Newbie guides to keyword research?

How many tools and what combination do you recommend I use?

Dimitri001 said:

You're saying if the competitors are below 30 I can beat them just on good on site optimization like title, meta description and headings and without backlinks?

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I have been able to do it in that instance many times. just look on the actual google results for the search term and if the keywords are only in the description tag (not at the beginning) and clearly not being used as the basis for those pages, you would be at least on the top 5 pages. you will know when you try to rank and random countries show up in google search console because then you know that people definitely hard trying to hit that keyword. then when you do backlinks and social signals, you would definitely go well. if you have keyword dense content (under 3 percent though) for the page and competitors ranked accidentally, you would have a good chance.

Any recommendation on what combo of tools I should use to research keywords?

Good info for you, hot of the presses
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/seo-guide-for-2017-building-and-ranking-sites.959735/

I should have specified, I'd appreciate it if the tools were free

If you don't know how to do it properly, you should find some service to do it so you can understand it first. Check out the market place

So much good info already shared OP but I published this tutorial on keyword research a few month back that may help you out , it can be done for free provided you are willing to put the time in.

Dimitri001 said:

I'm completely new to SEO and I need to do keyword research. I'm wondering if folks could point me to the best guides (whether on YT or a site) on how to do keyword research.

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Try this site Moz (dot) com