I don't see a whole lot of people talking about the Keyword Planner's untimely death, but I used the tool quite frequently to run keyword audits for my SMB clients. It helped me discover which keywords were working in each market, and was also handy for discovering outliers — keywords with ridiculously high CPCs, good opportunities, and so on.

Once my research was complete, I'd put all of this data together in a report to help customers & potential clients better gauge how much to budget, where to spend that budget, and what keywords and ad groups might work best in a campaign.

I can't say the reports were always accurate, but they were certainly better than nothing. And nothing is all I've got now that the Keyword Planner no longer provides any keyword data.

So far, the best replacement I've found is the Keyword Overview tool in SEMRush. However, this doesn't work well for local markets since you can't run bulk queries at anything except the country level.

Is there something else I should be using to help me research and build search campaigns? I don't mind paying for the tool as long as I can help maintain my workflow.