made, where you can see a quick overview on the limits you have remaining on your account and when they refresh. You simply click on your profile picture and it will pop up, making it clear to know what limits you may be approaching in your account.

10 Day Free Trial

Not only do Mangools offer a free trial but it is a trial that only requires basic information to start, whereas a lot of other tools ask you for a credit card and might even charge you a nominal fee for a trial account. It’s great to see Mangools offering such a generous free trial.

What I Don’t Like about KWFinder and Mangools

Less Data

When it comes to SEO tools and data I am learning that you get what you pay for when it comes to database size. When doing keyword research KWFinder will limit your results from 200-700 depending on your plan. When you search these same terms in the more expensive keyword research tools, you will literally get thousands of keyword ideas. This gives the people with those more expensive tools a clear advantage.

No Bulk Check

As someone that does a lot of keyword research for multiple sites I find the fact that KWFinder doesn’t have a bulk check tool annoying (or if they do, they should make it more obvious because I haven’t found it!). This means I have to spend a long time clicking the magnifying glass next to each keyword I would like the tool to analyze. I regularly import keyword lists into the tool of around 300-500 key phrases, so you can imagine how much annoying clicking I have to do. I have even resorted to having something else on in the background (maybe a movie or podcast) to make sure I can get through all this clicking without getting bored. Funnily enough, this is something that I don’t see a lot of other big reviewers talking about as a negative, but for me this is massive!

Rank Tracking Too Limited

On the basic plan you only get 200 keywords that you can rank track for your site and then you only get 700 with the premium plan and 1500 when in the agency plan. This would be fine for someone with one or two sites, but if (like me) you have over five this amount of keywords is too limiting. I like to have at least 200 keywords for each website I own, which leads me to have to use other tools to do this. And yes I could buy the agency plan but frankly then I would have a lot of other wasted resources not used each day (and I would be paying between $80-130 for the pleasure. Rank tracking should be more flexible within the plans, allowing us to add and take away keywords tracked for a change in subscription cost.

Slow Performance

KWFinder can be annoying in terms of performance, especially when you are using it regularly every day. Sometimes you click to analyze a keyword and the tool gets stuck and then after around 10-30 seconds it will tell you something went wrong and to do the analysis again. Even when the tool does work, the analyze time is pretty slow when compared to other tools. When you couple this with the no bulk check problem mentioned above and it makes the KWFinder platform frustrating at times. This must be down to the code of the tools backend, something Mangools should be looking to upgrade and improve. I don’t get this with other tools I use or have tried. Pull your finger out Mangools, especially now that your tool is pretty popular!

Tool Setup

Mangools may wonder why people forget about their other tools, then they give us one of the worst tool setups and accompanying user interfaces ever! Why do they feel the need to split up their offering into several separate tools? In my eyes they should do what all the successful players are doing and simply have one tool with one tool name and have all the features available at the users fingertips within that one tool. They only have their selves to blame for people only sticking to KWFinder. I would love to know the statistics about how many of their users actually use tools outside of KWFinder often! I bet it isn’t a lot. 

Should You Subscribe to Mangools and KWFinder?

As someone that has used the tool for several years, this is my takeaway. Mangools is a great suite of tools for an online business owner that is on a budget or simply doesn’t want to pay the earth for their SEO tool. If that is you, this is a great option that I would highly recommend. It is great for people just starting out in this industry that they can access such a high-quality tool for this price.

Having said that, I recommend you try out their trial and see if the workflow is good for you. Will you find the slow loading of keyword analysis and clicking that magnifying glass often annoying like me? Depends on the amount you want to use the tool and your level of patience. Hopefully, Mangools will upgrade the backend of their tool so we don’t have to talk about this downside.

Another thing is that KWfinder and the keyword competition score is still the number one reason that most people would invest in this suite of tools. That world class keyword difficulty metric is worth the admission price alone, and this is why most users stick with KWFinder. They are starting to build out their other tools but still not to the point where I feel like using them often. Hopefully, they continue fleshing them out. Also, please give us more flexibility with your pricing plans. You are forcing us to pay for quotas for features we may not use. I may want more keywords to check rank for, but I don’t need all those other high quotas in the agency plan.

If you want to try out Mangools and KWFinder for yourself try the 10-day free trial below.