You will be able to collect keyword ideas from several tools and read their volume and difficulty figures as rough estimates.
Open Google, type "birthday cake" slowly, and stop before you press enter. Look at the list that drops down under the search box. You will see completions such as "delivery", "near me", the names of particular estates and particular flavours. This list is autocomplete, Google's suggested completions as you type, based on what people search. It is free and comes straight from Google, so it is a good first place to collect keyword ideas.
Keyword tools are useful for finding searches you had not thought of. They are much rougher at measuring how many people make those searches.
After autocomplete, run the search and look at the results page. The People also ask box shows related questions. Related searches sometimes appear at the bottom of the page. Like autocomplete, both are free and come directly from Google.
Google Keyword Planner sits inside Google Ads. It suggests related searches and gives volume estimates. It was built for advertisers, so it leans towards searches people might pay to appear on. It is still a useful source of ideas for organic search. It often shows a range of volume rather than a single number.
If your site is already in Google Search Console, its Performance report shows the actual queries that led to your pages appearing in results. These queries are real and not estimates, though Google leaves out some rare ones to protect privacy. Module 9 shows how to read this report.
Paid tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush build their own search databases and estimate volume, difficulty and which sites rank. They are convenient when you research many searches at once or look at competitors. They are named only as examples and are not recommendations. You can complete the course without them.
Mei Ling, the home baker in Punggol from Digital marketing foundations, looked up "custom birthday cake Singapore" in two keyword tools on the same afternoon. One tool showed hundreds of searches a month. The other showed a figure several times larger. She had planned to choose which cakes to write about based on those numbers, and now she did not know which to believe.
Every search volume figure is an estimate of how many times a search is made in a month. Paid tools build these figures from their own data sources and models, and none of them publish their methods in full. So tools disagree, and in a small market like Singapore they can disagree widely. A search made a few hundred times a month in Singapore (an illustrative figure) gives every tool very little data. One tool might show 90, another 400, and a third nothing at all. A tool showing a different figure, or no figure, is not lying, because each one is estimating from a thin sample.
Use volume figures to compare searches within one tool and to spot obvious differences. If one search shows thousands and another shows tens, the difference is probably real. If two show 140 and 210, treat them as about the same.
Most paid tools also give a keyword difficulty score, often out of 100, meant to show how hard it would be to rank for a search. Each vendor calculates it with its own formula, usually based on the links pointing to the pages that rank now. Google publishes nothing like it, so it is not a Google measure. A difficulty of 30 in one tool and 30 in another do not mean the same thing.
Compare difficulty only within one tool, and use it as a rough first filter. Your own reading of the results page is often a better guide, as Lesson 2.2, Read the results page to confirm intent, explains. If the top five results are thin directory pages, a good local page has a real chance whatever the difficulty score says.
A common mistake is chasing the searches with the biggest volume. For a small business, high-volume searches are often informational. The people making them are far from buying, and the results are dominated by large sites that are hard to displace. A search with modest volume and clear buying intent can bring far more customers.
Take "custom birthday cake delivery Punggol". Every tool may show a tiny figure for it, or none. Yet nearly everyone who types it wants to order soon, in an area Mei Ling can deliver to. Ten ready-to-order visitors a month are worth more to her than hundreds of people reading a general cake-trends article. Priya's tuition example from Module 1 works the same way. "PSLE maths tips" may show more volume than "P5 maths tuition Tampines", but the second search is much closer to a phone call, so it is worth more.
When you judge a keyword, compare volume within one tool, treating close figures as equal and large gaps as meaningful. Compare difficulty within one tool as a first filter. Check the actual results page for real competition and intent. Then favour the modest search with buying intent over the large informational one.
Choose two sources. Keyword Planner plus one other tool works, and so does a tool plus your own Search Console data if you have some. Look up ten of your 20 searches in both. For each search, record the two figures side by side, along with the date and the country setting you used. Note any search where the figures differ by more than double.
You are not trying to decide which tool is right. You are measuring how much uncertainty sits behind the numbers, so you do not plan the next six months of work around a figure that could be off several times over.
Look up ten of your searches in two tools. Write down the volume each tool gives, and mark any search where one figure is more than double the other.
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