Every successful SEO campaign starts with the same question: what are people actually typing into Google? You don't need expensive software to answer it. This guide walks through how to do keyword research using free tools only, Google's autocomplete, Keyword Planner, Trends and Search Console, and finishes with a short list of keywords you can genuinely win. Keyword research done this way takes an afternoon, costs nothing, and beats guessing every single time.
Why keyword research comes first
Keywords are demand made visible. Before anyone writes a page, buys a domain or briefs a designer, keyword research tells you whether people search for the thing at all, what words they use for it, and how hard the competition will be. Skip it and you risk building pages nobody asked for, a mistake we see constantly and one of the most expensive in SEO because you pay for it twice: once to build the page and again to redo it. Search volume, the number of times a phrase is searched each month, is the first sanity check on every content idea you have.
It's also a skill worth owning in-house even if you later hire help. Learning how to do keyword research yourself means you can sense-check any agency's proposal, spot when a "quick win" keyword is actually unwinnable, and connect everything you publish to something customers genuinely type. Paid platforms wrap keyword research in dashboards and difficulty scores, and they're excellent, but every one of them is built on the same public signals you're about to use directly.
Step 1: Collect your seed keywords
Seed keywords are the raw material of keyword research: the obvious phrases for what you sell. Open a spreadsheet and list every service, every product, every problem you solve, in the words a customer would use, not your industry's jargon. A plumber's seeds are "blocked drain", "hot water repair" and "gas fitting", not "hydro-jet drainage solutions". Add location versions if you serve an area, and mine your inbox and phone enquiries for phrasing. Ten to twenty seeds is plenty to start.
Two underrated seed sources: your competitors and your own sales conversations. Read the menus and service pages of the three businesses you most often lose work to, because the phrases they structure their sites around are phrases someone has already validated. Then listen to how customers describe the job on the phone. The gap between what an industry calls a service and what a customer calls a problem is where the easiest keywords hide. If you serve several suburbs, seed each one only for services people genuinely search by location; the volume check in step three will confirm which deserve their own page.
Step 2: Expand the list with Google's free tools
Now let Google finish your sentences. Type each seed into the search bar slowly and record what autocomplete suggests, because those suggestions are drawn from real queries. Run the search and harvest the People Also Ask questions and the related searches at the bottom of the page. Both reveal the questions and variations around your seeds, and most of what you'll collect are long tail keywords: longer, more specific phrases that are easier to rank for and closer to a decision. A hundred seeds' worth of expansions gives you more ideas than most paid tools would.
Step 3: Check search volume without paying
Most guides on how to do keyword research assume a paid subscription for this step. You don't need one. Google Keyword Planner, inside a free Google Ads account, shows monthly search volume for any list you paste in. Without a running ad campaign it shows ranges rather than exact figures, but ranges are enough to separate keywords people search every day from keywords nobody types at all. Cross-check direction with Google Trends, which shows whether interest is growing, seasonal or fading. And if a page on your site already ranks, Google Search Console shows the real queries it appears for, actual data from your own market.
Record whatever volume signal you find next to each keyword in the spreadsheet. Precision doesn't matter at this stage; separation does. You're sorting keywords into rough tiers, searched constantly, searched sometimes, searched never, and any of the free sources can manage that. Keyword research fails on decisions made with no data far more often than on data that was slightly imprecise.
Zero-volume rule: if every tool shows a keyword at or near zero searches, don't build a page for it. Low volume with clear buying intent can still be worth a page. No volume is a page nobody will ever visit.
Step 4: Judge difficulty and intent
Difficulty is where free keyword research needs judgement instead of a score. Search each shortlisted keyword and look at who ranks: if page one is national brands, directories and major publishers on every result, a small site will struggle, but if you can see small businesses, forums or thin pages, the door is open. Paid platforms compress this into a keyword difficulty number, and our guide to SEO tools covers them, but the eyeball test tells you most of the story free. While you're on the results page, read the format too. What ranks reveals the search intent behind the keyword, and a page that fights the intent loses no matter how well it's written.
Step 5: Pick targets and map them to pages
You now have volume, difficulty and intent for every candidate. Sort ruthlessly: keep keywords with real volume you can plausibly win, group the ones that mean the same thing, and assign each group to exactly one page, existing or planned. One primary keyword per page, supported by its close variations, is the mapping that keeps pages from competing with each other. That map becomes the backbone of your content strategy: it tells you what to write next and why.
That's how to do keyword research end to end with free tools: collect seeds, expand them with Google's own suggestions, check volume in Keyword Planner, judge difficulty and intent from the live results, then map winners to pages. The paid tools make it faster. They don't make it different.
One last habit separates sites that compound from sites that stall: repeat the process. Keyword research is a snapshot of demand, and demand moves, new competitors, new phrasing, new questions. A light quarterly refresh, plus a proper pass whenever you add a service, keeps the map honest. The second time you work through how to do keyword research it takes half as long, because the spreadsheet, the sources and the judgement are already in place.
Want the shortcut? Keyword research is the first thing we do on every campaign, with the commercial-grade data to back it. Run the free audit or talk to us about a keyword map for your site.
