Technology

How To Find Low Competition Keywords For Your Website

With a few strong keywords for each market or category, competition can be fierce. But there are plenty of low competition keyword gaps you can identify and use to gain an advantage that many rivals may overlook.

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What Are Low-Competition Keywords?

In the competitive world of keywords, you need the right ones to make your adverts and web content appear in response to the right searches for SEO and pay-per-click. The obvious ones for any market will be the key products, services, or items that your audience is interested in. These high-competition keywords will be hard to rank for as you need to build tons of quality backlinks. So, many smaller businesses cannot compete with the big players to get their products at the top of searches.

However, there are also lots of low-competition keywords that larger players might ignore and can be snapped up by those with smaller budgets. Low-competition keywords relate to key topics or products and have become a valuable source of recognition for many businesses looking to compete, by outthinking and outfoxing rivals.

In technical terms, they have minimal rank among other search terms and require minimal link building or domain authority. By finding the right subject sub-topics or long-tail keywords, and using them correctly, you can generate rapid growth for your pages. They are most useful for startups or companies expanding into a new area or one that is well-established.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to finding low-competition keywords you can potentially rank for.

Identify Topics And Phrases In Your Market

As a business, you will already know the popular keywords and phrases that relate to your products or services and resonate with customers. If you can’t afford to use them, or they will max out your SEO budget for just a few terms, looking for the low-competition keywords creates a more viable approach.

To start with, sit down with your team and start thinking about the existing premium keywords for related terms. If you don’t have a team, note down your ideas on paper, creating trees of logical relevance, a progression that broadens your thinking around the core premium keywords. Think about what customers would search for outside the usual categories and any areas where your business adds value.

You can also look for alternative text versions of existing keywords. For example “PS5” is searched for more than the official term “PlayStation 5” and there are plenty of industry or market terms that have multiple variations you can use as the basis for low competition keywords. You can also add in local variations if you have a limited or regional area of operations.

Search For Your Low Competition Keywords Using Seo Tools

With the list of terms, now open up a web browser and start using a keyword tool to find the value of those keywords. You might be surprised to find that some you think are low-value are actually rather high value and vice versa, and over time these ratings may change in terms of volume and competition, so make this a regular exercise as part of your SEO review.

You can use those tools to dig into each keyword, finding the search volumes locally or further afield, and their difficulty. Use that information to filter your ideas into a priority list of terms to try. Some tools offer keyword gap finders that you can use to see automatically which terms your rivals do not bother with, giving you a useful insight into a gap in your market that could be of greater value.

Identify The Most Value And Best Budget Keywords

With your list, identify those terms that offer the most value or are available for the lowest cost. Some SEO tools will even show you the CPC rate for the keywords. So, you can easily calculate the value of the keywords. Depending on your budget you can try a mix-and-match approach up and down the cost scale. Or, you can focus broadly across the lowest value terms to see what works, sticking with terms that do, and then retrying with more low competition keywords around the successful ones, ditching the poor performers.

Use Them In Your Campaigns And Track Their Efficiency To Spot Winners

Since low competition keywords may offer more short-term results, monitor them closely to see when the tide is turning against you and look at others on your list to try and rebuild momentum. A regular refresh of your approach, and delivering fresh content that makes heavy use of low-competition keywords can help boost your authority around them. That may seem like a lot more work than plumping for the main keywords, but can be a valuable strategy for those willing to make the effort.

Use your regular SEO trackers to monitor that performance, while adding new ideas to the list, particularly around events, media, or market news that relate to your products or services which have a short window of value and opportunity. Juggle which sources you use to find out which works best over a reasonable period of time to get a true perspective on the results.

Now Find Some Quality Keywords

In the world of automated SEO and keyword data (there are some 20 billion ranked keywords out there), there is still a place for people willing to do a little research and get creative with their budget to make use of low competition keywords. After the creative part, there are still regular SEO tools to help you make data-based informed choices about your use of those terms to keep on winning as a smaller player in the market.

Scoring the low competition keywords is sometimes as easy as getting a good WordPress theme for your small business.

Nowadays you are also getting AI writing tools that will help you create the content. You can use keyword tools to find content ideas and AI tools to do the writing for you. This will help you create content in bulk and drive a ton of traffic with lower authority and backlinks. Unlike high competition keywords which require a lot more backlinks and time to beat the competition.