How to Do Keyword Research Without Paid Tools

Start with what you already know

Every keyword list begins with language, not software. Before you look at any tool, write down the words your customers, viewers or readers actually use when they describe the problem you solve. Support emails, sales calls, comment sections and community threads are richer sources of phrasing than any generator, because they contain the exact vocabulary of real people.

Collect those raw phrases in a plain list. Do not filter yet. A messy first draft of forty or fifty phrases is far more useful than a tidy list of five, because the value of the next steps comes from having enough raw material to expand and group.

Expand the list systematically

Expansion is mechanical work, and mechanical work is exactly what a browser tool should handle. Take each core topic and pair it with modifiers: intent words such as buy, best, cheap or compare; question words such as how, what, why and when; and qualifiers such as location, audience, price point or use case.

This is the step where a keyword generator, a long-tail generator and a keyword combiner earn their place. They do not invent demand — they save you from typing hundreds of predictable combinations by hand, and they guarantee you do not forget an obvious pattern.

• Core topic × intent modifier (best running shoes, cheap running shoes)
• Core topic × question word (how to clean running shoes)
• Core topic × audience (running shoes for flat feet)
• Core topic × location (running shoe store in Austin)

Validate demand with free signals

A generated phrase is a hypothesis, not a fact. To check whether anyone actually searches it, use free sources that report real behaviour: search engine autocomplete, related searches at the bottom of a results page, People Also Ask boxes, Google Search Console queries for pages you already own, and the search bars inside YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok.

Hashly deliberately does not display search volume, difficulty or cost-per-click numbers. Those figures come from licensed datasets, and inventing them would make your planning worse, not better. Use Hashly to build and shape the list, then validate the shortlist in a source that has real data.

Group before you write

Once your list is validated, group it. Phrases that would be answered by the same page belong together; phrases that imply a different answer deserve their own page. Grouping by shared head term is a fast approximation you can do in the browser, and it prevents the most common content mistake — publishing three thin pages that all target the same intent.

Finish by assigning one primary phrase and a handful of supporting phrases to each planned page. That mapping, not the raw list, is the actual deliverable of keyword research.