Hello, So I am trying to do keyword research so I know what keywords I can use in my first blog. I don’t have a lot of money so I can’t use popular tools semrush. I heard that Keyword Planner is good and free. However, to get to Keyword Planner I have to create an add and input my credit card information. I’ve seen other Reddit threads saying that you can pause the ad as soon as you create it. However, these threads say that you have to pay money in order to get accurate search results. Is this true? Thanks in advance!

I tried to use Keyword Planner to search for “superheroes” (I write superhero novels and, more importantly for this context, I blog about superheroes). I got a lot of results, but the initial keyword itself has a competition score of Low, which is just not possible. This isn’t a long tail keyword derived from “superheroes”; it’s literally just the word “superheroes”.

I saw that the competition score looks at how many advertisers are bidding on that keyword, not how difficult it is to rank on Google. That makes a bit more sense, but multiple YouTubers are saying to use Keyword Planner for SEO and talking as if the keyword competition was measuring how difficult it is to rank.

I am a novice who is terrible at SEO, so my question to you all is whether or not Keyword Planner is actually reliable for SEO, or if it’s just for adds only. Because, as it stands, I don’t feel like I could trust the keyword competition scores.