Blog / seo wednesday
How to Find Keywords Without Paid SEO Tools
A practical way for small site owners to find keywords using Search Console, customer emails and free demand checks, before paying for any SEO tool.
Most keyword advice opens by telling you which subscription to buy. For a site with twenty or thirty pages, that is the wrong first move. You already have the two best sources of keyword data, and neither costs anything: the queries your site is already showing up for, and the exact words your customers use when they write to you. Work those properly first. Here is how we go about it on the sites we look after.
Start with the queries you already have
Open Search Console and go to the Performance report. Switch to the Queries tab, set the date range as wide as it lets you, and sort by impressions rather than clicks.
What you are hunting for is the gap. Queries with plenty of impressions and almost no clicks mean Google thinks you are relevant but searchers are picking someone else. Queries sitting in average position 8 to 25 mean you are close enough that a better page could move up without a year of work. Both are more useful than the phrases you already rank first for, because those are already done.
Then do the cross-check that most people skip. Take your top thirty queries by impressions and search your own site for each phrase. Every time you find a query that appears in none of your page titles or headings, you have found a keyword you are ranking for by accident. Those are the cheapest wins on the whole list. Writing the phrase into the title and the first sentence of the page that already gets the impressions often does more than a new article would.
Filter by page as well as by query. A single page picking up impressions for five related phrases is telling you what that page is actually about, which is not always what you intended when you wrote it.
Let your inbox write the list
Your support tickets, contact form submissions and sales emails are keyword research that nobody else has. Pull the last three months of them and copy the question phrasing out verbatim, before you tidy it up.
Owners write "VPS resource allocation". Customers write "will my site go down if I get busy". Those are different searches, and only one of them is what people type. We have rewritten page titles on our own site purely because the same question kept arriving in support worded a way we had never used. Phone notes count too, if you take any.
Keep a plain text file for this and add to it as the questions come in. Six months of that is worth more than a trial of any tool.
Check demand, cheaply
Once you have a candidate phrase, you want a rough sense of whether anyone searches it. You do not need a precise number, only a direction.
Google Trends compares phrases against each other and breaks interest down by region, which matters if you serve one province rather than a whole country. Google's own autocomplete and the "People also ask" block show you the phrasings and follow-up questions Google associates with your topic. Bing Webmaster Tools includes a keyword view at no cost, and it is worth a look even if Bing sends you little traffic, because the suggestions differ from Google's.
Be careful about chasing volume. A phrase with a handful of searches a month and obvious buying intent is worth more to a small business than a broad term you will never place for. "Web hosting" is not a target. "Move WordPress site to new host without downtime" is.
One keyword, one page
The most common self-inflicted problem we see is three pages half-targeting the same phrase. They split your internal links, and Google picks whichever one it likes, which is rarely the one you would have chosen.
Decide which page owns a phrase, make the title and the first paragraph say so plainly, and point the other pages at it with a link using that phrase as the anchor text. Our notes on writing titles and descriptions that actually get clicked cover the on-page side of this. If two pages genuinely overlap, merge them and redirect the loser.
Give it time, and watch the right number
New pages move in a predictable order: impressions appear first, average position drifts, clicks come last. Judging a page on clicks after ten days tells you nothing. We check impressions and query count at two weeks, position at six, clicks after that. Our post on the Search Console numbers worth watching goes into which columns matter and which are noise.
One server-side note, since this is where hosting actually touches keyword work. A page that takes four seconds to render will underperform the same content on a quick server, and no amount of keyword choice fixes that. Check your real page timings before blaming the words. Our hosting plans run on servers we tune ourselves for exactly this reason.
None of this needs a subscription. It needs an afternoon with Search Console open and your inbox beside it. If you want a second pair of eyes on what your Performance report is telling you, open a ticket with our support team and we will take a look with you.