How to Do Keyword Research When You Have No Budget

Semrush costs $130/month. Ahrefs costs $129/month. For a bootstrapped founder pre-revenue, that is not a line item that makes sense. The good news: you can do meaningful keyword research with free and freemium tools, and the gap between free and paid is smaller than the SEO tool vendors would like you to believe.

What you are actually trying to find

Keyword research has one goal: identify the specific phrases people type into Google that are relevant to your product, have enough monthly searches to be worth targeting, and are not so competitive that a new site cannot realistically rank for them. Everything else is noise.

For a new SaaS product, the sweet spot is usually:

• Monthly search volume: 100–2,000 searches (lower volume, lower competition)
• Keyword difficulty: under 20 (on Ahrefs scale) or low on whatever tool you use
• Search intent: matches what you can actually deliver (a tutorial if it is "how to" phrasing, a comparison page if it is "X vs Y" phrasing)

With 200 keywords in this range, you have 200 potential blog post topics. At one post per week, that is four years of content — enough to build a meaningful organic channel entirely from low-competition long-tail queries.

Free tools that actually work

Google Search Console

If your site is already live and getting any traffic at all, Google Search Console is the most valuable keyword data source you have access to — and it is free. The "Performance" report shows every query your site has appeared in search results for, the impressions, clicks, and your average position. This tells you what Google already thinks your site is about, which is the starting point for any content strategy.

Look for queries where you are getting impressions but low clicks (position 5–20) — these are ranking but not quite on page one. A targeted piece of content or an improved existing page can push them over the threshold.

Google Autocomplete and People Also Ask

Type your seed keyword into Google and observe the autocomplete suggestions. Each one is a query that real people are searching for frequently enough that Google surfaces it as a suggestion. The "People Also Ask" section shows related questions that you can answer in FAQ sections or standalone posts.

This is genuinely useful keyword research. It is not quantified — you do not know the search volumes — but you know the intent is real because Google would not surface suggestions for zero-volume queries.

Google Keyword Planner

Google's own keyword tool is free (requires a Google Ads account, which is also free to create). It shows search volume ranges — broad buckets rather than precise numbers — but it is enough to validate whether a keyword has meaningful volume or is essentially zero. Use it to filter out keywords that sound plausible but nobody actually searches for.

Keyword Surfer (Chrome extension)

Free Chrome extension from Surfer SEO. Shows search volume estimates directly in Google search results as you browse. Not as accurate as paid tools, but directionally useful for quickly triaging whether keywords are worth pursuing.

Ubersuggest free tier

Neil Patel's Ubersuggest gives limited free searches per day (3–5 per IP). Enough to validate 15–25 keywords per day with search volume data, competition scores, and related keyword suggestions.

Answer the Public free tier

Generates a visual map of questions, prepositions, and comparisons related to a seed keyword. Free tier allows 3 searches per day. Excellent for finding "how to," "what is," and "why" queries that match blog content intent perfectly.

The no-budget keyword research workflow

Here is a practical workflow using only free tools:

1. Start with competitor analysis. Find 3–5 sites ranking for your target keywords. Look at their blog. Every article they have published is a keyword they thought was worth targeting. You have a free content strategy roadmap from a site that has already validated the keywords work.
2. Expand with Google Autocomplete. Take your 5–10 seed keywords and type each into Google. Note all autocomplete suggestions. Add "People Also Ask" questions. You now have 50–100 candidate keywords.
3. Validate volume with Keyword Planner. Check which candidates have meaningful search volume. Eliminate anything with fewer than 50 monthly searches unless the intent is extremely high-value.
4. Assess difficulty by examining the SERP. Search for your candidate keyword and look at who is ranking on page one. If every result is from a DR 80+ site with thousands of backlinks, you need more authority before that keyword is realistic. If results include smaller sites, blogs, and Reddit threads, it is targetable now.
5. Build your content calendar. Group validated keywords into clusters (related topics that share intent) and assign one cluster per blog post. Publish consistently.

When to invest in paid tools

Paid tools — Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz — give you precise volume data, competitive analysis, backlink research, and rank tracking in one place. The free tools give you the same information more slowly and with more friction. When your organic channel is generating revenue and you are publishing consistently, $130/month in SEO tools pays for itself rapidly. Until then, the free workflow above is enough to build a meaningful content strategy.

While you are building your content strategy, do not neglect your backlink profile. Directory submissions cost nothing and give you the domain authority foundation that makes all your content efforts more effective. Launchstag is a free 10-minute submission with a real dofollow backlink — start there and then work through your content calendar.