How to Find Low Competition Keywords in 2024

So you have created a brand new website for your business and now ready to jump-start the keyword research to rank on the first page of Google.

Why the first page of Google? Because this is the place where most of the traffic from Google comes to a website.

If your website is languishing on the second or third page of search result, the chances are that nobody would ever visit your website.

It has been jokingly but rightly said that The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search result.

Websites featuring on the first page of Google get the majority of the traffic. Even on the first page, there are significant differences in Click-Through-Rate (CTR) on websites ranking from top to bottom.

A Study suggests that websites ranking on the first page gets the following CTR:

First Position - 36.4% CTR
Second Position - 12.5%
Third Position - 9.5%
Fourth Position - 7.9%
Fifth Position - 6.1%
And so on...

So if you're not ranking on the top 3 results, you're missing out on a lot of traffic.

Though there are more than 200 ranking factors, one of the most important, in my opinion, is finding the right keywords with low competition and decent search volume. This is especially important for newer websites with no authority in their niche and a good backlink profile.

Why low competition keywords? Because at the top of Google search results, there is fierce competition between websites to get more traffic. If your website targets keywords with low competition, you'll be able to rank your content on the first page of search results and get a decent amount of organic traffic.

In this guide, you will learn to find the best keywords where competition is low and also has a decent search volume.

Let's get started.

Note: This article contains affiliate links. When you click an affiliate link and make a purchase, we get a small compensation at no cost to you. See our Privacy Policy and Disclaimer for more info.

Find Low Competition Keywords

Keyword Research is essential for any website but you must choose your keywords smartly.

Having a good number of low competition keywords in your arsenal will help you boost your website's ranking.

So let's get started with all the three important steps that you need to focus on right now.

Step 1: Find The Related Keywords
Step 2: Check Monthly Search Volume
Step 3: Check Keyword Competitiveness

Step 1: Find The Related Keywords

In this step we will find all the keywords that are related to your site.

To find the keyword, go to Keyword.io in your browser. It is a free keyword research tool to find longtail and related keywords.

Enter the main topic of your website inside the tool.

Let's say you want to create a website on fishing and have identified the following related topics to write articles on:

Fishing kayak
Fishing hat
Ice fishing gloves
Fish finder
Pontoon boats
Portable fish finder
Catfish rods

In this article, we will cover only the first topic - fishing kayak and check whether it has low competition and good search volume. (You can repeat these steps for the rest of the keywords mentioned above.)

Enter the topic - fishing kayak inside the Keyword.io tool and hit the Search button.

You will get the list of all the keywords or topics that people are searching on Google related to our topic - fishing kayak.

In the above image, our search resulted in 592 topics related to our main topic - fishing kayak.

From the list, you can pick the topics based on which you can easily write about on your website.

To select any topics, just click on the check box, as shown in the above image. As you select the topic, it would automatically appear on the text box on the right side.

In the above example, we have selected six topics:

Best budget fishing kayak
Best cheap fishing kayak
Best fishing kayak
Best fishing kayak under 1000
Best fishing kayak under 500
Best fishing kayaks

After selecting the keywords that we want, we can move on to the next step - To find the monthly search volume of these keywords.

To do this, copy these keywords and paste it into a text file. We will use these keywords in the next step.

Our target is to select only those keywords that have good monthly search volume as well as low competition.

If there is a very low search volume for the target keyword, there is no point in wasting time and effort in writing content based on those keywords as you won't get much traffic from Google for those keywords.

Now we would divide our task into two parts.

In the first part, we would check whether there are good monthly search volume. On the basis of search volume, we would filter our keywords.

In the second part, we would check whether the chosen keywords have low or high competition.

Step 2: Check Monthly Search Volume

To find monthly search volume, we would use one of the most popular SEO tool called Semrush.

To start with we would create a free account on Semrush. To create an account go to the link given here - Semrush Free Account.

On the Semrush website, click on the Sign Up button and enter your email address and password to create your account.

On the Semrush Dashboard, we will select Keyword Overview to check the monthly search volume along with other key information.

As shown in the image given below, paste your keywords under Keyword Overview and select your target country.

We've selected United States as we're targeting visitors from US.

After entering all the keywords and target country, select Analyze button to get metrics like volume, KD, CPC, and others.

In the above image, you can see that it contain all the important metrics including monthly search volume.

Ideally we would want to target keywords that have monthly search volume greater than 1000 or at least 500.

Please Note:

Keywords having monthly search volume less than 500 can be ignored. However, such decision also depends on the niche you're targeting. If your niche is highly competitive, then keywords having search volume in the range of 250-500 can also be considered.

In the above image, all our target keywords have very good monthly search volume.

But wait. Before you launch yourself into writing content, we need to check whether these keywords have high or low competition.

To do this, we will proceed to Step 3.

Let's get started.

We are in the final step to check whether a particular keyword has low competition or not.

Before we move ahead, let me tell you about a term commonly used in SEO world - Keyword Difficulty (KD).

It is normally measured in 1 - 100 point scale. It gives you an estimate of how hard it is to rank on the top 10 organic search results of Google or other search engines.

Low number mean low competition, big number means high competition.

It mainly refers to the linking domains to the current top-10 ranking pages. So a website that as more backlink to a particular content will normally rank higher than its competitors.

However, there are many other factors also that contribute higher ranking like - quality of content, length of the article, SEO and others.

But still backlink is one of the most important factor for ranking.

SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs, provides KD metrics to measure whether a particular keyword would be easy or tough to rank on Google.

However, I would advise you not to follow KD metrics offered by any SEO tool blindly. Why?

Check out the below example.

We're using two of the world's most powerful SEO tool, Semrush and Ahrefs, to prove our point.

Let's took the same set of keywords as above to find the KD.

You can see that all the terms have keyword difficulty score above 50. According to Semrush, it will be very difficult to rank our content if we focus on these keywords.

Let's see what keyword difficulty score of these terms in Ahrefs.

We will open Ahrefs.com and head over to the Keyword Explorer and paste all our keywords here and hit the search button.

Here are the results.

Keyword difficulty for all the terms are less than 30. Ahrefs suggests that these terms are easy to rank keywords with very low competition.

Thus both the SEO tool gives very contrasting keyword difficulty score.

I think I am able to prove my point here. So don't rely on any SEO tool to give you accurate KD.

So how do you measure the KD of any keywords?

In Step 3, I am going to reveal one of the easiest methods that I always follow while doing keyword research for my blog content.

So let's move on to our final step - Check Keyword Competitiveness.

Step 3: Check Keyword Competitiveness

Backlinks from good authority websites that points to a quality web content will normally rank higher on search results than its competitors that has zero or fewer backlinks.

Let's check the keyword competitiveness of our search term - Best Fishing Kayaks.

Basically we're going to perform the following steps for our keyword:

Check what are the top 10 websites that are ranking on the first page of Google.
Check how many backlinks or referring domains are pointing towards them.

These two steps will give us an indication whether we have any chances to rank on the first page of Google for our chosen keyword.

Basically we're going to find whether our chosen keyword has low competition or not.

To do this, we would again take the help of Semrush.

Go to Semrush.com and enter the term - best fishing kayaks under Keyword Overview, and press Analyze.

Semrush will throw up the detail metrics like volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, global volume, and others.

Scroll down the page and you'll get the top 10 websites that are ranking for the search term - Best fishing kayaks.

Here you can see how many backlinks and referring domains are pointing to these web pages.

You can observe that here are some websites with good number of backlinks while some have very few.

Our aim is to look for websites that have very low or zero backlinks pointing towards them.

In the above image, you can see that websites ranking on the 3rd and 6th position of Google's first page has only 1 and 0 backlinks pointing to them respectively.

What does this mean for us?

It means that we have very good chance to break into the top ten results of Google.

So what do we need to do?

We just need to create our content much better than these two websites and also create more quality backlinks from good authority websites than our competitors.

I hope my point is clear to you.

If you perform the above strategy you could easily be able to rank your content higher on search engines.

Wrapping Up

Ranking content higher on search result, especially on the top 3 position on the first page of Google, is the key to get massive organic traffic.

And this could be done easily with keywords that have low competition.

I hope that now you know:

How to find keywords
How to check monthly search volume
How to check keyword competitiveness

Semrush is truly the Swiss army knife of keyword research. It not only help you to find keywords monthly search volume but also check for low competition keywords.

If you want to learn more about these features and how it can help you to beat your competitors in search engine rankings and grow your traffic, check out my article - Semrush Review.

It is my preferred SEO tool. Not only mine, but also used by marketing experts around the world.

They have easy to follow guides, tutorials and documentation that give you insights on every aspect of search engine optimization.

Semrush also offers a free trial where you can use all the premium features during the trial period for free. Get started with the Semrush free trial below.

Visit Semrush