Ask HN: How to discover high-volume search phrases about a service?

1 point·punkpeye··2 comments

I am trying to figure what are the most common problems that people Google when they are researching Playwright, test automation software, and then blog about it.

How do I go about finding out what Google search?

A few indirect ideas I've had are:

* Look at Stack Overflow questions with the highest number of views * Look at GitHub issues with the highest number of engagement

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If you have a Google Ads account, the Keyword Planner tool will give you estimates-- broad monthly ranges if you don't have any ad spend, or closer approximations if you have paid spend. It recommends similar terms, too.

SEMRush has a free version where you get ~10 queries per day, so you can explore search volume for terms like "test automation software" and drill down from there. It won't 100% match GKP, but will be similar enough in magnitude.

If you're comfortable using APIs, https://dataforseo.com/ is going to be the cheapest/easiest route. I've used it for past projects, and it is basically like $0.10 (don't quote me, but around there) to fetch monthly search volume for <700 terms per batch. I think they can also provide search suggestions, estimated CPCs/competition indexes and other metrics as provided by Google.

Google Trends is easy/simple, but only gives an index score-- not actual query volume. Lots of marketing people use this for ideation.

Thanks! How does something like Dataforseo estimate the search volume?

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