Low Competition Keywords

What are low competition keywords?

Low-competition keywords are keywords that you can rank for without much effort. You usually won’t have to build many links or have high website authority (Domain Rating) to rank for them and get organic traffic to your website.

Search intent

Even if a keyword is super low-difficulty, you’ll struggle to rank for it without creating the kind of content that searchers are looking for. So when doing keyword research, it’s worth looking for keywords that actually make sense for the type of content you want to create.

The four broad types of keywords are:

• Informational. The searcher is looking for information about a topic.
• Navigational. The searcher is looking for a specific website.
• Commercial investigation. The searcher wants to buy a particular product or service, but hasn’t quite made up their mind which one to buy.
• Transactional. The searcher is looking to buy something.

You can often tell which bucket your keyword falls into by looking for keyword modifiers in the query. If it contains words like “buy” or “cheap,” it’s most likely a transactional query. If it contains words like “how,” “what,” or “where,” then it’s probably informational.

How to find “low-competition” keywords

Follow these three steps to find thousands of high-volume, “low-competition” keywords fast.

1. Brainstorm topics

Think about what your target audience might be searching for in Google and jot down your ideas. You don’t need to try to guess exact phrases here; just note down broad themes.

For example, if you sell computers and parts online, these might be:

• computer
• laptop
• macbook
• imac
• hard drive

Don’t overthink this. Just write down what comes to mind.

Move on to step two once you have 5–10 ideas.

2. Expand ideas with a keyword research tool

Plug your topic ideas into a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, then go to the Phrase match report. You’ll see keyword ideas including one or more of the words and phrases you entered, complete with monthly search volumes and other SEO metrics.

3. Filter for low ‘difficulty’ keywords

Many keyword research tools have a difficulty score. Ours is called Keyword Difficulty (KD) and it’s a numerical representation of how hard it’ll be to rank in Google’s top 10 for a search query.

In the Phrase match report, filter for keywords with a KD score between 0–10 to find “low-competition” keywords.

You can see above that we managed to find over 167,000 keywords from just five “seed” topics. If you want to narrow down the list, just add a minimum monthly search volume filter.