Good keyword research is the difference between writing things people search for and writing things nobody will ever read.
That’s the whole game. Find the words your audience is typing into Google, write something genuinely useful around them, and you’ve got a chance of ranking. Skip it, and you’re just publishing into the void and hoping.
The good news: you don’t need to spend a penny to get started. There are free tools that will take you a long way. The better news: I’ll tell you exactly where the free ones run out of road, so you don’t waste weeks before working that out for yourself.
What you’re actually looking for
Before the tools, the thing they’re all trying to help you find: a keyword that enough people search for to be worth your time, but not so competitive that you’ve no hope of ranking.
Chase the big obvious terms and you’ll be buried under sites with a decade’s head start. Pick something nobody searches and you’ll rank first for a phrase with an audience of zero. The sweet spot is in between — decent demand, beatable competition. Every tool below is just a different way of finding that spot.
The free tools worth your time
Google Keyword Planner
It’s free, it’s from Google, and it’s the most underrated tool of the lot. It lives inside Google Ads (you don’t have to run an ad to use it), and because the data comes straight from the source, the search volumes are as honest as you’ll get.
The catch: it’s built for advertisers, so it lumps similar keywords into ranges rather than exact numbers, and it says nothing about how hard a keyword is to rank for. Brilliant for ideas and volume. Useless for judging your chances.
Google Search Console
If you already have a site with any history at all, this is the first place to look — and almost nobody does. It shows you the exact searches you’re already appearing for, including the ones sitting on page two where nobody clicks.
Those are gold. A page ranking 11th for a decent term is one good rewrite away from page one. Search Console hands you that list for free. Use it.
Google Trends
Less a keyword tool, more a sense-check. It tells you whether interest in a topic is rising, falling, or seasonal. Worth thirty seconds before you commit to writing about something that peaked in 2019.
Ubersuggest
The most popular free option, and a genuinely useful one — keyword ideas, rough difficulty scores, and a look at what’s ranking. The free tier is now limited to three searches a day on the website, though the Chrome extension still gives you unlimited basic lookups as you browse. Enough to dip in. Not enough to do a proper morning’s research.
AlsoAsked and Bing Webmaster Tools
Two honourable mentions. AlsoAsked maps out the “People Also Ask” questions around a topic, which is perfect for structuring an article. Bing Webmaster Tools quietly gives away keyword data that costs money elsewhere, and almost no one bothers with it.
The honest problem with free tools
Here’s what nobody selling you a course will admit: free tools are brilliant for ideas and hopeless for decisions.
They’ll happily generate a thousand keywords. What they won’t do — at least not reliably, and not in one place — is tell you which of those thousand you can actually rank for. You end up flicking between five tabs, copying numbers into a spreadsheet, and still guessing at the difficulty.
When you’re writing one article a month, that faff is fine. When you’re trying to build a site, it quietly eats your time. At some point the maths flips, and a paid tool that does it all in one window pays for itself in the hours it saves.
The one paid tool I’d actually pay for
I’ve tried the big SEO suites. Ahrefs and Semrush are superb, and they should be — they cost well over £100 a month, which is fine if SEO is your full-time job and absurd if it isn’t.
For everyone else, I use Mangools.
It bundles five tools in one: KWFinder for keyword research, SERPChecker for sizing up the competition, SERPWatcher for tracking your rankings, plus backlink and site-authority tools. The keyword difficulty score is the bit that matters — a single colour-coded number that tells you, at a glance, whether a keyword is worth chasing. That’s the decision the free tools can’t make for you, made for you.
It’s not the most powerful tool on the market. It’s the one with the best ratio of “does what I need” to “doesn’t cost the earth.” Plans start around $29.90 a month, or closer to $20 if you pay annually — a fraction of what the big names charge.
And you can try it properly before paying: there’s a 10-day free trial with no credit card required, plus a permanent free plan after that. So you can run your actual keywords through it and see if the difficulty scores change how you’d bet, before spending anything.
So what should you actually use?
If you’re just starting out: Google Keyword Planner for ideas, Search Console for what you already rank for, and Ubersuggest to fill the gaps. That combination is free and it’s plenty.
If you’re past the dabbling stage and the tab-juggling is wearing thin: take the free Mangools trial, run a week’s worth of real research through it, and see whether the difficulty scores save you from writing things you were never going to rank for.
Because the most expensive keyword tool isn’t the one you pay for. It’s the ten articles you wrote targeting keywords you never had a hope of ranking for.
Affiliate disclosure: some links above are affiliate links. If you sign up through them it costs you nothing extra, and it helps keep this site running. I only recommend tools I actually use.