The short version: Free keyword research lives in Google Search Console, Google Trends, Answer the Public, and Reddit, not in expensive software. You need to know search volume (Google Trends gives relative numbers), search intent (what people want when they type that phrase), and competition (whether you can realistically rank). Three hours of work each week beats no work at all, which is what most people do.
Why the expensive tools exist, and why you don't need them
Ahrefs charges £99 per month. SEMrush charges £129. Moz Pro costs around £99 a month. They're professional tools built for teams who run paid search campaigns or manage hundreds of client sites. If you're a solopreneur, a small marketing team, or someone rebuilding a business on a tight budget, which I was doing five years ago, these tools become an unnecessary line item that keeps you from the work that matters.
Here's what those tools do: they crawl websites, estimate search volume, show you backlinks, and tell you how hard a keyword is to rank for. Useful? Yes. Essential? No. The information exists elsewhere. You just have to do the work yourself.
I rebuilt my newsletter list from 300 subscribers to 3,000 in 18 months without SEMrush. I did it by understanding what my audience was searching for, not because software told me, but because I asked them directly and then tested my understanding using free sources. More on that later.
The four free sources you need
1. Google Search Console (free, linked to your own site)
This is your first port of call. If you have a website, Google Search Console shows you exactly what people typed to find you. You already have real data about your own site's keywords.
Log in, go to Performance, and set the date range to the last 90 days. Look at the queries people used. How many impressions? How many clicks? What's your current ranking position?
This tells you which keywords you're already visible for, even if you're on page two or three. These are the easiest wins because you only need to move the needle slightly to get clicks. A keyword where you're ranking 15th and getting 20 impressions a month might move to position 8 with one decent piece of content or one update to existing content.
Sort by clicks first, then impressions. The keywords with clicks are real, people found you and clicked. The ones with impressions but no clicks mean Google thinks you're relevant but your page title or meta description isn't compelling enough to make people click.
2. Google Trends (free, no account needed)
This gives you relative search volume, not absolute numbers. That's the honest limitation. You cannot see that "AI marketing strategy" gets 2,400 searches per month. You can see that it gets more searches in January than July, and you can compare it to similar terms.
Here's what I do: I go to Google Trends, type in a keyword, and look at the graph over time. If it's flat or declining, I'm cautious. If it's rising, I'm interested. Then I look at "Related queries" at the bottom, that's gold. Those are real questions people are asking that contain your keyword.
In 2024, I was deciding whether to double down on "AI for small business marketing" or "marketing automation for solopreneurs." Trends showed me the first term was rising month-on-month and the second was flat. That told me where the demand was. I structured six months of content around the rising term.
3. Answer the Public (free, one search per day)
This tool scrapes autocomplete data from Google and Bing and visualizes what questions people are asking around your keyword. Free tier: one search per day. That's enough if you're methodical.
Type your main keyword. You'll see a "questions" section, these are real searches in the form of "how to," "what is," "can you," "is it," etc. These are content ideas. Each question is a gap you can fill.
This is not about finding a magic keyword that will make you rich. It's about understanding what people want to know. If you're writing about "email marketing," Answer the Public will show you "why is my email open rate low," "how to increase email open rate," "what is a good email open rate", all real searches. Pick the one your audience needs answered.
4. Reddit (free, search your niche)
Reddit is where people ask real questions without a sales filter. Go to Reddit, search your industry or topic, and look at the threads. What problems do people mention? What do they ask over and over?
If someone's searching "how to fix low email open rates," they've already found the answer in the common results. But if someone's asking that question on Reddit in r/EmailMarketing, they're frustrated enough to seek community advice. That's a signal you can write something better than what currently ranks.
Sort by "Top" and "Past Year." You'll see which threads got the most upvotes. Those are the questions your audience cares about most.
A real example: how I used this to find content that ranked
Two years ago, I was trying to figure out what small business owners wanted to know about email marketing. I'd already written generic guides on "how to write a subject line" and got almost zero traffic.
I went to Reddit and scrolled r/smallbusiness and r/entrepreneurs. I saw the same question four times in a month: "Why did my email list stop growing? I had 200 subscribers six months ago and I'm still at 200."
I checked Google Trends. "How to grow email list" was rising. Answer the Public showed me 47 variations of that question, including one I'd never thought of: "how to grow email list without social media."
I wrote that piece. Specific, tactical, addressed the exact frustration I'd heard on Reddit. Fourteen months later, it's pulled in 8,000 organic visits. Not viral. But real.
That came from 90 minutes of free research, not from running a SEMrush report. The difference is I talked to my audience first and then tested my understanding using free data sources.
The honest point most articles skip
Here's what no one tells you: if you don't have a website with traffic, or if you're in a brand new niche, free keyword research only gets you so far.
Google Search Console shows you what's working on your site. But if your site is new or small, you won't have much data yet. Google Trends and Answer the Public tell you what people are asking, but they don't tell you the commercial intent, whether people asking that question are likely to buy from you, link to you, or even care what you have to say.
You solve this by doing one thing expensive tools won't do for you: talk to your audience directly.
Email your current subscribers. DM your followers. Call your past customers. Ask them: What did you search for before you found me? What made you click my result instead of the one above it? What question should I answer that I haven't answered yet?
I did this before getting my first 1000 newsletter subscribers. My list was stalled at 150. I emailed 20 subscribers and asked why they signed up. Seven gave me specific answers: they'd searched for "AI marketing for small teams" or "how to set up ChatGPT for marketing" and landed on a piece I'd written. None of them had started with Ahrefs or SEMrush. They'd started with a Google search because they had a real problem.
That became my north star. Every keyword I pursued after that was one I could trace back to a subscriber's language. That's more valuable than any search volume number.
The three-hour-per-week system that works
If you're going to do this without tools, you need a system:
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
- Monday morning (30 minutes): Search Console. Export queries from the last 30 days, sort by impressions, identify three keywords where you're ranking 11-20 that you can push to page one with one updated post.
- Tuesday (30 minutes): Answer the Public. Run a search on your main topic or a variant. Screenshot the questions. Pick the three with the clearest content angle.
- Wednesday (30 minutes): Google Trends. Validate that the questions you picked are trending or stable. Check if there's a seasonal angle.
- Thursday (30 minutes): Reddit. Search your industry keywords. Read 10-15 threads. Note the exact language people use when they describe the problem.
- Friday (60 minutes): Write or brief content based on what you've learned. Prioritize keywords where you're close to ranking, questions people are actively asking, and language you heard directly from your audience.
That's three hours. It's not sexy. It's not a plug-and-play report. But it's how you find real keywords people search for, and it costs you nothing.
Why you might need tools, and when
I'm not going to pretend that free research is perfect. If you're managing SEO for 30+ websites, or if you're trying to compete with big media sites in a crowded niche like finance or health, paid tools save you time and give you data free tools can't.
But if you're a solo founder, a small team, or someone consolidating your marketing tech stack, the ROI on a £99-per-month tool is terrible. You're paying £1,188 per year to save 30 minutes per week of research. That's £455 per hour saved. But you don't earn £455 per hour unless you're already making serious revenue from that SEO work. Most people don't.
If you're doing content marketing and trying to decide whether to hire a service or do it in-house, this research time is the part that doesn't scale. That's when you might hire someone. But you hire them because you need 10 pieces per month, not because you need software to tell you what keywords to target.
The thing most people get wrong
People think keyword research is about finding the magic phrase that will make them rank. It's not. It's about understanding what your audience is searching for, why they're searching for it, and whether you can write something better than what currently ranks.
You don't need expensive software to do that. You need curiosity, time, and a willingness to look at real data. The free sources give you that.
Start with Search Console. You already have it. Look at what's working on your site right now. That's your baseline. Then use the other three sources to expand beyond it. Do that for three weeks. You'll have more keyword ideas than you can write in six months.
How I Used Google Search Console's "Queries" Filter to Find Keywords I Was Already Ranking for on Page 2
Most free keyword research advice points you toward Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest, but the fastest wins I have ever found came from a report that was already sitting in my own Google Search Console account. Go to Performance, click "Queries," and then filter by position: set the average position to greater than 10 and less than 21. What you are looking at is a list of keywords where your site is already showing up on page 2 of Google results. You did not need to build authority from scratch for these. You already have it, partially.
On one of my own content sites, I ran this filter and found 34 keywords where I was ranking between position 11 and 18, pulling fewer than 10 clicks per month each. I picked the six with the highest impressions, went back to the individual posts that were triggering those rankings, and made three specific changes: I added the keyword to the H2 nearest the top of the post, I wrote one new 150-word paragraph that answered the search intent more directly, and I updated the meta description to include the phrase. Within six weeks, four of those six posts had moved onto page 1. That is not a theory. That is what happened.
The reason this works better than hunting for brand-new keywords is simple: Google has already decided your content is relevant. You are not persuading the algorithm from zero. You are nudging something that is already moving. Compare that to writing a new post targeting a keyword where you have no existing signal, and the timeline to any result stretches out to months, not weeks.
- Filter: Performance > Queries > Average Position > between 10 and 21
- Sort by Impressions descending to find the highest-traffic opportunities first
- Cross-reference the URL triggering each query by clicking the keyword and switching to the "Pages" tab
- Make surgical edits only: one new H2 mention, one new paragraph, one updated meta description
- Recheck the same filter after 30 days and record position changes in a simple spreadsheet
This whole process costs nothing except about two hours of your time. You do not need Ahrefs, Semrush, or any paid tool to execute it. The data is yours, it is free, and for most blogs sitting on a reasonable backlink profile, it is the single highest-return keyword activity you are probably not doing right now.
Free resource: The Keyword Cluster Planner Template.
Frequently asked questions
Can you really rank without knowing exact search volume?
Yes. Exact search volume matters if you're spending money on ads or deciding between a keyword that gets 1,000 searches and one that gets 100,000. But if you're writing organic content, what matters is: is this keyword relevant to your audience, does someone search for it, and is the content that currently ranks worse than what you can write? Google Trends and Reddit will tell you that. The exact number of searches per month is noise.
What if my niche is too small for any of these free sources?
Then you're not doing keyword research, you're building authority within a tiny community. You need to find the five websites, blogs, or forums where your people hang out, and write content that serves them specifically. Search engines don't matter yet. Building trust with the 500 people who care about your niche matters. Do that first.
Should I eventually move to paid tools?
Only if you've maxed out free sources and the bottleneck is research time, not writing time or promotion time. Most people writing one or two pieces per month will never hit that point. If you're writing 10+ pieces per month and SEO is your main growth channel, then a paid tool saves you real time. Until then, you're buying a problem you don't have.
What's the fastest way to start if I've never done keyword research?
Start with Google Search Console. Look at the keywords that are driving clicks. Pick the three with the highest click volume. Write one piece that's obviously better than the current top result for each. That will take you four weeks and cost you nothing. See what happens. Once you've done that, layer in the other sources.
Related reading: The Best Marketing Tools for 2026 (Tested and Reviewed) and Customer Service Jobs Work From Home: The Honest Truth About Pay, Hours, and Who Stays.
For the bigger picture, see my full guide to SEO.
This overlaps with my main post on the topic: keyword research free no tools.
This overlaps with my main post: keyword research free no tools.
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