The number you were taught to chase is the one that has stopped meaning what it meant.
Search volume. Five thousand a month looks like five thousand a month, and it no longer tells you how many people will arrive on your site, because a growing share of those searches get answered before anybody scrolls.
Industry tracking put AI Overviews on something like 48% of queries by March this year. Where they appear, reported desktop click-through rates can fall by half and mobile by around a third.
So a keyword at 5,000 searches a month with an AI Overview sitting on top of it and a row of aggregators below can deliver fewer visits than a 400 a month query where the results page is still ten ordinary links.
Which changes the order of the job. You are no longer hunting for volume and then checking difficulty. You are hunting for queries where a click still happens, and that check is free.
The free sources, in the order I would use them
Search Console first, always. Performance, then Queries. This is the only list in the world that is specifically about you, and most businesses have never sorted it properly. Look for queries with impressions and almost no clicks, which are usually pages that half-answer something, and for queries you did not know you appeared for at all. That second group is where the easiest work is, because you have already proved you are eligible.
Autocomplete, worked systematically. Type your service and stop. Then type it again with who, what, how, why, best, cheap, near. Then run the alphabet, your service plus a, then b, then c. It is tedious and it takes fifteen minutes and it produces the actual phrasing people use, which is rarely the phrasing your website uses.
People Also Ask, and a correction worth having. A lot of people now believe this went away. What Google retired was FAQ rich results, which stopped appearing in May this year with the documentation removed in June. People Also Ask is a different thing, it never ran on your markup, and it is still there. Expand a few boxes and it keeps generating more, which gives you a map of the questions Google believes surround this topic.
Related searches at the bottom of the page. Ignored because it is at the bottom. It is Google telling you what the same person searched next.
Your competitor’s navigation. Their menu and their service pages are somebody’s keyword research, already done and paid for. You are not copying their content, you are reading which categories they decided were worth a page.
Your own inbox and WhatsApp. The questions customers actually ask, in their words. This is the best source on this list and it costs nothing but reading your own messages for twenty minutes.
Read the results page, not the words
This is the part that separates useful research from a spreadsheet of phrases, and it is what the paid tools cannot do for you.
Search each candidate query and look at what the page is made of.
Shopping results and product listings mean the intent is transactional. A blog post will not rank there and would not convert if it did.
A local pack near the top means this is a Google Business Profile question rather than a content question. No amount of writing wins it. That is a different job.
Many ads means the query is commercially valuable and expensive, which is useful information in both directions.
An AI Overview that fully answers the question, with forums and aggregators underneath means you can rank and still get very little. Note it and move on unless the topic is strategically important to you for other reasons.
Nobody good ranking, thin pages, results from 2021 means either an opportunity or no real demand. Check volume to tell which.
The test I would apply to every shortlisted query: if I searched this, would I click anything? If the honest answer is no, volume is irrelevant.
What the AI report will and will not tell you
While you are in Search Console, the Generative AI report under Performance is worth opening, and worth understanding precisely.
It gives you impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, split by URL, country and device. It does not give you click-through rate, position, or the prompts people typed.
So it is not a keyword research tool. What it is good for is spotting the gap where pages pick up ordinary search impressions and almost nothing in the AI report, which is a problem with how your page is written rather than with which keyword you chose. I went through what that gap usually means separately.
Three things specific to searching in India
Transliteration and Hinglish. People type in Roman script with Hindi or regional words mixed in, and the commercial term is often not the dictionary one. Autocomplete will show you this if you start typing the way your customers speak rather than the way your brochure reads.
City and locality qualifiers do most of the work. The head term is usually unwinnable and the same term plus a locality frequently has almost no competition. That is not a small keyword, it is a keyword with a buyer attached.
Longer, spoken phrasing. A large share of Indian search is voice or typed as a full sentence, which produces queries nobody would think to put in a keyword list. These are the easiest things on the internet to rank for and they convert well, because somebody asking a full question is usually close to deciding.
What to do with the list
Sort by whether a click survives, then by how specific the buyer is, then by volume. In that order.
Then map one query per page rather than stuffing five into one, and give the page the shape the results page implied. If page one is all product listings, build a product or service page. If it is guides, write the guide. If it is a local pack, go and fix the profile instead.
Before lunch
An hour, four things.
Open Search Console, Queries, last three months, and sort by impressions with clicks ascending. Write down the ten queries where you appear and nobody clicks.
Then spend fifteen minutes in autocomplete with the question words and the alphabet, and collect everything that sounds like something a customer would say.
Then take your five best candidates and actually search them. Look at what the page is made of and cross off the ones where you would not have clicked anything.
Then read your last fifty WhatsApp enquiries and write down the three questions that keep repeating. Those are pages, and nobody else in your category has written them properly because they never looked.
None of that needed a subscription. What the paid tools buy you is speed and volume estimates, and at this stage neither is your constraint. My notes on SEO cover what happens after the list exists. If you’d like to think through your own, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch.