How to Do Keyword Research with Free Tools

Keyword research means finding out which words your customers use to search for you on Google. It sounds technical, but for a small business a good way to do it is usually not an expensive tool. It's Google itself, plus a bit of systematic thinking.

We'll use a hypothetical example throughout: a workshop in Nilüfer, Bursa that reupholsters sofas and chairs. The owner assumes people search for “upholsterer”. As we'll see, the words customers actually use may be a little different.

Search intent comes first

Two people searching the same topic can want very different things. When assessing a keyword, first ask “what is this person trying to do?” There are four main intents.

Informational: the person wants to learn something. “How long does sofa upholstery last”, “how to clean velvet fabric”. They're not ready to buy yet, but if you give the right answer, they may remember you. These keywords suit blog posts.

Comparison: the person is weighing options. “Reupholster or buy a new sofa”, “velvet or linen”. They're close to deciding.

Transactional: the person is ready to act. “Sofa upholstery prices”, “chair reupholstering”. These keywords belong on service pages.

Local: the person wants a business nearby. “Upholsterer in Nilüfer”, “upholsterer near me”. For most of these searches Google shows the map first; your Google Business Profile and your service page work together here.

The easiest way to understand intent is to type the keyword into Google and look at the first page. If it shows blog posts, Google treats it as informational. If it shows a map and businesses, it's local; price pages and shops mean transactional. Google's first page is the most practical indicator of intent.

Free tools and how to use them

Google autocomplete. Type “sofa upholstery” (in our example, the Turkish “koltuk döşeme”) into the search box and pause. The suggestions show patterns people really search: prices, fabric, do it yourself. Adding different letters after the phrase surfaces more suggestions. Do this in a private window so your own search history doesn't skew the results.

People also ask. This box in the results shows real questions, and new ones open each time you click. In our example, questions like “How many days does reupholstering take?” and “Is it worth reupholstering an old sofa?” might come up. These are very valuable for both blog posts and FAQ sections.

Related searches. This section at the bottom of the page shows neighbouring keywords.

Google Search Console. If your site is already live, this is the most valuable source, because it's your site's real data, not an estimate. The queries list in the Performance report shows which searches your site appears in, with impressions and clicks. A situation we see often: your site shows up at position 20 for a keyword and gets impressions, but you have no page dedicated to that topic. That's a page waiting to be written.

Google Ads Keyword Planner. You can use it free with a Google Ads account. At the time of writing, without active ad spend it shows monthly search volume in broad ranges (say, 100 to 1,000) rather than exact numbers. That's still enough to compare keywords with each other.

Google Trends. Useful for spotting seasonality. You could check, for instance, whether upholstery searches rise before holidays or during moving season, and plan your content calendar around it.

Long-tail keywords

One-word searches like “upholstery” get lots of volume but have unclear intent and heavy competition. Long, specific searches like “L-shaped sofa upholstery price in Nilüfer” get less volume, but the searcher knows what they want.

For small businesses, the long tail is usually the smarter target. Instead of competing with big sites on generic terms, you give a good answer to specific questions they don't bother with. Each of these searches looks small, but twenty of them together can add up to meaningful traffic.

A caution: the long tail doesn't mean a separate page for every variation. “Sofa upholstery price” and “cost to reupholster a sofa” share the same intent; one page answers both.

Mapping keywords to pages

A keyword list is useless on its own. Every keyword needs an address on the site. The rule is simple: each page gets one main keyword and a few close variations that support it. If you target the same main keyword on two different pages, they can compete with each other and often both stay weak.

For our workshop, the mapping could look like this: the homepage for “sofa upholstery in Bursa” plus local variations; a separate service page for “chair upholstery”; a pricing page for “sofa upholstery prices”; blog posts on “is it worth reupholstering an old sofa” and “choosing upholstery fabric”.

Once mapped, you write each page's title and description around its keyword. We covered that with examples in our post on title tags and meta descriptions. You'll find how to build blog posts around a keyword in our guide to SEO-friendly blog posts.

A simple keyword sheet

A spreadsheet is all you need. Use these columns:

• Keyword
• Intent (informational, comparison, transactional, local)
• Estimated volume range (from Keyword Planner)
• Source (autocomplete, Search Console, People also ask)
• Target page (existing URL or “to be written”)
• Status and date

For a first round, 30 to 50 keywords is usually enough. Grouped by target page, they produce a plan of roughly 8 to 12 pages. That plan becomes your site's content skeleton.

Update the sheet every three months with Search Console data. Keywords you didn't think of at first will show up in real data once the site is live. In the upholstery example, they might be customers' own phrases, like “replacing a sofa cover”.