Keyword research for Nepali websites when the tools have no data

Why the keyword tools are blank for Nepali

You type a Nepali phrase into a keyword tool and get nothing back. Most guides read that blank as a verdict on the market. It is a coverage gap, and you can measure it.

On 12 August 2026 I asked DataForSEO which locations its Labs endpoints support. The list came back with 94 entries. Nepal is not one of them — India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are. A keyword-ideas request set to Nepal does not return thin data; it fails with Invalid Field: ‘location_name’.

Keyword Planner does cover Nepal. But for a long list of ordinary Nepali queries it returns a null — an empty field, which is a different thing from a reported zero. That distinction is where the opportunity sits.

The pages ranking for this query mostly route around the problem. The one at position one, anobee.com, tells readers that “the majority of internet users in Nepal search primarily in English” and to “aim for KD under 30”. I ran a character count over the three Nepal-specific pages in the top five that day: two contain no Devanagari at all, and the third contains fifteen Devanagari characters, making one phrase.

Seeds, intent and clustering are in my keyword research guide for Nepal. Stay here for the part those guides skip.

One concept, two scripts, very different reported volume

The same concept, written in Roman letters and in Devanagari, comes back from Keyword Planner with figures that are not remotely comparable.

Every figure is what Keyword Planner reported for location Nepal on 12 August 2026, through the DataForSEO API. Read them as tool output, not as a census of how Nepalis type. Part of the gap is real — plenty of people search in Roman letters because that is what the phone keyboard offers. Part may be the reporting thinness that produces the nulls. I cannot separate the two, and nor can anyone selling you a Nepal keyword report.

The pattern inside the table is the useful part. Lok Sewa Aayog is a named institution and its ratio is 9:1. The generic descriptions sit at 301:1 and 990:1. Proper nouns — institutions, districts, festivals, brands — hold their Devanagari share far better. Start your Devanagari pages where the proper nouns are.

The highest romanised volumes I recorded tie at 90,500 a month: nepali patro, preeti to unicode and unicode to preeti. At the other end, सुनको भाउ reports 320 against 368,000 for gold price nepal.

A null is not a zero, and a zero is not no demand

These queries returned no volume figure at all from Keyword Planner for Nepal on 12 August 2026:

• nepali seo, nepali language seo, keyword research for nepali website
• एसईओ के हो, डिजिटल मार्केटिङ
• काठमाडौं होटल, सस्तो होटल काठमाडौं
• नेपालमा एसईओ सेवा

Every one returns a full live Google SERP in Nepal. काठमाडौं होटल, with no reported volume whatsoever, returns a hotels pack above the organic results, an images block between results seven and eight, and a related-searches strip at the foot. Google’s own hotel search holds the top two positions, TripAdvisor third, MakeMyTrip fifth, Booking.com ninth. Google does not usually assemble a hotel booking module over a query nobody is typing.

So when the number is missing, read the SERP. Four signals say demand is there:

1. The results are coherent, not dictionary entries and unrelated pages.
2. A rich element is attached: People Also Ask, a video carousel, a hotel or local pack. Google builds those where it has behaviour to model.
3. The results are commercial — booking sites, service pages, price listings, classifieds.
4. Autocomplete finishes the phrase in either script. Google’s documentation says predictions “reflect real searches that have been done on Google”.

Ignore the result count Google prints at the top. It estimates how much of the index matches, not how many people search.

Building a Nepali keyword list without volume data

This is the workflow I use when the numbers are not there. It takes an afternoon and produces a list you can defend.

1. Write your service in all three forms. English, romanised Nepali, Devanagari. A trekking outfit in Thamel has trekking agency Kathmandu, kathmandu ma trekking company, and काठमाडौं ट्रेकिङ कम्पनी. Treat them as three query populations, because that is how they behave.
2. Expand each form through Google autocomplete, in a browser located in Nepal, in both scripts. Type the phrase, then the phrase plus each letter in turn, and record what appears. It needs no tool coverage and costs nothing.
3. Mine the Devanagari SERP. Harvest the related-searches strip and every People Also Ask question, expanding each so it spawns more.
4. Collect the words your customers use. Nepali Facebook buy-and-sell groups, the Viber enquiries you have received, and your own Google Business Profile search-terms report. This is where you learn that a room to rent is डेरा or कोठा, not अपार्टमेन्ट — the live घर भाडामा results are full of the first two and contain none of the third.
5. Validate by looking at who ranks, not at a difficulty score.

One caution on seeds. Nepali Wikipedia holds 30,023 articles and about 9.1 million words of article text, against 7.2 million articles on English Wikipedia — both from the projects’ own statistics API on 12 August 2026. English-market guides lean on Wikipedia for entity discovery. At that size it cannot carry the same weight here.

Harvesting variants with Google Input Tools

You do not need a Nepali keyboard to research Nepali keywords. Google Input Tools supports Nepali through transliteration and a Devanagari Phonetic on-screen keyboard. Unlike Hindi, Nepali gets no handwriting input; you can check the table yourself on Google’s Input Tools language list.

It is also a harvesting instrument. Type the romanised phrase your customers use, read off the Devanagari it produces, then push both strings back through autocomplete. Twenty seed phrases will double your list in about half an hour. Research both sides of that conversion: plenty of people type ghar bhada kathmandu and press search.

Reading the SERP as your difficulty score

I have not found a keyword difficulty score for Nepal whose data source is documented. One dataset publishes its limits and I can quote them: DataForSEO Labs excludes Nepal. What sits inside Ahrefs or Ubersuggest I cannot audit, so I will not claim their Nepal figures come from any particular place. A number you cannot trace is a poor reason to build or skip a page.

सस्तो होटल काठमाडौं reports no volume in Keyword Planner. Pulled in Nepal on 12 August 2026, page one carries a hotels pack and ten organic results, of which six are social or video — three Facebook, two YouTube, one TikTok. Three are news articles. One booking site appears, Booking.com, in tenth. Not one hotel in Kathmandu holds that query with a page of its own.

That is your difficulty reading, and it is more honest than a score. I pulled two more Devanagari SERPs with the same shape — काठमाडौंमा घर भाडामा and नेपालमा एसईओ सेवा — and broke them down result by result in my piece on Nepali-language SEO.

Choosing what to build when you cannot rank by difficulty

Three rules, in this order.

Prefer queries where no real business page holds the top ten. News archives, Facebook threads and forum posts are beatable by a page written to answer the query. A competitor’s well-built service page is not, at least not first.

Use romanised forms for reach and Devanagari forms for defensibility. The reported volume sits with the romanised spellings. The empty, uncontested SERPs sit with the Devanagari ones.

Do not build a Devanagari page unless you will actually write it in Devanagari. Google’s documentation is blunt: “Google uses the visible content of your page to determine its language. We don’t use any code-level language information such as lang attributes, or the URL.” A Devanagari title bolted onto English body copy will not match Devanagari queries.

For most Nepali businesses the output of this research is not a bilingual site. It is your existing site plus three to five deliberately Nepali pages, aimed at queries you have watched go unclaimed.

Can I use ChatGPT for keyword research in Nepali?

Yes for generating candidates, no for measuring them. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are good at producing the Romanised spellings and question forms a Nepali searcher actually types — kasari garne, kati parcha, kati paisa lagcha — and at grouping a long list into intents. They have no search-volume data of their own, so any number an AI model gives you for a Nepali query is invented.

The workable method is the one this article already describes, with the model used at step one only: ask it for thirty ways a Nepali speaker might phrase the need in Roman script and in Devanagari, then take that list to Google autocomplete, the People also ask box and your own Search Console query report to see which forms real people use. Treat the model’s output as a brainstorm to be verified, never as evidence.

One practical caution: models default to textbook Nepali and searchers do not. The spellings that carry impressions in Search Console are often the informal ones — badaune beside badhaune, hunxa beside huncha — so keep the variants the model tells you are wrong.

Frequently asked questions

What to do with all this

Missing data is not missing demand. It changes the method, not the opportunity. You stop asking a tool for permission and start reading what Google hands over free: autocomplete, People Also Ask, related searches, and page one itself.

A commercial Devanagari SERP held by news articles and Facebook posts is an unusually cheap opening, and it is cheap partly because the tools do not measure it, so fewer people go looking. How long that holds I do not know. If you want it mapped for your own site, that is what my content SEO service does.

Suraj Giri

SEO Expert in Nepal

Suraj Giri is an independent SEO consultant based in Bhaktapur, Nepal. His project work spans e-commerce, travel, SaaS, healthcare, and local businesses, with a focus on measurable organic growth.

Written and reviewed by Suraj Giri. Read the editorial standards and corrections policy.