Find Low Competition Keywords That Rank

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If your website is new or still trying to gain traction, the smartest thing you can do is hunt for low-competition keywords. This isn't about avoiding the big leagues forever; it's about building momentum. By targeting search terms that the established giants often overlook, you can secure faster rankings, drive high-quality traffic, and start building real authority with search engines.

Why Low-Competition Keywords Are Your SEO Superpower

Trying to rank for hyper-competitive keywords right out of the gate is like trying to shout over a rock concert. You'll pour a ton of resources—time, money, and content—into a battle you’re almost guaranteed to lose against household names.

This is where the magic of low-competition keywords comes in. Think of it as finding a quiet, uncrowded side street that leads straight to your ideal customer, instead of getting stuck in traffic on the main highway.

The Strategic Advantage of Easier Wins

Going after less competitive terms isn’t about thinking small. It’s about being strategic. Every time you rank for one of these keywords, you score a small but meaningful win. These little victories add up, compounding over time to build your site’s credibility in Google’s eyes.

This is a foundational strategy. The goal isn't to permanently avoid high-traffic keywords, but to build the authority needed to eventually compete for them. Securing a handful of easier rankings will drive more qualified traffic than failing to rank for one impossibly difficult term.

To give you a clearer picture, let's break down the practical differences between these two approaches.

High Competition vs Low Competition Keyword Strategy

This table shows the practical differences you can expect when targeting high-competition versus low-competition keywords as a growing website.

Metric	High Competition Keywords	Low Competition Keywords
Time to Rank	12+ months (if ever)	2–6 months
Resources Required	High (large budget, extensive link building)	Low (focused content, minimal link building)
Traffic Quality	Often broad and less targeted	Highly specific and targeted
Authority Building	Slow, as ranking is difficult	Fast, as each win builds credibility
Typical User Intent	Informational (top of funnel)	Transactional or commercial (bottom of funnel)

As you can see, the low-competition route offers a much more realistic path to tangible results. It's about getting on the board and building from there.

This strategy is especially powerful for businesses in specialized niches. Different SEO approaches, like focusing on a local area, can massively boost your visibility. For instance, a detailed guide like Local SEO for Contractors: A Guide to Ranking Higher highlights how tailored strategies help you attract the right audience by sidestepping the national competition.

By focusing on these more attainable keywords, you create a feasible path to the first page of the search results. These ranking wins can happen in a matter of weeks or a few months, not years. Instead of waiting around for one massive victory that may never come, you can rack up a series of smaller wins that collectively build a powerful SEO foundation. This doesn't just drive traffic—it proves your site's value to search engines, setting you up for bigger wins down the road.

How to Brainstorm Keywords Your Audience Actually Uses

Before you even dream of firing up an SEO tool, let's get one thing straight: the best, most valuable keyword ideas don't come from a database. They come directly from your audience.

If you want to uncover those low-competition gems that actually drive sales, you have to get inside your customer's head. That means understanding the exact words they use to talk about their problems—the very problems your product or service is built to solve.

This isn't a guessing game. It’s about being a detective, listening in on the raw, unfiltered conversations happening right now. You just need to know where to look.

Listen to Real Conversations

Your first job is to become a fly on the wall. Ditch the corporate jargon and marketing-speak and immerse yourself in real customer chatter. This is where you’ll find the authentic, and often completely missed, keyword opportunities.

Customer Support Logs: Your support tickets, live chat transcripts, and help desk emails are a goldmine. What specific phrases pop up again and again when people describe their frustrations? Jot down their exact wording. These are your seed keywords.

Online Communities: Dive into forums like Reddit, Quora, and niche-specific Facebook groups. Search for thread titles that start with "How do I…?" or "Has anyone found a tool that…?" These are pure, unadulterated expressions of user need.

Google's "People Also Ask" (PAA): When you search for a broad term in your niche, Google literally hands you a list of related questions. The PAA box is an incredible source for long-tail keyword ideas, all based on what real people are actively searching for.

I once found a killer low-competition keyword for a software client just by lurking in a Reddit thread. Customers kept calling a feature a "data snapshot," while we were internally calling it "report generation." We spun up some content around "data snapshot tool" and hit page one in a matter of weeks.

Build Your Initial Seed List

As you pull these phrases from the wild, you're not just collecting words; you're laying the groundwork for your entire SEO strategy. Start organizing these ideas into a simple list. Our guide on how to build a keyword list can walk you through how to structure this process effectively.

Once you’ve got these terms, knowing how to add keywords to a website is the critical next step to make them count. This brainstorming phase gives you the raw materials, but smart implementation is what ultimately gets you ranked.

By starting with authentic user language, you're building a powerful seed list that reflects genuine needs. This sets you up for massive success before you even touch the technical analysis.

Using SEO Tools to Uncover Hidden Keyword Gems

Okay, you've got a solid list of brainstormed ideas. Now it's time to stop guessing and start measuring. This is where we bring in the heavy hitters—powerful SEO platforms that validate your ideas and, more importantly, uncover the keyword opportunities your competitors have completely missed.

I've found the most effective workflow is a bit of a reverse-engineering job.

Instead of staring at a blank keyword research tool, I start by peeking at what my competitors already rank for. This gives you a pre-vetted list of terms that are proven to work in your niche. From there, it's all about filtering down to find the low-competition gems they might not even realize they're ranking for.

You can see here how a tool like Semrush lets you take a massive list of keywords and instantly filter it by specific metrics.

Just by setting a low Keyword Difficulty, you can sift through thousands of irrelevant terms and zone in on the most attainable targets.

Finding the Sweet Spot with Keyword Metrics

The whole game of finding low-competition keywords is about balancing a few key numbers. Modern tools have made this more of a science than an art, but you still need to know what you're looking for. The goal is to find terms with a healthy monthly search volume but a low keyword difficulty (KD) score.

To make sense of the data, you need to understand three core metrics:

Keyword Difficulty (KD): This is a score, usually from 0-100, that estimates how tough it will be to crack Google's first page. A lower number is always better. We're hunting for the low single or double digits.

Search Volume: Simply put, this is the average number of times a keyword gets searched each month. You need some volume, but don't get hypnotized by huge numbers. 100-500 monthly searches for a low-KD term is often a goldmine.

Cost Per Click (CPC): This tells you what advertisers are willing to pay for a single click on this keyword. A higher CPC is a great sign—it points to strong commercial intent, meaning those searchers are ready to buy.

Your job is to find that perfect balance—the "sweet spot" where KD is low, but the search volume and CPC are high enough to be worth your time.

Remember, while search volume gets all the attention, it’s the combination of low difficulty and high relevance that actually drives profitable traffic.

A Practical Workflow for Keyword Discovery

Let's walk through a real-world example. Imagine you're running a small business that sells project management software built specifically for creative agencies. Here’s the process I'd follow.

First, I'd pinpoint a direct competitor—someone in the same space, maybe a little bigger but not an untouchable giant like Asana or Monday.com.

Next, I’d pop their domain into a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush and head straight to the "Organic Research" report. This spits out every single keyword they currently rank for.

Now for the magic. Apply a filter to only show keywords with a KD score of less than 20. This instantly cuts out all the hyper-competitive head terms you have no business targeting right now.

Finally, sort that filtered list by search volume, from highest to lowest. What you're left with is pure gold.

This process uncovers the "low-hanging fruit." You’ll often find dozens of valuable long-tail keywords your competitor is ranking for by accident. They aren't actively targeting them, which creates a perfect opening for you to swoop in with a purpose-built piece of content and steal that traffic.

And the world of keyword research is evolving fast. Beyond these traditional methods, many marketers are now using advanced AI-powered SEO tools to dig even deeper and find hidden gems.

If you’re a small business trying to figure out which platform is right for you, check out our guide on the best SEO tools for small businesses to see which options fit your budget and goals. By repeating this competitor analysis workflow a few times, you can quickly build a powerful list of keywords that are both highly relevant and totally achievable.

Unlocking User Intent with Long-Tail Keywords

If you really want to understand the magic behind a low-competition keyword strategy, you need to look past the "avoiding a fight" part. The real power is in decoding user intent.

When someone types a longer, more specific phrase into Google, they're not just window shopping—they know exactly what they're looking for. Getting this right is what separates traffic that just shows up from traffic that actually converts.

Let’s think about it. The difference in intent between two search terms can be massive. Take a super broad, high-volume keyword like "SEO". What does that person want? It could be anything. A student writing a research paper, a small business owner trying to learn the ropes, or an expert hunting for new tactics. The intent is informational, vague, and incredibly hard to pin down.

Now, let's look at a long-tail phrase like "local SEO services for plumbers." Night and day, right? The intent is crystal clear. This is a plumber, and they need professional help getting their business to show up in local searches. This query is commercial, specific, and has a high probability of turning into a lead or a sale.

Breaking Down Search Intent

To find low-competition keywords that actually move the needle, you have to nail the searcher's goal. Every query falls into one of three main buckets. Learning to spot them is a game-changer.

Informational Intent: The user is looking for an answer or wants to learn something. These queries often contain words like "how to," "what is," or "guide." Your job is to be the most helpful, comprehensive source out there.

Commercial Intent: The user is in research mode, getting ready to make a purchase. They're comparing products, looking for reviews, or trying to find the "best" option. This is your chance to guide them toward a decision.

Transactional Intent: The user has their wallet out and is ready to buy. Keywords will include terms like "buy," "price," "discount," or location-based phrases like "near me." This is the highest-value traffic you can get.

By focusing on these different types of intent, you can craft content that feels like it was made just for the person searching. If you want to go deeper on this, our guide on short-tail vs long-tail keywords breaks it down even further.

When you match your content to a user's intent, you stop just answering questions and start solving real problems for real people. This is the secret sauce behind why long-tail keywords convert so well—they connect you with people who are already far down the path to making a decision.

How This Impacts Your Rankings and Engagement

When you get specific about user intent, you naturally improve your chances of ranking. Targeting low-competition, long-tail keywords brings in a much more engaged audience. In fact, longer search queries get roughly 1.76 times more clicks than single-word searches. That makes them a goldmine for any smart SEO strategy.

The best approach is a balancing act: you need to find keywords that hit the sweet spot between search volume, business relevance, and clear user intent. It’s a powerful strategy, especially for newer sites trying to build authority and attract hyper-targeted traffic. As explained in a detailed guide from SeoProfy, this strategy is vital for SEO success.

By putting user intent first, you create content that doesn't just rank—it resonates. And that’s what leads to higher engagement, more conversions, and better results for your business.

Manually Vet Your Keywords with SERP Analysis

SEO tools are fantastic for pointing you in the right direction, but let's be honest—their metrics can sometimes be misleading. A low Keyword Difficulty (KD) score feels like a win, but it’s never a guarantee.

The most critical step in finding low-competition keywords you can actually rank for is to get your hands dirty with a manual SERP analysis. This is your reality check. It’s where you put on your detective hat and see what Google is really showing people for your target keyword.

This simple check stops you from wasting weeks creating content for a keyword that was never truly in the bag.

The Page One Reality Check

Before you commit to a keyword, open an incognito browser window and search for it. Your mission is to assess the true strength of the pages currently holding the top spots. Forget the numbers for a moment and look at the actual websites.

You're specifically hunting for signs of weakness—clues that Google isn't entirely thrilled with the current results and is ready for something better.

Here’s what you should be looking for:

Low-Authority Sites: Do you see other smaller blogs, new companies, or personal websites ranking? If a site with a low Domain Authority (DA) can crack page one, that’s a massive green light for you.

User-Generated Content: Are forums like Reddit or Quora popping up in the top 10 results? This is a huge opportunity. It’s a direct signal from Google that there’s a lack of dedicated, high-quality content for that query.

Outdated or Thin Content: Click on the top-ranking articles. Are they short, stale, or just plain poorly written? If you’re confident you can create something significantly more helpful, you have a solid chance to overtake them.

Spotting a Green Light SERP

A "green light" SERP is one that practically rolls out the red carpet for you. It’s the ideal scenario you're hoping for when trying to find low competition keywords.

Let's say you search for "best silent mechanical keyboard for office" and the results are a mixed bag: a Reddit thread from two years ago, a blog post from a small tech blog with a low DA, and a couple of big tech sites that only briefly mention "silent" keyboards in a massive roundup.

This is a perfect opportunity. The presence of a forum and a low-DA site tells you the competition is soft. You can swoop in with a dedicated, in-depth guide that directly solves the user's specific problem and likely jump into the top results.

Identifying a Red Light SERP

On the flip side, a "red light" SERP is a clear warning to back off. This is when the top 5-7 results are all dominated by huge, authoritative domains that are household names.

For instance, if you search for "best project management software" and the entire first page is a wall of giants like Forbes, PCMag, TechCrunch, and the software companies themselves (Asana, Monday.com), you should probably find a different keyword. Even if a tool gives this a low KD score, the real-world competition is absolutely brutal. Trying to break into that lineup as a smaller site is a losing battle.

For a smarter approach in these high-competition landscapes, our guide on how to find low-hanging fruit keywords offers some great alternative strategies.

This manual SERP check only takes a few minutes per keyword, but it provides invaluable context that no tool can fully capture. It's the final, essential step that validates your research and confirms you’ve found a genuine opportunity worth pursuing.

Your Questions About Low Competition Keywords Answered

Diving into a low-competition keyword strategy almost always brings up the same handful of questions. It’s one thing to understand the theory, but it's a whole other ballgame to put it into practice with confidence. Let's clear the air and tackle some of the most common hurdles I see people run into.

Getting these details right is what separates a strategy that looks good on paper from one that actually drives traffic and revenue.

What Is a Good Search Volume to Aim For?

This is the classic "it depends" scenario, but I won't leave you hanging. I can give you some practical benchmarks that have worked for me and my clients. For a site that's relatively new or just trying to gain a foothold, a keyword with 100-500 monthly searches can be an absolute goldmine.

Seriously, don't write off those low-volume terms. Ranking on page one for a keyword with 100 monthly searches is infinitely better than being buried on page five for a term with 10,000 searches. Plus, keep in mind that keyword tools almost always underestimate the total search volume. A single, well-written article will naturally rank for dozens of related long-tail variations, bringing in far more traffic than the one number suggests.

The real value isn't in the raw search number; it's in the quality of the traffic. A highly specific, low-volume keyword often attracts visitors who are much further down the funnel and closer to making a purchase, delivering a far better ROI on your content efforts.

How Much Can I Trust Keyword Difficulty Scores?

You should treat Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores from tools like Ahrefs or Semrush as incredibly useful starting points—but never as absolute truth. A KD score is just an educated guess made by an algorithm, not a direct line to Google's inner workings.

A low KD score is a fantastic signal that you might be onto something, but it's no replacement for a manual SERP analysis. You have to verify the tool's data by actually looking at the search results yourself. If the top-ranking pages are all from massive, authoritative domains, that keyword is probably way harder to rank for than the KD score lets on.

When Should I Pivot to More Competitive Keywords?

Moving on to bigger, more competitive terms is a natural—and necessary—part of growing your site's authority. The key is knowing when to make that pivot. The right time is only after you’ve built a solid foundation of rankings for less competitive terms in the same topic area.

Think of it as earning your stripes. Once you've successfully ranked for a cluster of related low-competition keywords, Google starts to see your site as a credible authority on that subject. This "topical authority" is your ticket to competing for the bigger prizes. For instance, a smart play for B2B tech companies is to first dominate a niche sub-topic before going after broader SEO keywords for a software company.

The clearest sign you're ready? You'll start to notice your new content begins to rank faster and with less effort. That's your green light.

Ready to stop guessing and start ranking? Outrank uses powerful AI to automate your keyword research and content creation process. Build a pipeline of high-quality, SEO-optimized articles in a fraction of the time. Discover how Outrank can grow your traffic.