| Keyword | Volume | CPC | Competition | 12-month trend |
|---|
How it works
The Yandex Keyword Tool harvests real autocomplete suggestions from Yandex's public suggest API (the same engine that drives the dropdown in yandex.com's search box) for any seed term you enter. Suggestions reflect what real Yandex users have searched for. We then enrich every harvested keyword with monthly Google search volume, CPC, competition, and a 12-month trend via the Keywords Everywhere API.
How the harvest works. The harvester runs in your browser via JSONP (calls go from your IP, not ours) and hits Yandex's suggest.yandex.com/suggest-ya.cgi endpoint. We iterate your seed combined with the alphabet (a-z, 0-9) plus ~70 modifier words spanning questions, comparisons, prepositions, buyer-intent qualifiers, and tutorials. For each prefix Yandex returns 0-10 suggestions; we collect every unique one. A typical 5-seed harvest produces 200-500+ keywords. For Russian-market research, enter Cyrillic seeds directly (e.g. купить машину).
Volume enrichment. As keywords are harvested, batches of 100 are sent to the KE API for Google volume, CPC, competition, and 12-month trend. Yandex doesn't publish per-keyword volume publicly, so Google volume is used as a proxy. Be aware that for Cyrillic / Russian-market keywords, Google volume may substantially underestimate actual Yandex demand because Google's market share in Russia is small.
Country targeting. The Country dropdown changes the volume-lookup country (so the KE API returns Google volume for that market). Yandex's suggest endpoint itself ignores the country hint and serves the same suggestions regardless. Your last-picked country persists across sessions.
Conservative pacing. The harvest is paced at roughly one request every 1.5 seconds to stay below Yandex's per-IP rate limit. A full 5-seed harvest takes ~15 minutes. You can stop early at any time and keep the keywords found so far.
Plan caps. On the Free plan you can run 500 keyword lookups per day across all our keyword tools combined.
What the columns mean
- Keyword
- The exact suggestion Yandex's autosuggest returned for some prefix of your seed term. Click the cross-link icon to open the keyword in SERP Checker for a live SERP audit.
- Volume
- Monthly Google search volume averaged over the past 12 months, sourced from Google Keyword Planner via the Keywords Everywhere API. Yandex doesn't publish per-keyword volume publicly. For Russian-market Cyrillic queries, this number can underestimate real Yandex demand; for cross-validation, check Yandex.Wordstat directly.
- CPC
- Average cost-per-click that advertisers pay in Google Ads for that keyword, in the country's currency. For ads on Yandex itself (Yandex.Direct), CPCs are measured separately in Yandex.Direct's interface.
- Competition
- Google Ads' competition score (Low / Medium / High), reflecting how many advertisers bid on the keyword on Google. A rough proxy for general commercial interest; for Yandex-specific SEO competition, the signal is approximate.
- 12-Month Trend
- Sparkline of monthly Google search volume over the past year. Useful for spotting seasonal patterns. Hover any point on the chart for the exact month-over-month value.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Yandex Keyword Tool?
It's a free, no-signup keyword-research tool that harvests real autocomplete suggestions from Yandex's public suggest API for any seed term you enter, then enriches every harvested keyword with monthly Google search volume, CPC, competition, and a 12-month trend. The harvester runs in your browser (calls go from your IP), and the volume data comes from the Keywords Everywhere API.
Why does Yandex matter for SEO?
Yandex is the dominant search engine in Russia (~50-60% market share, ahead of Google) and a meaningful player across CIS countries (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey). If your business sells into Russia or the broader Russian-speaking market (~258 million native speakers worldwide), ranking on Yandex matters more than ranking on Google there. Yandex also has strong product integration with Yandex.Maps, Yandex.Market, and Yandex.Taxi, which drive a lot of commercial intent.
How does Yandex's autosuggest work?
Yandex exposes autosuggest via the public suggest.yandex.com/suggest-ya.cgi endpoint (the same engine that drives the dropdown in yandex.com's search box). Each prefix you type returns suggestions Yandex has seen real users search for. We iterate your seed term combined with a-z, 0-9, and ~70 modifier words, collecting every unique suggestion as JSONP. A typical 5-seed harvest produces 200-500+ keywords.
Should I use Russian or English seeds?
For Russian-market keyword research, use Cyrillic seeds (e.g. купить телефон for "buy phone"). Yandex's suggest data heavily favors Cyrillic input even for users in Russia. English seeds will return mostly English-language suggestions, which is fine if your target audience is English-speaking expats or tourists searching from Russia, but won't reflect what Russian-speaking users actually search for. The harvester accepts Cyrillic text directly.
How is Yandex SEO different from Google SEO?
Yandex weights several signals differently than Google. User behavior signals (click-through rate, time on page, return-to-SERP) carry more weight on Yandex; backlinks slightly less. Yandex pays close attention to a site's commercial relevance (the LF-IDF model) and applies a strong host-level quality score. Practical implication: write genuinely useful content for the Russian audience, use Yandex.Webmaster (the Yandex equivalent of Google Search Console) to monitor indexing, and earn links from .ru / .by / .kz domains where possible.
Are the volume numbers Yandex-specific?
No, and this is the biggest caveat. The volume column shows Google search volume for the harvested phrase, sourced from Google Keyword Planner via the Keywords Everywhere API. Yandex doesn't publish per-keyword volume publicly. For seeds that are common Cyrillic-language queries in Russia, Google volume can substantially underestimate actual Yandex demand (because Google's Russian-market share is small). For Yandex's own keyword data, use the free Yandex.Wordstat tool directly, but it requires a Yandex account.
Why does the harvest take ~15 minutes?
To stay below Yandex's per-IP rate limit we space requests out at ~one every 1.5 seconds. A 5-seed harvest makes about 530 calls (5 seeds x 106 modifiers), which takes ~15 minutes. Hammering the endpoint faster than that quickly leads to IP throttling. You can leave the tab open; results stream into the table as they're found, and you can stop early to keep the keywords harvested so far.
Does the Country dropdown change Yandex results?
The Country dropdown changes the volume-lookup country (so the KE API returns Google volume for that market). Yandex's suggest endpoint itself ignores the gl parameter and serves the same suggestions regardless, so the keywords harvested won't change with the dropdown. For a Russia-specific volume signal, our data isn't the right source. For phrasing variety (what real Yandex users are typing), the harvested keyword list is the same regardless of country.