How to get keyword volume without paying for a keyword tool
Keyword research · 5 min read · Updated
You can get keyword volume from two free sources that are more accurate than most paid tools for your own site: Google Search Console, which reports the real impressions your pages received for each query, and the Google Ads Keyword Planner, which reports Google's own volume figures and gives exact numbers rather than ranges once the account has any spend. Paid keyword tools model the same underlying data and then resell the model. Where you have impressions for a query, use them — they are a measurement of your market rather than an estimate of everyone's.
Search Console impressions, and why they beat volume
An impression in Search Console means a real person searched that query, in a real location, and your page was eligible to appear. That is a count of events, not a model of them. A third-party volume figure is a national monthly average, smoothed, bucketed and usually months old.
For deciding what to do about a page you already have, impressions win outright. They tell you the demand that actually reaches you, in the countries you serve, including the long-tail variants no keyword tool lists because each one is searched nine times a month.
- Performance → Search results, then switch to the Queries tab and set the date range to the last three months.
- Export the lot. The interface caps what it displays; the export and the API go deeper.
- Filter to queries where your average position is between 5 and 20 — that is where a change moves the most clicks.
- Ignore position 1–3 queries unless the CTR is oddly low, which usually means a title that does not match the query's intent.
The one thing impressions cannot tell you is the demand for a query you are not eligible for at all. That is the gap the Keyword Planner fills.
The Google Ads Keyword Planner, including the ranges problem
The Keyword Planner is free with any Google Ads account, and it is the source most paid tools ultimately derive from. Its well-known limitation is that an account with no spending history sees wide ranges — "1K–10K" — rather than exact figures.
The fix is not a trick: run a small campaign. A genuinely modest spend, a few pounds a day for a couple of weeks on a campaign you would want to run anyway, unlocks exact volumes on the account permanently. If the keyword data matters enough to consider a subscription, it is worth more than the subscription would have cost.
| Source | Accuracy for your site | Cost | Covers queries you don't rank for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search Console impressions | Highest — it is measurement | Free | No |
| Keyword Planner, with spend | Google's own figures | Cost of a small campaign | Yes |
| Keyword Planner, no spend | Order of magnitude only | Free | Yes |
| Third-party keyword tool | Modelled, often ±50% | £70–£200 a month | Yes |
Estimating when you have neither
A brand new site with no Search Console history and no Ads account is the genuinely hard case. There are reasonable ways to estimate, and they should all be labelled as estimates wherever the number is shown.
01Anchor on a query you can measure
Find one related query where you do have impressions, or one whose volume you know from anywhere reliable.
02Use autocomplete and related searches for the shape of demand
These are generated from real query frequency. They will not give you a number, but they reliably tell you which variant is the common one.
03Scale by modifier
Location and qualifier modifiers cut volume predictably. A city qualifier on a national term typically lands somewhere between a fiftieth and a fifth of it, depending on the city.
04Label it, everywhere
Estimated, in the table, on the chart and in the export — not in a footnote. An unlabelled estimate becomes a fact the moment it is copied into a second document.
SEOGrowPilot does exactly this, and shows its working: it reads volume from your own Google Ads account when you connect one, falls back to your Search Console impressions, and where it has to derive a figure it marks it estimated in the interface rather than presenting a modelled number as a measured one.
What volume is not for
Volume is one input to a revenue forecast and a poor priority signal on its own. A 40-a-month query where the searcher is holding a credit card is worth more than a 9,000-a-month query being searched by students, and no volume figure of any accuracy will tell you which is which.
Which is worth remembering before spending anything on better volume data: the accuracy gain from a paid tool is small, and it sits inside a calculation whose largest uncertainty is your conversion rate and the value of a conversion — both of which you already have, free, in your own accounts.