Google Keyword Planner alternatives

Nothing is wrong with Keyword Planner. It is an advertising tool doing its job, and the job is not yours.

• Volume arrives as a range rather than a figure unless the account is spending on ads.
• There is no difficulty score, so nothing tells you whether a search is winnable by a site like yours.
• Close variants are grouped, so "invoicing app" and "invoice app" can arrive as one row and you lose the distinction.
• It knows nothing about who currently ranks, which is the part that decides whether to write the page.
• It requires a Google Ads account, which is a detour if you never intend to advertise.

• Exact figures or ranges: can you tell 90 from 900.
• Difficulty: does anything estimate how contested the search is.
• Questions: does it surface the phrasing people actually type.
• Your own data: does it tell you what you already appear for, which no keyword tool can invent.
• Cost: free, free tier, or a subscription you will keep paying.

1. 1

   Search Console, for the searches you already appear on

   The Performance report lists the queries that showed one of your pages, with impressions, clicks and average position. No keyword tool knows this about your site, and it is the only list where you are already in the race.

2. 2

   Bing Webmaster Tools, for free volumes

   Its keyword research is free and gives volumes rather than ranges. Bing is not Google, so the figures describe a smaller market, but the relative order of searches is usually instructive.

3. 3

   Autocomplete and People also ask, for the phrasing

   Type your term into Google and read the completions, then read the questions on the results page. That is real demand in people's own words, without a tool between you and it.

4. 4

   Google Trends, for direction

   Relative interest over time, which answers whether a term is rising or fading. It gives no absolute volume, and that is fine for the question it answers.

5. 5

   A browser extension, for volumes while you browse

   Keywords Everywhere shows volumes on the results page as you search. Useful when research happens while you read rather than in a spreadsheet.

For questions specifically, AnswerThePublic draws autocomplete suggestions as wheels of questions and prepositions, and AlsoAsked maps the People also ask tree several levels deep, both with small free allowances.

• One site, small budget, you want figures and a difficulty score: Mangools, whose KWFinder gives keyword research with a difficulty score and sits in a suite of five small tools.
• You want breadth: Semrush's Keyword Magic Tool for large idea sets beside tracking, audits and competitive research.
• You want the link-led view of a query: Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, whose difficulty is built from the links of the pages that rank.
• You want beginner-friendly and cheap: Ubersuggest, with a free daily allowance and smaller data than the large suites.
• You want the questions mapped: AlsoAsked or AnswerThePublic, which are not volume tools and do not pretend to be.

For a product site with fewer than a hundred pages, this is usually enough, and it is better research than a spreadsheet of volumes.

1. 1

   List the jobs, not the keywords

   Write the ten things a buyer wants to do with your product, in their words. "Send an invoice from my phone", not "invoicing solutions".

2. 2

   Ask autocomplete to finish them

   Type each job into Google and record the completions. You now have the real phrasings, ranked roughly by popularity.

3. 3

   Read the results page for each

   What ranks tells you the intent: ten product pages means people are buying, ten guides means people are learning, ten lists means people are choosing.

4. 4

   Check your own report

   In Search Console, look for the same phrasings. Anything with impressions and a position between 5 and 15 is a page you can improve rather than write.

5. 5

   Size it once, at the end

   Only now open a volume tool, if you have one, to order the shortlist. The decision was already made by intent and by what you can win.

• Search Console: no volumes, and nothing about queries you have never appeared on.
• Bing Webmaster Tools: figures from a smaller market than Google's.
• Autocomplete and the results page: no numbers at all, only order and intent.
• The small suites: less data than the large ones, which matters more for rivals than for your own planning.
• The large suites: a subscription that renews whether or not you opened it this month.

We make Porteur, which is not a keyword tool: it is a report bought once that reads a site and names the searches around it, who holds them, and which are within reach, so you can skip the spreadsheet stage entirely on a small site.