So you just created your brand new website and you’re ready to start creating content and take on the market, but once you start doing keyword research you realise that the competition is actually wild. So how can you find the best keywords for you that are also the ones with the lowest competition? Today, we’ll be sharing four steps that will help you find the best keywords for low competition opportunities.
We all know that doing keyword research is essential for a business. But you really need to be smart about the keywords you choose, because choosing enough low competition keywords will really help to boost your website’s rank!
So let’s get into the first step!
#1. Building your initial keyword list
To do this, you’ll have to use a SEO tool like ahrefs Keyword Explorer or Semrush Keyword Research. We’ll be using Semrush today and going to ‘Organic Research’, enter a competitor’s domain name in the search bar and click “search”. We did an example search with fitmencook.com.
What you will get as a result is a list of keywords that your competitor’s site is currently ranking for in Google’s top 100 organic search results. You can also use filters to find keywords that are most relevant to your website.
Here is an example with the word “vegan”. Of course if you repeat this process with a long list of competitors’ domains you will get a very big keyword list, and you can export all these results in an XLS file so that you can keep all the results together.
In case this was not enough here’s an alternative with the Keyword Gap Tool. Using the Keyword Gap Tool, in fact, you can view unique keywords per domain and export your results just as you did for the Organic Research report. All you have to do is enter your website and four of your competitors.
Then, in the filters tab you set the filter from “shared” to “all keywords”. Exporting also these results will give you a very good bird eye view of what’s the situation in your market right now.
#2: Expanding your keyword list
Now we know what you must be thinking: “Why am I expanding this list which is already huge?!” Well, the answer is really simple: it will make things easier later when we get back to it to filter it down to find the most accessible keywords for you!
In order to do this, you can go to the Keyword Magic Tool where you can find and create the best long tail keywords for your project. You’ll be able to find “Phrase Match” keywords, which is a list of expanded keyword phrases that include your queried term, but also you can find “Related Keywords”, which are phrases that are semantically related to your queried term and may not share the same phrasing but still give you back similar results.
And to top all of that, you’ll be able to check also the section “Questions”, where we’ll show you all the keyword phrases that include a keyword question like who, what, where, when, why or how.
Allow us to expand on this ! Being able to find exactly your customers’ pain points, and finding the questions related to your queried term will make it so much easier to create great content that you know answers to a search intent.
#3: Discover high volume keywords with less competition
So you may know that the average monthly search volume for a keyword shows you how much potential traffic you can get to your website. Of course, though, we all know that the keywords with the highest volume are also the most difficult ones to rank for because of the high competition. So the solution to this pickle is to try and find a balance between a keyword search volume and its competition level.
To help you with that you can look at two main ways of filtering keywords: Keyword Difficulty and Competition Level. So what are they?
Keyword Difficulty is an estimation of how hard it would be to outrank the current website that are ranking for particular keywords in Google’s top spots. While Competition Level is the density of advertisers that are using a particular keyword for their ads.
This metric is usually referred to as competition in paid search, but it can also be somewhat representative of what is happening in the organic search. So when you make your reports, make sure that in your files you have two columns for these specific metrics. Now that we’ve talked about what they are, the next important question is “So which is the better one?”
Well, here are some numbers that will help you sort out that question: as a general rule when it comes Keyword Difficulty, anything above 80% is the most difficult to target for and we wouldn’t suggest pursuing that. Keywords from 60 to 80% are average, which means that it won’t be impossible to rank for them, but it also won’t be a walk in the park. Keywords below 60% are the easiest ones to rank for, but also the hardest to find.
Likewise with the Competition Level: anything above 0.80 probably means that a lot of advertisers are already using it or trying to rank for this keyword, which means that the user has a transaction intent when looking for that specific keyword. The keywords from 0.6 to 0.8 are average, which means that there are some advertisers trying to rank for these ones. Those below 0.60 are the ones with the least competition. This could mean two things: either they are just not profitable, or a lot of advertisers in your niche haven’t exactly understood the full potential of these keywords. So… It might be a goldmine or it might be not.
#4: Filtering your master keyword list and finding low competition keywords
Start with a filter for Keyword Difficulty to only look at keywords with a KD score which is less than 75. This will allow you to find some very high volume target keywords that won’t be totally impossible or extremely hard to rank for.
A quick way to estimate what are the best keywords after you have done the filtering is to put them inside of Keyword Manager. In the Keyword Manager you can enter up to a thousand keywords at a time, and you can create multiple lists. You’ll be able to refresh the data on all your selected keywords in a simple click so that you will always have the freshest results to create your best strategy.
And also you can look through advanced filters, this will help you understand specific metrics about your keywords and you’ll be able to see if they trigger a feature snippet.
Feature snippets are huge for SEO and you should always take note if one keywords, or a lot of your keywords hopefully, can trigger one of these. Because if you write your content in the right way you might be able to take over the feature snippet with your link.
So as we’ve seen, keyword research is essential for a business to thrive in the market. But you also need to be smart and carefully choose the keywords that you want to target. So always remember to believe in your SEO and, second, follow these steps: check your competition and build your initial keyword list. Once you’ve done that, enrich this list with related keywords, phrase match keywords, and questions. Then, check your competition and the keyword difficulty of your competitors. After you’ve implemented, don’t forget to keep doing the research of low competition keywords regularly, and of course track your rankings to see if they’re growing!
Have you ever done anything similar? What is your process in keyword research for low competition opportunities?
