01What each free tool shows
Four Google tools cover most of this job, and each answers a different question. We read the help page of each one on 20 October 2026. None of them tells you where you will rank, and none gives you a list of phrases that is ready to use without a human choosing from it. That choice stays with you, because only you know what you actually sell.
- Search Console: Google's help page calls it a free service. Its Performance report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, and can group them by the query people typed. The default view covers the past three months.
- Autocomplete: Google says predictions come from common and trending queries that match what you type, and that the searcher's language and location shape them. It shows wording, not volume.
- Keyword Planner: Google's page calls it a free keyword search tool for advertisers building keyword lists for search campaigns. You need a Google Ads account with setup finished and a campaign created first. It shows estimates of monthly searches and the cost of targeting them.
- Google Trends: you can compare up to 8 groups of terms. Values are divided by total searches for the place and period, scaled from 0 to 100, and very low-volume terms appear as 0. It shows relative interest, not a count of searches.
02A one-afternoon routine for a Romanian business
Spend one afternoon, not a month. Write your services the way a customer would ask for them, then run them through the tools in this order. The order matters: start with what needs no setup, and open Keyword Planner last, only if you need it. Keep a plain spreadsheet open while you work: one row per phrase, with the tool that surfaced it and the page on your site that should answer it.
- List the 10 to 20 things you sell in a customer's words, with the town where it applies. Not the words on your invoice.
- Type each one into Google in Romanian, with and without diacritics, from the area you serve, and note what autocomplete adds. Google says location affects predictions, so a search from another city can mislead you.
- Verify your site in Search Console (Google's start guide lists ownership verification as step one), then open Performance and the Queries tab. You are looking for searches your site already appears for, and for pages that show up for a search you never planned.
- If you plan ads, or want a rough size check, put the phrases into Keyword Planner and treat the numbers as what Google calls them: estimates.
- Give each phrase one page. A phrase without a page is a to-do. A page without a phrase is a guess.
03When free is enough, and when to pay someone
Free is enough when you can name your services and your town in an afternoon and your site has been in front of Google for a while, so Search Console has something to show. Paying is the better choice when finding phrases is not the hard part. The hard part is judging which ones you can realistically win and putting each on the right page. What SEO costs and why results take months are covered in our other posts, so we do not repeat them here.
- Free is enough: one location, a handful of services, a site that already has some Search Console history.
- Pay someone: a new site, so the best free tool has nothing to show yet.
- Pay someone: many services or towns, where mapping phrases to pages is the real work.
- Pay someone: a crowded niche. Keyword Planner shows search estimates and the cost of targeting them, not whether you can rank for a phrase. That call takes judgment.
- Pay someone: you know you will not do the afternoon. A list nobody reads is worth nothing, free or not.
04Where PROOF48 is the wrong choice
PROOF48's FOUND plan is 297 EUR a month and includes local SEO for 5 target keywords. It is monthly work, not a one-off keyword report. If all you need is a list of phrases and a page for each, do the afternoon above and keep the money. We also promise no Google position: a good phrase list is a starting point, not a ranking. And if you need customers this week, search is the wrong channel; our SEO page says to use ads for that.
- Only need a phrase list and a page map: do it yourself with the tools above
- Need customers this week: ads, not organic search
- Want a guaranteed position: nobody can sell you one, and we do not
- Want ongoing local SEO work, a Business Profile and a monthly report: that is what FOUND is for
A salon site built one page per service
SCP Shine & Style, a beauty salon in Sector 3, Bucharest, was rebuilt by PROOF48 with a Romanian keyword in the homepage H1 and a page per service, each with its own copy and media. That is the one-phrase-one-page shape from the routine above. The case study does not record which tool picked those phrases, and we publish no ranking, revenue or booking figure for the salon, because we do not measure them and will not estimate them.
See the build: SCP Shine & StyleQuestions, answered
Is Google Keyword Planner really free?
Google's Keyword Planner page calls it a free keyword search tool for advertisers. To open it you first need to complete your Google Ads account setup and create a campaign, and the help page says setup includes entering billing information.
Are Keyword Planner numbers exact?
No. Google's help page describes them as estimates of how many searches a keyword gets each month. Use them to compare phrases with each other, not as a forecast of visitors.
Does Google Trends show how many people search for something?
No. Google says each value is divided by total searches for its place and time range and scaled from 0 to 100, so it shows relative interest. Very low-volume terms appear as 0, which makes it a weak fit for a narrow local phrase.
Is Search Console enough on its own?
It counts how often your site appeared and was clicked, grouped by the query typed, so it describes searches you already show up for. For phrases you do not appear for yet, add autocomplete and, if you run ads, Keyword Planner.
Do I need a paid keyword tool?
Paid tools exist, but we did not open their pages for this post, so we state no features or prices for them. For one location and a handful of services, the Google tools above answer the question.
Where PROOF48 fits
For one location and a handful of services, Google's own free tools are enough: Search Console for what you already show up for, autocomplete for how people word a search, Keyword Planner for rough estimates if you run ads. Pay someone when you have no data yet, many services, or no time to turn phrases into pages. PROOF48's free technical audit starts from your URL, and every build at /work is live.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Cosmin has worked in online marketing and software development since 2018, and has built with AI every day since January 2023. He still writes code from scratch daily, in Python, React, Rust and C#. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, so every opinion on this blog was paid for in real builds, not in theory.