How to Do Keyword Research for Free: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

Most people pick blog topics the same way. They think of something they know about, write it up, hit publish, and wait. Then nothing happens, and they decide the writing must be the problem.

Sometimes it is. But a lot of the time, nobody was searching for that topic, or the people who were wanted something different from what the post gave them. Keyword research is just the habit of checking this before you spend a whole weekend on a draft.

You don't need a paid tool for it. Ahrefs and Semrush are good products, and if you ever outgrow the free options you'll know without being told. Until then, Google hands out most of what a beginner needs, and a few small tools fill the gaps.

Below is the order I'd use them in. One hypothetical example runs through every step: a small blog about making coffee at home, and a post on cold brew you're thinking of writing. Alongside it, I've pulled in real stories from other people and companies who did this kind of research, with the source named each time. Those are their results, told as they told them, so treat the numbers as their claims and not as a guarantee for your own site.

What you're actually looking for

A keyword is whatever someone types into a search box. Sometimes it's a single word. More often it's a messy half-question. "Cold brew" is a keyword. So is "how long does homemade cold brew last in the fridge."

When I look at a possible keyword, I ask myself three things. Are people searching for it? Could a site like mine realistically compete? And would the person searching be happy to land on the page I'd write?

Beginners skip that last one all the time. Someone typing "buy cold brew maker" wants a shop, not your 2,000-word essay on steeping time. Marcus Sheridan, the pool company owner who turned blogging into a business, makes the same point in his talks, as summarized by the Spiderworking blog. A post like "5 fun games to play in your swimming pool" might bring visitors, but they may have no plans to buy a pool. A search like "best pool providers in Richmond Virginia" comes from someone who is shopping. Same subject, very different reader.

Every keyword number you'll see in any tool is an estimate, even in the expensive ones. Use the numbers to compare one idea against another. Don't read them as a promise of traffic.

Step 1: Start with what's already in your head

Before you open any tool, make a plain list of 15 or 20 topics. Not keywords, just topics. What do readers ask you? What confused you when you were starting out? What did you google last month?

For the coffee blog, that list might be: cold brew ratios, best beans for cold brew, mason jar versus pitcher, why cold brew turns bitter, how long it keeps, concentrate versus ready-to-drink.

Then go and see how real people phrase these things. Search your topic on Reddit and skim the titles. Read YouTube comments under popular videos. Check Quora. You're hunting for wording, because people don't write "optimal steeping duration." They write "why is my cold brew so bitter??"

How this worked for River Pools. The best-known example of starting from customer questions is River Pools and Spas. After the 2008 crash hit his business, Marcus Sheridan sat down and listed every question buyers had ever asked him about fiberglass pools, then wrote an answer to each one. According to PRNEWS's coverage of his Content Marketing World keynote, the first article was "How Much Does a Fiberglass Pool Cost?", a question he says nobody in the industry was answering openly. PRNEWS reports that he credits that one article with $150,000 in sales, and that he tells other businesses to turn their top 100 customer questions into 100 posts. In a later podcast interview with Find Your Yellow Tux, he described writing those answers late at night, one at a time, and said the site eventually became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world. Those figures are his own, so read them as his account. The method is the useful part: he started from real questions, not from a keyword tool.

Starting here matters more than it sounds. If you begin with a tool, you'll chase the same suggestions everyone else is chasing.

Step 2: Let Google finish your sentences

Open Google in a private window so your own search history doesn't bend the results. Type your seed topic and stop before you hit enter. The suggestions that drop down can show you phrases people commonly search for. They're not search volume data, but they're free ideas, and they're phrased the way real people talk.

Now play with it. Type "cold brew how" and see what appears. Then "cold brew why," "cold brew vs," "cold brew for." Try each letter of the alphabet after the seed, too. It's tedious and it works.

Next, search the phrase properly and look at two spots on the results page. The "People also ask" box is one. Click a question and it expands and often adds new ones below it. The "Related searches" list at the very bottom is the other.

You can automate a lot of this. AnswerThePublic and AlsoAsked both turn a seed keyword into a map of questions, and both have free usage that's capped, so check what you get before you plan around them.

Copy everything worth keeping into a spreadsheet. Don't judge anything yet.

Step 3: Get a rough sense of volume with Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is Google's own tool, so it's one of the most direct free sources of Google's own keyword estimates. It lives inside Google Ads, which sounds like a trap. It isn't, as long as you're careful.

The usual route goes like this. Sign in to Google Ads, and when it pushes you toward creating a campaign, look for the option to switch to Expert Mode and then to create an account without a campaign. Depending on your country and account, Google may ask for billing details before setup finishes. You aren't charged for research, but don't launch a campaign by accident. Google moves these buttons around, so if your screen looks different, hunt for the same options rather than giving up.

Once you're in, open Tools, then Planning, then Keyword Planner, and choose "Discover new keywords." Type in your seeds. Set the location and language to match your real readers, not just wherever you happen to live. Those numbers can be very different from country to country.

There's a catch. Without active ad spend, Google tends to show volume as wide ranges, like 1K to 10K, instead of exact figures. The SEO Engine blog tested the free tier against four paid tools across 47 keywords and reached the same conclusion. The ranges are real, and they limit how precisely you can compare competitors. It's annoying. It's still useful, because it tells you whether a keyword lives in the hundreds or the tens of thousands, and that's often all a beginner needs.

Keep in mind that the tool was built for advertisers, so its suggestions lean commercial. The CPC column shows what advertisers pay per click. It can be a clue that advertisers see commercial value in a query, but it isn't a direct measure of what the searcher wants, so don't read it as "these people are ready to buy."

If you want a second set of numbers, the Keyword Surfer Chrome extension shows rough volumes on the Google results page, and Ahrefs has a free keyword generator with limited results. When the tools disagree, and they will, treat every figure as a direction and skip the hunt for the one true number.

Step 4: Check whether interest is rising or fading

A keyword with decent volume can still be a bad bet if fewer people search it every year. Google Trends catches that.

Type your keyword in and set the range to five years. Trends doesn't show search volume. It shows relative interest on a scale of 0 to 100, which is fine, because you're looking at the shape of the line, not the number.

Is it climbing, flat, or sliding? Does it spike at the same time every year? Check the chart yourself before you build a publishing plan around a guess.

Two coffee examples worth knowing. A QuestionDB guide on using Trends draws the line between a recurring pattern and a fad with two drinks. Searches for hot chocolate recipes jump reliably every winter. Dalgona coffee, the whipped coffee that took over social media in 2020, peaked and then faded fast. If you were planning a post around each, the first is a topic you can update and republish every year. The second is a bet that may already be over.

Once you know a topic is seasonal, timing matters. The UK agency Pod Digital gives a simple rule: if a keyword peaks in June, publish in April, so Google has time to crawl and index your page before demand arrives. Search Engine Land's guide to SEO seasonality makes a similar point, that you want to be visible before traffic peaks, not chasing it afterward. One caution from the same guides: seasonal terms can get crowded when the peak arrives, so check who's already ranking.

Trends also lets you compare terms side by side. If you can't decide between "cold brew concentrate" and "cold brew ratio," put both in and look at which one has more life in it.

Small or very specific keywords sometimes show "not enough data." That doesn't mean nobody searches them. It just means Trends can't say.

Step 5: Look at the competition with your own eyes

Paid tools give you a difficulty score. Free tools mostly don't, and those scores are rough guesses anyway. A quick manual check tells you a lot.

Search your keyword and study page one. Ask yourself a few things.

Who is ranking? If it's mostly huge publishers and big brands, you'll probably struggle for a while. Forum threads or small personal blogs in the results can be a sign that the page isn't fully locked up by major sites. That's worth investigating, not a green light. You still have to compare how relevant, thorough, fresh and well-linked those pages are next to what you could produce.

What kind of pages are they? This is the intent check. If page one is all product listings, a how-to guide won't fit. If it's all long guides, a thin 400-word post won't compete. Nullstacks, an SEO agency blog, describes the mistake as writing from the keyword down instead of from the results page up. The keyword tells you the topic, and the results page tells you the shape of page Google expects to show.

How old and how good is it? Outdated or shallow results can be an opening, though not a guarantee.

Write a quick note in your sheet: easy, medium, or hard. You're allowed to be wrong. You'll get better at this fast.

Step 6: Mine your own data in Search Console

If your site has been live for a while, Google Search Console is probably the best free keyword tool you have, because the data is yours. It shows real searches that made your pages appear on Google.

Verify your site, open the Performance report, and look at the Queries tab. Sort by impressions. Queries where you're already getting impressions but few clicks, or where you appear somewhere around positions 8 to 20, are worth a closer look. Google's own Search Console Help explains why to treat position carefully. It's an average across all the searches where you appeared, so it can differ from what you see when you search the phrase yourself.

A story from an agency. In a collection of Search Console success stories on Grit Daily, the team behind SERPpro describes opening its Performance report and finding that people were reaching the site through queries like "white label link building services" and "white label SEO partnerships." Those were more specific than the keyword the site had been targeting. The team built a separate page for each, because the intent behind each phrase was a little different, and says most of the new pages were ranking first or second within a week. Another contributor in the same piece describes starting by filtering for queries on page two, positions 11 to 20, with decent impressions and almost no clicks. Both are self-reported results, so don't expect the same speed. The lesson is the habit: your own query data often shows what people already think your site is about.

If your site is brand new, this report will be empty or close to it. That's normal. Verify the site now so the data starts collecting, do steps 1 to 5 in the meantime, and come back in a month or two.

Step 7: Choose, then write it down

Your sheet is probably messy by now. Keep the columns simple: the keyword, what the searcher really wants, the rough volume range, how crowded page one looked, and a status (idea, drafting, published). Fancy sheets don't get used.

Then pick using three questions. Is the intent clear? Does page one look beatable? Do you actually know enough to write something better than what's there?

If your site is new, lean toward long, specific phrases. Ahrefs makes this case with the example of someone launching a cryptocurrency blog. The popular, high-volume keywords are tempting, but a brand-new site has almost no chance of ranking for them soon. Longer, more specific phrases give even a new site a shot at the top ten, and ranking for one of them often brings visits from related searches too. For the coffee blog, skip "cold brew" and go for "how long does cold brew last in the fridge." Fewer people search it, but fewer sites are fighting for it.

A small-blogger version of the same lesson comes from the MostlyBlogging site. Its author says that many of her earliest posts used a single generic word as the keyword, and that she wished she had known about long-tail keywords when she started. She went back and updated the old posts once she did.

Each post gets one main keyword. If you cover the topic thoroughly, you'll naturally use many related terms without forcing them in. A keyword repeated awkwardly every third sentence reads like exactly what it is. Google Search Central's guidance on creating helpful, people-first content is worth reading once in full.

Mistakes that waste the most time

Chasing the biggest number is the classic one. A keyword with 50,000 monthly searches sounds great until you see who owns page one. A keyword with 300 searches that you could actually rank for can send you more traffic than the big one ever will.

Ignoring intent comes next. Volume means nothing if your page doesn't match what people want when they click. The River Pools story is the reverse of this mistake: its most valuable posts targeted questions from people close to buying.

Then there's treating estimates as facts. Two tools can give you very different numbers for the same keyword, and both are guessing. If you catch yourself agonizing over 1,200 versus 1,900, stop. Those two keywords are basically the same size.

Doing research once and never returning is quieter but just as costly. Search habits drift and new questions appear, so a short revisit every few months is plenty.

And writing for the tool instead of the reader. If a post reads oddly because you forced a phrase in, cut the phrase.

How long this takes

For a first pass on one topic area, give yourself an afternoon. Maybe two hours if you already know the subject well. After a few rounds it drops to under an hour, because you stop second-guessing every step.

It also gets faster to read results pages. After you've looked at enough of them, you start noticing mismatches, like a query that clearly wants a how-to while most of the top results are product pages, without opening every link.

Questions people ask

Can I do keyword research without knowing search volume?
Yes. Autocomplete, People Also Ask, Reddit threads and Search Console all show you what people care about without a number attached. Marcus Sheridan's whole approach started with customer questions, not volume data. Volume helps you compare ideas. It isn't required to find them.

Should I target keywords that show zero or very low volume?
Sometimes, yes. Tools often show low numbers for specific, newer, or conversational searches that real people do type. If the topic fits your site and you can answer it well, a low reported number alone isn't a reason to skip it.

How do I choose between two keywords with the same intent?
Look at both results pages. Pick the one where the top pages feel weaker or more dated, or where you know something the current pages don't cover. If they look equal, write about the one you can explain better.

Is Google Keyword Planner really free?
You don't pay to use it, but you need a Google Ads account, and without ad spend you usually see ranges instead of exact numbers.

Do I need a website to start?
Steps 1 to 5 don't need one. Only Search Console does.

Is AI-assisted writing a problem for search?
Google's published guidance on AI-generated content says the focus is on quality and helpfulness, not on how the content was produced.

Sources for the stories and facts above

The River Pools and Spas story comes from PRNEWS's coverage of Marcus Sheridan's Content Marketing World keynote and from his interview on the Find Your Yellow Tux podcast. The intent example comes from the Spiderworking blog's summary of his talk. The Keyword Planner range findings come from The SEO Engine blog. The Trends examples come from QuestionDB's guide to Google Trends for keyword research, Pod Digital, and Search Engine Land's guide to SEO seasonality. The Search Console story comes from Grit Daily's collection of Google Search Console success stories, and the explanation of average position comes from Google's Search Console Help. The long-tail examples come from Ahrefs and the MostlyBlogging site, and the results-page point comes from the Nullstacks blog. Google Search Central's helpful-content and AI-content guidance is referenced in the final sections. Figures and outcomes are as reported by those sources and may not match your own results.

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How to Do Keyword Research for Free: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners — TopBlogs

Learn keyword research for free with Google Search Console, Keyword Planner, Trends and autocomplete. A simple process for beginners, with real stories from other sites.

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