SEO Beginner here. I need some help!

I am an intern who works for a very small company. These guys don't know anything about SEO (even I don't know much), so I am responsible for everything. Here's what I have done so far:

1. Keyword Research: Selected a long tail keyword. Average monthly searches are very low (less than 50), and all the tools are suggesting that it'll be easier to rank for this keyword.

2. On-page: Fixed Titles, Meta-descriptions, H1s, URLs, and some content.

3. Off-page: Nothing. We have started a weekly blog post to have more content on the website, not as a link building strategy or anything. Also, we are posting/sharing good content on social media.

4. Technical: Well, the site is very small (less than 15 pages) so we don't have any 404s (also, no crawl errors). I have increased the website's speed significantly. Got the free Cloudflare plan, compressed the images, minified the code, implemented browser caching, and removed unnecessary plugins (we are using WordPress). I have reduced the page size and number of requests (earlier our Google Page Speed Insight score was 40 something, now it's 88).

Future Plan: We are redesigning the website, going for the "brand feel." Also, we'll add more pages to the website like event page, history page, our process, separate pages for each of our services etc.

Questions:

A. Are we heading in the right direction? What else can we do?

B. Good free keyword research tool? Google keyword planner sucks. I have also used Moz's keyword explorer and KWfinder, their volume estimates vary so much. Not sure which is the right one. Also, I am not sure if the keyword we are targeting is good because we do not have any reliable data. We can't use paid tools because we have no money.

Some other things:

1. Our Domain is 8 months old. Google first crawled our website in August.

2. Our host sucks.

3. We have done all of this in one month, and absolutely zero results so far. We are not even ranking in the top 100. We'll probably wait two more months.

PS: My plan is to target a better keyword (1,000 monthly search volume), but obviously, it'll be a lot harder.

Thanks

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