How To Find Low Competition Keywords (Quick SEO Opportunities)
Need help finding low competition keywords? You’re in the right place.
While they have lower monthly search volumes, they have less competition, making them much easier to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
In this post, you’ll learn how to find low competition keywords you can actually rank for.
Treat this post like a process. Work through it step-by-step and at the end you’ll have a solid list of promising keywords.
Note: We won’t be discussing how to source keywords from traditional tools like Semrush. That’s the exact method most SEOs use so even though you can find low competition keywords, that’s where everyone is looking. The point is to do things differently and find keywords from other sources. And we won’t be covering sourcing keywords using ChatGPT because the free version will essentially just pull ideas out of a hat at random. That’s not what we want here.
1. Build your keyword list
Initially, you want to find keyword ideas from different places.
Some would begin by using paid keyword research tools to get the ball rolling.
There’s nothing wrong with those tools. I use them frequently.
But that’s how most SEOs do their research because its convenient. Sometimes even the lowest competition keywords can be more contested.
But as it turns out, there are some pretty good free tools available that often get overlooked because they take a bit of effort to go through.
We’ll start with Google itself.
The search engine is flush with keyword ideas waiting to be found – you just have to know how to use it properly. Doing so lets you extract hundreds of low-competition keywords out of the box without shelling any case! Let’s get started…
Google Autocomplete
This feature predicts what you plan to search on Google as you’re typing.
If you type in “content” without pressing Enter or clicking on the Search button from the Google search bar, it’ll show a drop-down window with ten search phrases containing the word “content.”
If you type in “content moderator,” one of the keyword suggestions in Autocomplete, it’ll again show you ten search queries containing the words you initially typed in.
Keep adding words in the search bar to help you brainstorm long tail keywords from Autosuggest. Then, list the keywords in a sheet, which you will use later.
A technique you can use in Autocomplete is the wildcard search operator. By adding “*” in the search query (again, without pressing Enter on your keyboard), you should be able to find keywords that Google won’t suggest.
For instance, by placing an asterisk (*) between the words “best” and “for kids,” Google will replace the asterisk with words that people commonly search that also contain the words above.
Play around with this search operator by putting it in different places in your search query to find keyword ideas.
People Also Ask
Once you’re on SERPs, you may see a section with four questions related to your keyword. This section, called “People Also Ask” (PAA), contains questions addressed by pages optimized for the search query.
If you click on a question, two things happen: it opens a drop-down section with the highlighted answer from a page, and it shows two additional questions related to the one you just opened.
Keep doing this to open more question keywords that you can add to your list!
Tip: To help you scrape the questions from the PAA for your keyword, you can use the SEO Minion Chrome extension. While you have to subscribe to its paid plans, it lets you choose how many questions to download and how deep you want it to go. It beats doing this manually, especially if you have other SEO tasks.
People Also Search For
When you scroll down the bottom of SERPs, you should see the People Also Search for section, which is pretty self-explanatory.
These search terms don’t necessarily contain your initial search phrase. Rather, people type in these search queries after or before searching for the same keyword you entered.
You can click on a search term to find keywords that people are searching for that term.
YouTube Autocomplete
YouTube is the second-biggest search engine in the world and is also owned by Google. Using data provided by this platform should help you expand your keyword list and improve your video content campaigns.
Similar to Google’s Autocomplete, you can type in your topic on the search bar, and YouTube will help you finish your search by suggesting relevant search queries to the one you typed so far.
The wildcard search operator also works on YouTube. Just make sure to put your cursor where the asterisk is so YouTube will replace it with words in the suggested search phrases.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a curious study. This oft-ignored and highly underrated keyword research tool primarily deals with trending keywords or those quickly gaining popularity.
It basically lets you jump into a trend and strike the iron while it’s hot, which could be a boon to your new website! Since that topic or query is hot off the press, you have few competitors, making ranking for this search term much easier.
To use it, go to the Trending New page and filter the results within your target location, time range, and other variables to zero in on trends relevant to you.
The results here show you the search volume of each keyword as well as the time the topic trended online.
Click on a topic to show the trend breakdown on the right side of the screen. It gives you tons of long-tail keyword ideas to target for your site.
You can copy these keywords into your list or compare keywords according to their popularity over time.
Speaking of which, another way to use Google Trends to identify low competition keywords is by looking at seasonality. Some search queries perform better during certain periods, ex., Christmas displays during the holidays, swimwear during summer, etc.
You can type in your keyword on the search bar or explore any of the trending topics from your research. Doing so will reveal to you a graph of its popularity over time on a scale of 0 to 100 (100 being the highest).
In the example above, “new orleans saints” has never reached as much popularity as it has now. From here, we can deduce that its popularity is not due to a season (because the graph has been fairly flat in the past 12 months). That means the topic has undergone some drastic changes recently that put them in the spotlight.
In other words, you should definitely consider including it in your short list of keywords and optimizing it on your website to take advantage of its skyrocketing popularity!
Google Keyword Planner
At this point, you have a veritable list of keywords that could potentially be low-competition keywords. However, there are still gaps in our research – we have yet to find out how many people are searching for your list of keywords on search engines.
Enter Google Keyword Planner. It is Google’s free keyword tool to help you determine how many searches a keyword receives in a month. This is important because you want to target search terms people search for instead of those that don’t have a search volume.
To use this platform, you must sign up for a Google Ads account. Once you do, enter your seed keyword on the search bar.
The next page will show you keyword suggestions from your initial keyword and the average monthly search volume range for each term, e.g., 100 to 1k, 1k to 10k searches, and so on.
These average ranges should at least give you an idea of how popular a search term is on Google.
However, the search volume is only half of the story, as we want to know how easy ranking for the keywords will be. It’s best to export the keywords into a sheet and choose which ones to add to your list.
2. Validate your list using SEO tools
Now, you should have a list of low-hanging fruit keywords to consider when ranking your website. The next step is to understand and gauge which keywords in your list to prioritize and which ones to discard if necessary.
This is where SEO tools like SE Ranking come into play. Its keyword research feature identifies the keyword difficulty, search intent, and other keyword metrics. These help you effectively target low-competition keywords.
After signing up for an account, go to Keyword Research and copy and paste your keyword list onto the search bar. Make sure to change the country or location to your desired one before proceeding.
You will be brought to the tool’s bulk keyword analysis page, where it breaks down your keywords according to the affordable metrics. By default, keywords with the highest search volumes appear at the top.
That’s good and all, but we also want to filter keywords with low competition so you can rank higher on SERPs upon optimizing for the keyword on your site and increase your organic search traffic.
To discover low-difficulty keywords easily, click the Filter icon and enter the difficulty range. For this example, let’s show keywords with a maximum difficulty of 30.
After clicking “Apply Filters,” you should see potential target keywords that meet your prerequisite.
If the filter doesn’t return a lot of keywords, you can perform the steps above to extract even more keyword ideas, then run them again using this process.
But since you’re already on SE Ranking, you can use it to find relevant keywords from your seed keywords.
Go back to the Keyword Research feature and enter your topic in the search bar.
From the results page, click on any of the “View Detailed Report” buttons under Keyword Ideas. Ideally, you want to click on the one with the most keyword suggestions.
Next, open the Filters section and narrow down the keywords to your desired Keyword Difficulty metric range before clicking “Apply Filters.”
Doing so should help you identify keywords to target in your upcoming SEO strategy.
If you’re looking specifically for long-tail keywords, click on the Question tab to only show question keywords (queries that start with “what,” “why,” “when,” “where,” and “how”) on top of your filters.
3. Conduct competitor keyword research
In case you’re still looking for even more low keyword difficulty, high volume keywords, SE Ranking has got you covered.
It has a Competitive Research feature that lets you spy on keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but your site isn’t.
To proceed, you need to identify the top websites on your niche or topic. You can do this by going to the Competitor Keyword page and entering your site URL on the search bar.
On the results page, scroll down until you see the organic competitors section. Click on “View Detailed Report” to see the complete list of websites.
From the list, select five of the closest competitors. They don’t need to have the highest traffic. A good rule of thumb is to refer to the common and missing keywords. The closer the difference between common and missing keywords, the closer they are to being your direct competitors.
From here, you can click on the missing keywords of the competitors you’ve identified and see keyword opportunities you can include in your SEO campaign.
Of course, you can drill down the keyword suggestions according to your desired keyword difficulty and search volume using the filter features.
Just as important, you can add another competitor from your research here. Just enter its URL at the top, and the tool will show you keywords from both sites that you’re not ranking for.
Researching keywords your competitors rank for is a great complement to the traditional keyword research approach above.
The fact that similar sites are ranking for low-competition keywords on search results means that they work! Creating much better content for the same keyword means you can leapfrog them on SERPs and generate even more traffic for your site.
Conclusion
The impact of low-competition keywords in your keyword strategy can’t be denied. They are basically the prerequisites to taking your site to the next level.
Attracting traffic from search engines by finding and targeting low-competition keywords using the process above has a snowball effect. Once traffic is generated from a low competition keyword, expect the same to happen on your other pages targeting other search queries, as long as you correctly optimize their content as well.
Ultimately, by covering easy-to-rank-for keywords relevant to your website’s topic, you will be on your way to achieving topical authority and earning the trust of search engines in the process. At this point, anything’s possible – even ranking for high competition keywords!
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