With a few strong keywords for each market or category, the competition can be fierce. But there are plenty of low-competition keyword gaps you can identify and use to gain an advantage that many competitors may be ignoring.
What are low competition keywords?
In the competitive world of keywords, you need the right keywords to get your ads and web content to appear in response to the right search queries for SEO and pay-per-click. The most obvious for each market are the main products, services, or items that your audience is interested in. These highly competitive keywords will be difficult to rank for because you need to create tons of quality backlinks. As a result, many smaller companies are unable to compete with the big players to get their products to the top of the polls.
However, there are also plenty of low competition keywords that larger players can ignore and smaller budgets can cling to. Low competition keywords are related to important topics or products and have become a valuable source of recognition for many businesses looking to compete by overthinking and outperforming their competitors.
Technically, they rank minimally among other search terms and require minimal domain authority or link building. By finding the right subtopics or long-tail keywords and using them correctly, you can generate rapid growth for your pages. They are most useful for new businesses or businesses that are expanding into a new or established area.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to finding low competition keywords to potentially rank for.
Identify topics and phrases in your market
As a business, you already know the popular keywords and phrases related to your products or services that resonate with customers. If you can’t afford to use them or are maxing out your SEO budget for just a few terms, researching low competition keywords is a more viable approach.
First, sit down with your team and brainstorm existing premium keywords for related terms. If you don’t have a team, get your ideas down on paper and create logical relevance trees, a step that broadens your thinking to include top premium keywords. Think about what customers would look for outside of the usual categories and consider where your business adds value.
You can also search for alternative text versions of existing keywords. For example, “PS5” is searched for more frequently than the official term “PlayStation 5” and there are many marketplace terms with several variations on which you can base your low competition keywords. You can also add local variations if you have a limited or regional presence.
Search for low competition keywords with SEO tools
Now, with the list of terms, open a web browser and use a keyword tool to find the value of those keywords. You may be surprised to find that some you consider low quality are actually higher quality and vice versa, and over time, these rankings can change in terms of volume and competition, so make this a regular practice as part of your SEO review.
You can use these tools to examine each keyword, find the search volume locally or further afield, and its difficulty. Use this information to filter your ideas into a prioritized list of terms to try. Some tools offer keyword gap finders, which allow you to automatically see which terms don’t bother your competitors and provide useful information about a gap in your market that may be of greater value.
Identify the most valuable keywords with the best budget
Use your list to identify the terms that offer the most value or are available at the lowest cost. Some SEO tools even display the CPC rate for keywords. Therefore, you can easily calculate the value of the keywords. Depending on your budget, you can try a combined approach up and down the cost ladder. Or, you can focus heavily on the lowest scoring terms to see what works, stick to the terms that work, and then try again with keywords with less competition around the successful keywords and discard the ones that don’t. Do they work at low performance?
Use them in your campaigns and track their effectiveness to find winners
Since low competition keywords can bring you more results in the short term, watch them closely to see when the tide turns against you, and watch others on your list to try to gain momentum again. Regularly updating your approach and providing fresh content that makes heavy use of low competition keywords can help you build your authority on them. This may seem like a lot more work than focusing on the most important keywords, but it can be a valuable strategy for those willing to put in the effort.
Use your regular SEO crawlers to monitor this performance and add new ideas to the list, especially events, media, or market news related to your products or services that present a small window of value and opportunity to have. Juggle the fonts you use to see which works best in a reasonable amount of time to get a real insight into the results.
Find some quality keywords now
In the world of automated SEO and keyword data (there are around 20 billion keywords ranked), there is still a place for people willing to do a little research and get creative with their budget to find low-impact keywords with some competition. After the creative part, there are still regular SEO tools to help you make informed, data-driven decisions about how to use these terms to continue thriving as a smaller player in the market.
Scoring low competition keywords are sometimes as easy as getting a good WordPress theme for your small business.
Nowadays, you also get AI writing tools to help you create content. You can use keyword tools to come up with content ideas and AI tools to write for yourself. This will help you create bulk content and generate lots of authoritative traffic and smaller backlinks. Unlike high competition keywords, it takes a lot more backlinks and time to beat the competition.
