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The Best Ways To Do Free Keyword Without Tools?

Whether you are doing SEM or SEO, you probably know that you aren’t going anywhere without keywords. In fact, you can’t do much on the Internet at all without them. However, good keyword tools can sometimes be very expensive. But don’t worry! Today, I will teach you how to do free keyword research without any tools.

Just a little disclaimer before we move on. I am obviously not saying that tools are unnecessary or useless. On the contrary, some of them are really good and are definitely worth the investment!

However, if you are like me and can’t afford awesome tools like KWFinder or Semrush, there is no need to worry. You can still perform great research for your articles or campaigns without paying a single cent.

Can Keyword Research Be Done Without a Tool?

Paid tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Moz can be great investments to help you conduct keyword research.

However, it is possible to do effective keyword research without expensive tools like these.

This means you can do keyword research for free, and can avoid the hassle of deciding and committing to one of these expensive tools.

In this guide, I will show you how you can do keyword research for your website without any tools.

The Best Ways To Do Free Keyword Without Tools?

You can do free keyword research by using the various features that Google provides within its search engine.

Yes, by using Google, you can do effective keyword research for your site to find lots of new keyword opportunities.

I will also show you some other platforms that you can use to do keyword research, which will help you answer the various pain points and problems that your target audience is facing.

Here is the complete list of these “non-tools” that we will be covering that can help you do keyword research for your site:

1. Google suggestions

The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is an absolute gold mine when it comes to free keyword research. It gives you something that many tools don’t: the actual searches of users on Google.

Yes, looking up the keyword volume is great. However, when you look up the volume of a keyword, you only see the keyword itself. Usually, accompanied by a few short-tail and long-tail versions in the list.

However, Google actually shows you the exact phrase that users type in the search engine bar. This is great because you can actually see the most popular queries within their context. As a result, you have a much better understanding of what and how your audience searches on Google.

Even without looking up the volume, you already know which are the most popular searches on Google for a specific topic. Which, consequently, can give you some great long-tail keyword ideas that you might want to work on.

Of course, you can always double-check the keyword volume with a free tool such as Google´s keyword planner.

2. Google’s Organic Results

Google’s organic results are the blue links that appear in any given SERP and will provide a wealth of information about other keywords, or topics you may want to target.

To utilize Google’s organic results, Google a keyword, open a few of the top organic results (blue links), and analyze the pages.

Google is rewarding these pages by ranking them higher in the organic search results for that keyword. This means they are relevant and are properly satisfying the search intent for that keyword.

By analyzing these pages, you can find other valuable keywords by looking at each of the top pages:

Main heading (H1 tag).
The opening paragraph, or introduction.
Secondary headings (H2/H3 tags) – these are great for use as secondary, related, or sometimes keyword questions.

Up to this point, I have shown you features specifically to Google that can help you do keyword research without a tool.

3. LSI Keywords

Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing as a mathematical technique to detect the way words are grouped together in predictable patterns.

In other words, LSI keywords are the ones that are semantically related to your main keyword. They help the search engine understand the context within a search query.

Let’s say that I go to Google and type in “chicken soup”. In the section Searches related to chicken soup, the search engine returns the following LSI keywords:

It is highly recommended that you use LSI keywords within your page to provide more context on the topic that you are writing about. This will help you rank higher for your main keyword as Google has a better understanding of your content.

Additionally, LSI keywords can make Google show your content for other search variations that are not necessarily your main keyword.

4. Quora

Quora is a platform where users can ask questions and get answers to virtually any topic.

This means it can be a gold mine for finding the problems and pain points of your target audience. This is another great way to do keyword research and can help you determine the content you should be created to answer those pain points.

Head over to Quora and enter a broad keyword from your niche to discover the questions that people are asking.

For example, if I want to know the questions people are asking about investing in ETFs, I can find the most popular questions on Quora, by entering this keyword.

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5. Free keyword research via Landing pages

You can use any organic result from Google’s first page to research keywords directly from the landing page.

We already mentioned that ads can be a great way to do free keyword research, but non-paid results are sometimes even better. Why?

Competition is very hard for organic positioning, which means that the ones that show up on the first page did their job really well to end up there.

For example, this is the first result that I got when I typed “search engine marketing“. It is an article from Search Engine Land:

This is the result that showed up in the first position, on the first page of Google, for a highly competitive keyword. Beating over 900 million keyword Research without any tools (Just through SERP) Part:1 · Google’s Auto Suggestion

As you can see, there are multiple important keywords that appear in the article. Of course, all are related to SEM – which is a great indicator that these are keywords that should appear in your blog post as well.

You can use this free keyword research method following these 3 simple steps:

Start with a more generic keyword. For example, if you want to write about personal finance, just go to Google and type “personal finance”.
Open the first 3-5 results that show up – preferably in separate tabs so you can compare them in a quicker way;
Read the articles and write down the keywords that are similar to your generic term. You can later use them in your blog posts!