Find what your customers actually search for, with zero budget

If your site is already indexed, do this before anything else. Search Console's Performance report shows the actual queries that showed your pages in results, whether anyone clicked or not. Nothing else on this list is real data in the same sense, everything else is a prediction about what people might type.

Go to Performance under Search results, set the date range to the last three or six months, and open the Queries tab. Sort by impressions. You are looking for two things: queries with high impressions but low clicks (you are showing up but not winning the click, usually a title or meta problem), and queries with a handful of clicks that you never deliberately targeted (you are ranking for something by accident and should write more of it).

A momo shop in Kathmandu with a simple menu page might find it is getting impressions for 'momo delivery Baneshwor' and 'best momo near me' without ever having written those words. That is a page waiting to be written.

If you have no site yet, or no traffic yet, start here instead. Open a private or incognito window, so your own search history does not skew the suggestions, and type a seed phrase related to what you sell.

Autocomplete is built from real, frequent queries, not a guess. Type 'trekking permit' and Google will finish the sentence for you: cost, TIMS, ACAP, Everest, price 2026. Each suggestion is a phrase enough real people typed that Google decided it was worth surfacing.

Then go further than most people bother to. Add a letter after your seed term ("trekking permit a", "trekking permit b"...) and note what appears. Add a question word in front ("how", "why", "can", "does") and repeat. This alphabet sweep takes ten minutes and routinely turns up three or four phrases you would not have thought of on your own.

Search your seed term without incognito this time, and look at the 'People also ask' box that Google inserts partway down the results. These are real follow-up questions, and clicking one to expand it loads two or three more underneath. Keep clicking.

This is the single best free source for question-shaped content, the kind that answers a specific thing a person wants to know rather than a broad topic. If you sell trekking gear, 'People also ask' on a permit search might surface 'do I need a guide for Annapurna', 'can I get a TIMS card on arrival', 'is ACAP permit refundable'. Each of those is a subheading or a short section you can write, and together they often form most of a complete page.

Keep expanding until the box stops producing new questions, usually somewhere between eight and fifteen expansions for a topic with real search volume. Below that, you are seeing the honest ceiling of what people ask about that specific phrase.

At the bottom of the results page, Google lists eight related searches. These tend to be broader or adjacent terms rather than direct follow-up questions, useful for finding topic angles you had not considered rather than exact phrasing.

Click through two or three of the related searches themselves and repeat the autocomplete and 'People also ask' steps on each. This second layer is where you often find the terms your competitors are not writing for, because most people stop at the first page of results and never go one level deeper.

Trends will not give you volume numbers, but it does one thing free tools rarely do well: it compares two or more terms against each other and shows relative interest over time, filterable down to Nepal specifically.

Use it to settle spelling and phrasing arguments. Type 'Dashain' against 'Dasain' in the compare box, filtered to Nepal, and you will see which spelling actually gets searched more. Do the same for English versus romanised Nepali versions of a term before you commit a page title to one or the other.

Trends also shows seasonality, which matters a lot for a country with a festival and trekking-season calendar. A query for 'Everest base camp trek cost' likely spikes months before the September to November season and again before March to May. If you are planning content ahead of time, set the date range to 5 years and read where the peaks fall, then publish and update ahead of the next one rather than during it.

By now you have a spreadsheet with real Search Console queries, an autocomplete sweep, a stack of 'People also ask' questions, related searches, and a Trends comparison for the ambiguous ones. Resist the urge to write one page per line item.

Group phrases that a single page could genuinely answer. All the 'People also ask' questions under one seed term usually belong on one page as sections or an FAQ block. Search Console queries that already land on the same page confirm you have grouped correctly. Only split into a second page when the intent is clearly different, someone typing 'trekking permit cost' wants a number, someone typing 'trekking permit how to apply' wants a process.

Revisit Search Console again after you publish. New impressions on queries you did not deliberately target are the tool telling you, for free, what to write next.