How to get exact Google search volume without a Google Ads account

Wrenfield Data — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:04:04 +0000

Disclosure: I built Keyword Search Volume, the Apify Actor used in this tutorial. All numbers below come from real runs on October 18, 2026 (US, English).

Open Google Keyword Planner without an active ad campaign and the "Avg. monthly searches" column shows ranges: 1K–10K, 10K–100K. A keyword searched 1,300 times a month and one searched 9,400 times land in the same bucket. You can't plan a content calendar on that.

Google shows exact averages to accounts with ad spend. The underlying data is also available through the Google Ads API, and that's what this tutorial uses, without you needing a Google Ads account, a developer token or a credit card on Google's side.

What you'll have after 5 minutes: a spreadsheet with exact monthly search volume, CPC, competition, top-of-page bids and 12 months of history for every keyword on your list, plus keyword ideas from a seed.

Prefer video? The same walkthrough is on YouTube: Exact Google search volume without a Google Ads account (video).

What you need

A free Apify account. The free plan includes $5 of platform credit per month and no card is required. (Free-plan runs of this Actor use a monthly-refreshed keyword database and are capped at 10 keywords / 10 ideas per run; a paid plan removes the caps.)
A list of keywords. That's it. No code needed, but there's an API section at the end.

Step 1: Paste your keywords

Open Keyword Search Volume and click Try for free. In the input form:

Keywords: one per line. I used eight keywords for a hypothetical home-office blog.
Location: United States (also accepts GB, a Google Ads location code like 2840, or a city such as California,United States).
Language: English.
What to get: Search volume.

The exact input of my run:

{
  "keywords": ["standing desk", "standing desk converter", "best standing desk",
               "electric standing desk", "standing desk benefits",
               "l shaped standing desk", "standing desk mat", "walking pad"],
  "location": "United States",
  "language": "English",
  "mode": "search_volume",
  "includeMonthlySearches": true
}

Click Start. My run finished in 25 seconds.

Step 2: Read the results

Keyword	Avg. monthly searches	CPC	Competition
walking pad	246,000	$1.24	HIGH
standing desk	135,000	$5.16	HIGH
electric standing desk	22,200	$3.27	HIGH
standing desk converter	18,100	$2.24	HIGH
l shaped standing desk	12,100	$5.47	HIGH
best standing desk	8,100	$7.28	HIGH
standing desk benefits	2,900	$0.73	LOW
standing desk mat	1,900	$3.94	HIGH

Three things jump out that Keyword Planner's ranges would hide:

"walking pad" is almost twice as big as "standing desk" (246K vs 135K), and its CPC is a quarter of the price. In range mode both show as "100K–1M".
"best standing desk" has the highest CPC ($7.28) on the list. Advertisers pay most for comparison intent, which is a strong hint that a review article on that term monetizes well.
"standing desk benefits" is the only LOW-competition keyword. Small (2,900/mo) but informational and cheap to rank for.

Note: Google's "competition" column is about ad competition, not how hard it is to rank organically. For organic difficulty, see the next part of this series (keyword difficulty).

Step 3: Check seasonality

Every row includes monthly_searches, the month-by-month volume for the last 12 months (or up to 4 years with dateFrom/dateTo). Plot it before you schedule content: both "standing desk" and "electric standing desk" were 18–33% down month-over-month in this run, while "standing desk benefits" was up 24%. Publish a buyer guide ahead of the seasonal peak, not after it.

Step 4: Find new keywords from one seed

Switch What to get to Keyword ideas, enter a single seed (standing desk), set Max keyword ideas to 30 and Minimum search volume for ideas to 100. My run took 9 seconds and returned 30 ideas. A sample:

Keyword idea	Monthly searches	CPC
stand up desk	18,100	$5.59
sit stand desk	18,100	$6.01
adjustable desk	18,100	$3.35
adjustable standing desk	14,800	$3.83
laptop stand for desk	12,100	$1.00
standing desk with drawers	8,100	$2.81
small standing desk	4,400	$2.73
corner standing desk	2,900	$3.70

Ideas also include brand terms (FlexiSpot, Jarvis, Vari, Uplift). Those are useful if you write comparisons, and easy to filter out if you don't.

Step 5: Export, schedule or call it as an API

Download as CSV/Excel/JSON from the run page. To track demand monthly, save the input as a task and add a schedule. Or call it as a search volume API:

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/wrenfield-data~keyword-search-volume/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"keywords": ["standing desk", "walking pad"], "location": "United States"}'

Python:

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("wrenfield-data/keyword-search-volume").call(
    run_input={"keywords": ["standing desk", "walking pad"], "location": "United States"},
    max_total_charge_usd=1.0,   # hard cap for this run
)
for row in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(row["keyword"], row["search_volume"], row["cpc"])

It also works from Make, Zapier, n8n (official Apify node) and AI agents via the Apify MCP server.

What it costs

Pay per event: $4 per 1,000 keyword results plus a small fee per Google Ads request (up to 1,000 keywords per request). Keywords with no data are free, and paid Apify plans get volume discounts automatically. The Actor's Pricing tab has the current numbers. Set Maximum cost per run if you want a hard ceiling.

Caveats (read before you trust any volume number)

Google groups close variants ("standing desk" / "standing desks") and reports the same number for both. Don't add them up.
Google rounds into buckets (8,100, 12,100, 18,100…). Treat volumes as directional; compare keywords to each other rather than reading them as exact traffic.
CPC is the advertiser average, not what you'll earn per visitor.

Next: which of these keywords can you actually win?

Volume tells you what's worth having; it doesn't tell you what a young site can rank for. Two companion Actors take the same list one step further:

Bulk Keyword Difficulty Checker: keyword difficulty (0–100) and search intent for each keyword, $5 per 1,000 keywords. On this list, "standing desk converter" scored KD 7 and "l shaped standing desk" KD 10 in an October 18 run, versus 38 for "standing desk": 18,100 and 12,100 searches a month that a small site can realistically go after.
Competitor Keywords: every keyword a competitor's domain ranks for, with position and estimated traffic, $2 per 1,000 keywords plus $0.03 per domain. Feed the results back into Keyword Search Volume when you need exact volume and CPC for the whole list.

Next in this series: competitor keyword research without an Ahrefs subscription (exact volume first, then difficulty), and tracking which brands ChatGPT recommends.

DEV Community: Wrenfield Data