How to Find and Target Low Competitive Keywords

You spend three hours writing a solid article. You publish it. You wait. Six months later it's sitting on page four, behind a Forbes listicle, a Reddit thread, and two sites that look like they were built in 2009 but somehow have 50,000 backlinks.

That's not bad writing. That's picking the wrong keyword.

Most people searching for SEO advice get pointed toward high-volume terms first — "best project management software," "home insurance quotes," "how to lose weight." These are the keywords everyone wants. And because everyone wants them, you're not competing against small blogs. You're competing against Wirecutter, HubSpot, and NerdWallet.

Low competitive keywords are the way out of that trap. Here's exactly how to find them and do something useful with them.

What Makes a Keyword Low Competition

A keyword is low competition when the pages currently ranking for it are weak — thin content, few backlinks, low domain authority, or a poor match to what the searcher actually wants.

Keyword difficulty scores (like the 0–100 scale in Ahrefs or Semrush) estimate this, but they're not the whole picture. A keyword with difficulty 15 could still be dominated by a government site or Wikipedia, which you'll never outrank regardless of your content quality. And a keyword with difficulty 40 might have a first page full of forum posts and thin product pages that you could easily beat.

So the real definition: a low competitive keyword is one where you can rank without needing dozens of backlinks or years of domain authority.

Where Low Competitive Keywords Actually Live

Specific, multi-word phrases

Specificity almost always correlates with lower competition. "Project management software" has thousands of pages fighting for it. "Project management software for freelance designers" has almost none — and the person searching that phrase is far more likely to convert, too. See head terms vs. long-tail keywords for a breakdown of why this trade-off usually favors the specific phrase.

Questions nobody has answered well

Search a specific question in Google. If the top results are generic overviews that only loosely address the question, there's a gap you can fill. Answer the question directly and completely, and you have a real shot at ranking.

Location + service combinations

"HVAC contractor" is brutal. "HVAC contractor in Bozeman Montana" is winnable for almost any site with a few pages of content and a Google Business Profile. Local modifiers drop competition dramatically.

Comparison and alternative phrases

"[Product A] vs [Product B]" or "[Competitor] alternative" keywords tend to have lower difficulty than core category terms, and they attract buyers. Buyer keywords like these often convert better than informational terms precisely because the person is mid-decision.

How to Find Them: A Practical Process

Start with seed keywords, then filter down

Open Ahrefs, Semrush, or even the free version of Ubersuggest. Type in a broad term related to your topic. Sort by keyword difficulty, ascending. You'll immediately see long-tail variations you hadn't considered.

Free alternative: Google's autocomplete. Type your seed keyword and pause after each word. The dropdown suggestions are real searches with real volume. Add a letter at the end ("best crm software a," "best crm software b," etc.) to surface even more.

Check "People Also Ask" and related searches

Scroll to the bottom of a Google results page. The "Related searches" section and "People Also Ask" boxes are Google telling you exactly what variations people search. These are often goldmines — specific enough to have low competition, popular enough to drive traffic.

Look at what's already ranking with weak authority

Install a free tool like MozBar or use Ahrefs' free SERP overview. Search your keyword and check the domain authority (DA) of the top ten results. If most pages ranking have DA below 40 and few backlinks, you can compete even with a newer site.

Mine your existing rankings

If you have a Google Search Console account, open the Performance report and filter for keywords where you're ranking in positions 8–20. These are terms you're already relevant for but haven't fully targeted. Writing focused content around them — or improving existing pages — often produces ranking jumps faster than targeting entirely new keywords.

Look at competitor content gaps

Pick two or three competitors smaller than the category giants. Run their domains through a keyword gap tool (Ahrefs and Semrush both have this). You'll find keywords they rank for that you don't — and if they rank for it, you can too. This is especially useful because it filters out the ultra-competitive terms the big players are capturing, and surfaces the mid-tier phrases where smaller sites actually win.

How to Evaluate Whether a Keyword Is Worth Targeting

Before you write, check three things:

1. Is there real search intent you can satisfy? Search the keyword yourself. Look at what the top results actually are. If they're e-commerce product pages and you run a blog, the intent mismatch means you won't rank even with perfect content. Matching content to searcher intent is often what separates pages that rank from pages that don't.

2. Is the competition actually beatable? Look at the backlink counts for pages in positions 1–5. If they all have 200+ referring domains, you need significant link-building effort. If most have under 20, good content alone can compete.

3. Is there enough volume to be worth it? Don't dismiss 100 monthly searches. If those 100 searchers are decision-ready buyers, one ranked page could be worth thousands of dollars per month. Volume matters less than fit. That said, if a keyword gets fewer than 10 searches a month, verify it's not just a keyword tool artifact before investing in a full article.

Targeting Them: What the Content Actually Needs to Do

Finding the keyword is half the job. The content has to be better than what's currently ranking — specifically better, not just longer.

Read every result on page one before you write. Notice what they all do. Then notice what they all miss. Your job is to cover what they cover (so you're at least as complete) and add what they don't (so you're the better answer).

For low competitive keywords, you rarely need 3,000-word essays. A focused 800-word article that directly answers the question often outperforms a bloated guide written around padding a word count.

Put the keyword in your title, your H1, your first paragraph, and your URL. Don't stuff it everywhere — just those four places signal relevance clearly.

Build internal links to and from the page. If you have other content on your site that's relevant, link to the new page from it. This passes authority and helps Google understand the relationship between your pages.

Scaling the Approach

The real power of low competitive keywords isn't in ranking for one. It's in building a library of them. Fifty pages each getting 200 visits a month compounds to 10,000 monthly visitors — from keywords nobody else bothered to fight for.

This requires a systematic approach: mapping your keyword opportunities before writing anything, so you're building toward a complete content surface rather than picking terms ad hoc. Tools like Rankfill can automate this mapping — identifying which keywords your competitors are capturing that your site is missing and estimating the traffic potential for each.

If you want to understand the full spectrum from easy wins to harder targets, competitive keywords are worth understanding too — they're the terms you'll eventually need to tackle once your domain authority grows from these early wins.

FAQ

What keyword difficulty score counts as "low competition"? Generally, difficulty below 20–30 is considered low. But the score is a starting point, not a verdict. Always look at the actual SERP to see how strong the ranking pages are.

Can I rank for low competitive keywords without backlinks? Yes. Many low competition keywords are winnable on content quality alone, especially if your domain has some existing authority. New sites with zero backlinks may still struggle, but even 5–10 referring domains to your site can be enough for some terms.

How long does it take to rank for a low competition keyword? Typically 2–8 weeks for an established domain. New sites may wait 3–6 months. Google needs to find, crawl, and index your page, then assess it against competitors over time.

Is low search volume worth targeting? Yes, if the intent is commercial or the audience is specific. A keyword with 80 monthly searches from people actively evaluating software can outperform a keyword with 5,000 monthly searches from people who are just browsing.

How many low competition keywords should I target? As many as you can create genuinely good content for. There's no ceiling. The more targeted pages you build, the more your domain authority grows — which eventually lets you compete for harder keywords too.

What's the best free tool for finding low competition keywords? Google Search Console (for mining existing rankings), Google autocomplete, and AnswerThePublic are all free and genuinely useful. Ahrefs and Semrush have free tiers that give limited but real data on keyword difficulty and volume.