Keyword Research Tools: Free vs Paid, What the Data Means, and the Right One for a Local Business

Four tools, four search volumes, and why none of them is the number

There are only two sources of first-party keyword data: the search engines' own tools. Google's Keyword Planner and Bing's keyword research tool report from their engines' records. Search Console reports the exact queries that showed your pages. Everything else is a third-party estimate, built from the vendor's own scraping, panels and models, and calibrated in ways most vendors describe only in outline.

Even Google's figures are approximations. Its help center says Keyword Planner's average monthly searches are rounded, reflect the dates and location you choose, and are shown for exact matches only. Keywords with very low volume are neither discoverable nor forecastable at all. That last rule matters more to a plumber in one county than to a national retailer.

Free keyword research tools, and the question each one answers

The free tools are not cut-down versions of the paid ones. They answer different questions, and together they cover most of what a small business needs to plan its pages.

• Google Keyword Planner shows estimated monthly searches, a competition rating and a top-of-page bid range. Google defines the low and high bids as roughly the 20th and 80th percentile of what advertisers paid. High bids mark terms that turn into money. See our Keyword Planner guide for access and settings.
• Google Search Console lists the real queries that showed your pages, with impressions, clicks and average position. Queries with impressions and few clicks are the cheapest wins in SEO.
• Google Trends compares interest on a 0 to 100 scale relative to all searches in a place and period. It shows seasons and direction, not volume, and very small terms read as zero.
• Bing's keyword research tool, inside Bing Webmaster Tools, reports volumes from Bing's own searches with related and question keywords.
• Your Business Profile performance report lists the search terms people used to find your listing on Google Search and Maps, updated monthly.
• Google's own results page gives autocomplete suggestions and related questions for free. They are the plain language customers use, unfiltered by any vendor.

Free tiers of paid tools fill the gaps for occasional use: Semrush's free plan allows 10 reports a day, and Mangools allows 5 lookups every 24 hours. Our guide to free SEO tools lists the limits of each.

Paid keyword tools side by side, prices as of October 2026

Every price below comes from the vendor's own pricing or help page in October 2026. Where a vendor's site blocked our check, we say so rather than repeat a figure from somewhere else.

Credits and rows matter more than the headline price. A $29 plan with 250 rows per report is fine for checking a list of twenty services. It is useless for mining a competitor's ten thousand keywords. If you are choosing between the two big suites, our Ahrefs vs Semrush comparison and Semrush pricing breakdown go plan by plan.

Volume, difficulty and intent: what actually differs between tools

The tools differ less in features than in the data underneath. Before trusting any column, ask where it came from.

Cost per click is the most honest column in any of them. Advertisers pay real money for clicks that turn into customers, so a high bid range is a market signal that a term is worth ranking for. Our guide to cost per click explains how those bids form.

The local business problem: tiny numbers, real customers

Set Keyword Planner to a single city and most service terms collapse to small numbers, or vanish below Google's low-volume threshold. Owners read that as nobody searching. It usually means the searches are split across dozens of phrasings, and each one is too small to report. Say a roofer in Boerne finds no service term above a few dozen searches a month. That is normal, and it is enough.

For local businesses the most useful keyword data is often the least glamorous. Search Console shows exactly which town names and service phrases already earn impressions. The Business Profile performance report shows the terms people used to find the listing. Autocomplete shows how locals phrase the problem. A national tool's volume for a city term matters less than whether one buyer a week types it.

Location matters as much as the phrase. Our free local visibility check shows where you appear in Google search and maps for your customers' terms, and the guide to service area pages shows how to build a page per town without duplicating content.

Two hours of keyword research with nothing but free tools

1. 1

   List what you sell, in customer words

   Write every service and product, then rewrite each the way a customer says it on the phone. Water heater replacement becomes no hot water.

2. 2

   Mine Search Console

   Export the last 16 months of queries. Mark the ones with impressions and few clicks, and any that name a town or service you have no page for.

3. 3

   Expand in Keyword Planner

   Enter your seed terms with location targeting set to your service area. Keep terms with steady volume or a high top-of-page bid.

4. 4

   Check the seasons in Google Trends

   Compare your main services across five years. Plan pages and offers a month or two before each peak.

5. 5

   Read the results page

   Search each finalist privately. Note whether Google shows a map pack, ads, videos or articles; that tells you which kind of page can rank.

6. 6

   Map one primary term to one page

   Group close phrasings together and give each group a single page, so two pages never compete for the same search.

That last step is where most do-it-yourself research goes wrong. Our pages on keyword mapping and keyword clustering explain the method, and the SEO content guide covers turning the map into pages.

Which keyword tool to choose, by the business you run

• A local service business with one location: the free stack, plus Ahrefs Starter or a Keywords Everywhere plan if you want volumes while you browse. Spend the difference on pages.
• A multi-location or competitive local business: one suite with location-level rank tracking, such as SE Ranking or Semrush, so you can see rivals' terms town by town.
• An online store: a suite with a large keyword database and competitor research, because product terms run into the thousands.
• A business publishing articles to attract buyers: a question tool such as AnswerThePublic alongside a suite, plus Search Console to see which articles actually earn impressions.
• Anyone also buying Google Ads: Keyword Planner first, since it shares the advertising data, then our match types guide before spending a dollar.

The tools section hub lays out the full stack at each budget, including where keyword tools sit beside crawlers and rank trackers.

When the research is the easy part

Any of these tools will hand you a spreadsheet of five hundred terms by lunch. Deciding which twenty deserve a page, in what order, and what each page must say to beat the current top result is the work. It is also where a spreadsheet stops helping.

DataCram's keyword research service does that part: real customer phrasings, competitor gaps and a page-by-page map tied to the services that pay. If you want the pages built and kept ranking too, our SEO programs run month to month and start at $625 a month, per the SEO pricing page. We pay for the tools, so you do not have to.