find low-competition keywords The best paid and free tools

Everyone wants to rank for competitive keywords, but sometimes, that is not possible in the long run.

This is why everyone loves low competition keywords, they are easy to rank for, you don't need many, and in some cases, any backlinks to a page.

So in this article, I'm going to show you how to find low-competition keywords, and confidently determine if your competition is really low.

First, let's get to the point and talk about the low-competition keyword. Simply put, it's an easy keyword to rank for.

Now, with so many different factors that go into ranking on Google, people generally think.

of low-competition keywords as topics that don't require a lot of backlinks to rank high.

But the thing that ranks high on Google is not always limited to backlinks.  So, for the rest of this tutorial, we're going to go through a 5-step process.

You find low-competition keywords and most importantly, validate these keywords are really easy to rank for.

So the first step is to come up with a list of topics.  And when I talk about topics, I'm talking about general, relevant keywords.

These are called primary keywords.  For example, if we have a site about parenting, some general “parenting” keywords might include “stroller,” “pregnancy,” “kids,” and “car seat.”

Try to think of 5-10 general topics within your niche, but try to be specific enough that keywords can't be interpreted in many different ways.

Low competition keywords finder

Well, the second step is to broaden your topics with a keyword research tool.

Keyword research tools give you information about how often words and phrases are searched.

It's also the main way SEO builds keyword lists.

And the one I'll be using is the Ahrefs keyword explorer.

So, to get started, enter the initial keyword list that you just brainstormed and then run your search.

Next, go to the phrase match report.  Now, with over 3 million keyword ideas out there, we'll need to narrow this down.

keyword research tool free 

Ahrefs is a paid tool that you can make excellent use of, but there is a completely free tool that we talked about before. 

Filtering keywords with low difficulty to obtain data, here begins the third step.

A lot of keywords research tools provide some sort of ranking difficulty metric.

At Ahrefs, the difficulty of particular keywords calls their scores in KD, on a scale of 0-100, and attempts to determine how difficult it is to rank in the top 10 Google results for a given search query.

The method is based on the weighted average number of sites that reach the top 10 pages.

This means that the first ten pages with low difficulty scores will not have many links.

So let's set the keyword difficulty filter with a minimum value of 0 and a maximum value of 20, You will see many results now in potential low-competition topics.

Again ranking is not just about backlinks, there are a lot of other things you need to take into consideration.

We'll dive into some examples of "false positives" in a moment. For now, let's move on to the next step, which is to check if you can match the finder target.

The search intent tells us the reason behind the searcher's query, and if you can't match the searcher's intent then you won't be able to rank - even if the query is.

“Low Competition” For example, when someone searches for “best strollers,” does he search for blogs, posts, product pages, or e-commerce category pages?

The easiest way to find out is to Google just the query and look at the pages with the highest rankings for what we call, the three search destination elements.

The first C is the content type - so are the top-rated blog posts, product, or category pages? In this case, they are all blog posts.

The second C is the content format, For this query, they are all posts in the form of lists.

And the third C is the content angle, which is the dominant selling proposition used by higher-ranking pages, in this case, they take on the 'freshness' angle noting current year top pages usage in their headlines.

Assuming you have a website, you should be able to match searcher intent. Now, how about a query like "strollers?"

Looking at the top pages, you will see that they are mostly e-commerce category pages.

So if you don't sell strollers, it's going to be tough to arrange.

There is more to research intent than 3c but this should be enough to get you started on the right track.

But I highly recommend reading the lesson on search intent from the SEO for Beginners course.

Well, the last step is probably the most important, which is to evaluate whether the query is low difficulty.

Metrics like Keyword Difficulty and Referring Domains can tell you a lot.

While the combination of these metrics can be helpful, they don't always paint a complete picture.

For example, the query "compact flash card reader" has a low keyword difficulty score.

And if we scroll down to the SERP, you'll see that the first ten pages don't have that many links pointing to them.

But that doesn't mean that you can get more links and match your search target that you will be able to outperform these sites.

Now, you might be thinking… well, because all of these sites have high authority.  Well, in my opinion, more than DR, it's about commercial property.

Sites like Amazon, Best Buy, and BH Photo Video are places people trust and want to be.

They have built trust and positional authority in the field of electronics, photo, and video equipment.

And I'm not going to get into on-page considerations like aspects. Is that a low-competition thing? Certainly not unless you're equal to one of these brands.

The important thing to take away from this is that no tool can accurately determine the difficulty of ranking with a 1- to 3-digit number.

This is one of the reasons why we base our keyword difficulty score on just linking domains.

Backlinks are generally a prominent ranking signal, however, you need to manually evaluate each SERP to understand if the query is indeed the subject of low competition.

Now, we've looked at an example of a "false positive," so let's look at an example of an actual low-competition subject and how we come to that conclusion.

So the keyword we're going to be looking for is "best convertible dominos point car seat for small cars", looking at a KD you'll see it's relatively low.

So what that tells us is that, for the most part, the higher-ranking pages don't have many mentions of the domains they're referring to.

So this is a good test, but nothing more than that, let's scroll down to the SERP.

Now, the first thing I'm going to look at is if I can match the mainstream search intent because if I can't, there's no point in searching further.

And you'll notice they're all list-style blog posts, which will be easy to match, next let's do a quick scan of DR's column.

There seems to be a mix of low and high DR positions, which is promising because it tells us that the query probably won't be just branding.

And the fact that very low authority websites were able to crack the top 10 tells us that our default website is likely to compete as well.

So far so good, now let's take a look at the areas they are arranged to get an idea of ​​topical authority.

Meaning, are these sites likely to contain a lot of content related to babies, parenting, or children's products like car seats? And they all seem to do.

Now, assuming our site is related to kids, baby products, parenting, or anything close to related topics, we'd likely be in the same niche.

The next thing I want to look at is the relevancy of higher-ranking pages.

Now, not that they rank higher because of the exact match keyword.

But convertible car seats for small cars serve a very specific need.

This is probably why some of these lower-page authority sites are way ahead of the bigger players.

For example, this page targets the "best convertible car seats" in general. Finally, let's look at the Referral Domains column.

As you can see, the top-ranking page has few referring domains.

If we click on the number of referring domains for the page, we will see that all the links come from relatively low-authority sites.

And if you click on the link type filter, you will see that only one of these links is being followed.

Assuming we can outperform these pages on the content side of things, that sounds like a low-competition keyword to me.

As a final tip, I want to show you one great trick for finding low keyword competition with high traffic potential.

Not only that, but it will help you find brand-new combinations of low-competition keywords in almost any niche.

To get started, go to Ahrefs Content Explorer, a searchable database of more than five billion pages.

And since we're working on a hypothetical site about parenting, let's set the query to "parenting" and do the search.

low competition keywords list

Now we need to set some filters, first I'm going to set the reference ranges filter with a max value of something as low as 10.

Meaning our search query pages will not have many links, then I will set an organic traffic filter to show pages with a minimum of at least 500 monthly organic visits.

And right away, you'll see over 3,500 pages that mention parenting, get at least 500 monthly membership visits and have 10 or fewer referral domains.

Now, it's just a matter of looking at the titles of topic ideas that would be suitable for your site.

For example, suppose this is a coconut oil-based product for treating diaper rash that seems promising.

So I will click on the page traffic box to see the top keywords that the page ranks for.

And based on the KD values ​​it seems like another low-competition topic, but you still need to manually evaluate the search results.

Now, if you are in a niche that doesn't have a lot of low-competition keywords or you just have an unhealthy obsession with topics that are easy to rank for.

Then you can use those keywords as new seeds and go through the first steps I showed you in the tutorial again.

So I'm going back to the Keyword Explorer, but this time, I'm going to search for "nappy rash" like my seed.

Next, I'm going to go to the phrase match report, and finally, I'm going to set the maximum KD value to 20 again.

And now we have more great keyword ideas as some of them are probably too easy.

Now, while low-competition keywords are good to target when your website is fairly new or has low authority, they shouldn't be the only strategy you use.