Do keyword research from first principles, with a business and no data
Keyword research without a tool: the three sources of truth you already have, and an interview prompt that names no terms until it knows your business.
- Works in
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini
- You need
- A business, and the willingness to answer seven questions about it · No tool and no data required
- Written for
- how to do keyword research
Scored by our own engine
This page, run through the audit we sell. Measured 4 August 2026.
Keyword research is one question asked carefully: what does somebody type into a search box on the day they need what you sell. Everything else, the tools and the exports and the difficulty scores, is machinery for answering it at scale. With a business and no data you can still answer it, because the first half of the question is about your customers and you already have those.
The three sources you have before any tool
Your customers, Google itself, and eventually your own traffic. That is the whole free stack and most sites never use the first one.
Customer language comes from support emails, sales calls and reviews, and it contains the phrasings you would never write. Somebody with a scheduling problem describes double booked crews long before they describe scheduling software, and no list seeded from your product words will ever contain that sentence.
Google supplies the second source for free. Autocomplete suggestions and the related searches at the foot of a results page are drawn from things people actually typed, which makes them evidence rather than guesses. The prompt above ends by sending you there deliberately, because that trip is the research and the interview is only preparation for it.
Why the prompt interviews you first
Because a keyword prompt that takes your description upfront will hand your own marketing language back as a keyword list. You paste in a sentence about your leading platform, and out comes a set of terms containing the word platform.
The interview exists to get underneath that. Seven questions, one at a time, most of them about somebody else, with a rule that pushes back every time an answer arrives in brochure language. The answers are the input no tool has and no model can guess, and they are the reason the output is yours rather than generic to your industry.
What to do with the brief
Check it, then narrow it. The brief is a hypothesis about how your customers talk, and the checking happens in a search box.
Once the phrases have survived a real look at autocomplete and at what already ranks, take them into Keyword Planner for figures, then cluster them into pages rather than building one page per phrase. If the interview left you wanting more phrasings around one idea, expand that seed. If the whole vocabulary here is new, what keyword research is covers the ground more slowly, and the full sequence shows where this step sits.
You are going to interview me before you produce anything. I run a business
and I have no keyword data. Do not give me keywords yet. Do not give me a
plan yet. Ask questions.
How the interview runs:
1. Ask me one question at a time and wait for my answer. Not a numbered list
of seven questions. One, then the next, chosen partly by what I just
said.
2. Cover all seven of these before you produce anything:
- What somebody has to be doing or feeling on the day they need you.
- What they were trying to solve before they knew a product like yours
existed, in their words rather than yours.
- The last thing they tried that did not work.
- What they would call the thing you sell if they had never seen your
website.
- Who they compare you against, including the option of doing nothing.
- Where they are, and whether that changes anything about what you sell.
- The one sentence a happy customer says about you afterwards.
3. If an answer comes back in marketing language, say so and ask again. Words
like solution, platform, seamless, leading and empower are the signal.
Ask me what a customer would have said instead. Do this every time.
4. If I answer a question with a description of my product rather than of a
person, tell me and ask again. Most of these questions are about somebody
else.
When all seven are answered, produce a written brief. Prose with headed
sections, not a table and not a spreadsheet.
DEMAND IN PLAIN WORDS. Two paragraphs describing the situations somebody is
in when they would search for something you sell. Situations, not keywords.
THE WORDS THEY WOULD USE. Grouped into three sets and clearly labelled:
words that describe the problem and contain nothing about your product,
words that name a category of solution, and words that name you or a
competitor. Say which set is largest and what that tells me.
WHAT TO SEARCH TO CHECK THIS. Ten to fifteen phrases from those sets, framed
as things for me to type into Google myself so I can read the autocomplete
suggestions and the results. Not a keyword list. A list of things to look at.
THE FIRST THREE PAGES. Three pages worth building, each with the question it
answers and the situation from the first section it serves. One sentence
each on why this page before the others.
Constraints:
- Do not output search volume, difficulty or competition in any form. You
have no access to any of them, and I have no data to give you.
- Do not tell me a term is high volume, low competition, or easy to rank
for. You cannot know and neither can I yet.
- Every term in THE WORDS THEY WOULD USE must be traceable to something I
said in the interview. If you add one from general knowledge, mark it
"not from your answers".
My business, in one sentence: [WHAT YOU SELL AND TO WHOM]
Start the interview with your first question.What to change
Everything in square brackets is yours to replace. Nothing else needs editing.
[WHAT YOU SELL AND TO WHOM]- One sentence, and the only thing you fill in before the interview starts. Everything else arrives through the questions, which is the point: a prompt that took eight inputs upfront would let you paste your marketing copy in and get your own words back as keywords.
How to run it
- 01Answer the interview as a customer would, not as a founder
The seven questions are mostly about somebody else, and the instinct is to answer them about your product. Rule 4 catches it and it will catch you more than once. When you are asked what someone was trying to solve before they knew you existed, the honest answer usually contains none of your product words.
- 02Let it push back on your marketing language
When the model tells you an answer sounded like a brochure, rewrite it rather than defending it. Words like platform, solution and seamless are the ones nobody types into a search box, and a keyword set built from them describes your positioning rather than anybody looking for you.
- 03Take the search list to Google and read the autocomplete
Type each phrase into a search box and read what Google suggests underneath, then scroll to the related searches at the bottom of the results. This is real demand data, it is free, and it is the closest thing to evidence available before you have any traffic of your own.
- 04Read what already ranks for three of them
Open the results for three phrases and look at what kind of page is winning. If the first page is all product pages, an article will not compete there, and if it is all articles, your product page is in the wrong room. This is the check that keeps a plan attached to reality.
- 05Get real figures for the survivors before you build anything
Take the phrases that survived into Google Keyword Planner, which is free with an ads account. Nothing produced by the interview is evidence that anybody searches anything. It is a map of how your customers talk, which is the half no tool can give you.
- 06Build the first page and check a machine can read it
Write the first of the three pages, answering its question in the opening sentence rather than in the fourth paragraph. Then run it through the AI content readiness check, because a page that answers the right question in an unquotable shape wins on neither Google nor an assistant.
Questions people ask
How do you do keyword research without a paid tool?
Three free sources cover most of it. Your own customers, in the words they used in emails, calls and reviews. Google autocomplete and the related searches at the foot of a results page, which are drawn from real queries. Google Keyword Planner, which is free with an ads account and gives you volume ranges rather than exact figures.
What is the first step in keyword research?
Writing down what a customer is doing on the day they need you, before touching any tool. Keyword research is matching what you sell to what somebody types, and the second half of that is unknowable until you understand the first half. Starting at the tool produces a list of terms containing your product words and nothing a stranger would search.
How many keywords do I need to start?
Enough for three pages, which is usually a few dozen candidate phrases and no more. A list of five hundred terms is a way of avoiding the decision about what to publish first. Build three pages, watch what Search Console reports about them, and the next round of research will be based on evidence instead of reasoning.
Can I trust the keywords a language model suggests?
Trust the phrasings and distrust anything numeric. A model is genuinely useful for the ways people describe a problem, including the phrasings no tool has recorded because too few people searched them. It has no access to search volume and will invent figures that look exactly like measured ones, which is why this prompt forbids them.
How long does proper keyword research take?
The interview is fifteen minutes and the checking is the part that takes an afternoon. Reading autocomplete, looking at what already ranks and pulling figures from Keyword Planner is unglamorous and it is where the research actually happens. The output of the prompt is a hypothesis about your customers, not a finished plan.
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