How to Do Keyword Research for Free: Beginner's Guide

My first blog post went live on a Tuesday in February. I'd written about 1,400 words on "ways to earn money online," felt pretty good about it, and checked Google Search Console the next morning expecting at least a few impressions.

Zero. Not low numbers, just zero. I checked again the next day. Still zero. By day 61, the impressions column for that post had not moved once.

That's when I actually looked at what other people in similar niches were doing differently. The answer, annoyingly, was something I'd skipped entirely: keyword research.

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What keyword research is actually solving

Here's the thing nobody explained to me clearly at first. Keyword research isn't some advanced SEO ritual. It's just answering one question: what words do people actually type into Google when they're looking for what you wrote about?

My post was titled around "ways to earn money online," which is how I'd phrase it if I were talking to a friend. But actual searches lean toward things like "earn money from home using phone" or "part time online jobs for students." Same general topic, different words entirely. And for a brand new blog with zero authority, word matching matters a lot more than it does for an established site.

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Tool one: Google's autocomplete, completely free

The first thing I actually tried, almost as an afterthought, was just typing into the Google search bar and watching what it suggested.

I typed "earn money" and Google suggested "earn money online from home," "earn money apps that actually pay," and "earn money typing jobs." These aren't random. Google only suggests phrases that real people search often enough to matter.

I wrote a post around "apps that actually pay" because that exact phrase showed up in autocomplete, and it started getting a handful of impressions within about five weeks. Not a huge number. But compared to zero, it felt like something had clicked.

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Tool two: People Also Ask, and the related searches box

Search any topic on Google, and partway down the results page there's usually a box labeled "People also ask." Scroll to the very bottom and there's another one called "Related searches."

These two boxes are, to put it plainly, a free goldmine. I searched "how to start a blog" and the People Also Ask box gave me four real questions people search:

"How much money can a blog make?" "Can I start a blog with no money?" "What do I need to write a blog post?" "How long does it take for a blog to get traffic?"

Each one of those is a potential subheading, or even a whole separate post. I used three of them as FAQ questions in different posts, and one became an entire H2 section almost word for word.

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Tool three: Google Search Console, which you probably already have

If your blog is live, even with zero traffic, Search Console takes about ten minutes to set up and it's free.

Go to the Performance tab and look at your Queries. About six weeks in, I noticed one query, "fiverr for students with no experience," had 41 impressions but only 1 click. Google was already showing my page for that search. People just weren't clicking on it.

I changed the title to include "students" more directly and adjusted the opening paragraph to match. Within about nine days, clicks for that query went from 1 to 8. Small absolute number, but that's roughly an 800% jump, and it told me the page itself was fine, the entry point just needed work.

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So what counts as a "good" search volume?

This part genuinely confused me at first. I assumed bigger numbers were always better, so I went looking for keywords with 10,000+ monthly searches.

That was backwards. Keywords at that volume are dominated by sites with years of backlinks and authority. A brand new blog isn't getting anywhere near page one for those, at least not for a long while.

My first 11 posts targeted keywords in the 80 to 420 monthly search range. Small, sure. But competition was thin too. Seven of those eleven posts reached the first two pages of Google within about five months.

The fastest one to rank targeted "how to make an invoice on phone for free," sitting at around 95 monthly searches. Specific phrase, nobody big competing for it directly. It hit page one in 23 days.

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The free tools that were actually useful

Google Trends shows whether interest in a topic is rising or falling, and it's free with no account needed.

Ubersuggest's free tier gives you three searches a day. Sounds limiting, but three a day adds up if you check it weekly while planning posts.

AnswerThePublic's free version gives a couple of searches per day and breaks a keyword down into questions, comparisons, and prepositions in a visual map. It's genuinely useful for spotting angles you wouldn't think of on your own.

Honestly though, I ended up relying on Google's own autocomplete and the People Also Ask box more than any of these. The other tools were occasional, not daily.

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The mistake I made, and how I caught it

I wanted to write a post titled around "passive income ideas for beginners" because that's the phrase that made sense in my head. I published it and waited.

Two months. Basically zero impressions the whole time.

When I actually checked search data, that exact phrase had almost no volume. What people searched instead was closer to "side income ideas with no money," a noticeably different framing even though the topic underneath is the same.

I rewrote the title and the opening two paragraphs around the actual phrase, kept the rest of the content as is. It started picking up impressions within about three weeks of the change. The content wasn't the problem. The words I'd chosen to wrap around it were.

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Keyword research isn't a one-time setup step, which is something I wish someone had told me upfront. Before every new post now, I spend maybe 12 to 15 minutes on it: search the topic, scroll through autocomplete, check People Also Ask, and that's usually enough.

Paid tools start making sense once you've got 30 or 40 posts up and want to study what competitors are doing in detail. Until then, the free stuff covers it. Mine still does, and at this point I'm not in a hurry to change that...