How to Find Low Competition Keywords for Your Website
If your website’s domain authority is low and the top keywords you want to rank for are out of reach, then the best alternative for you is to focus on low competition keywords.
What are low competition keywords?
Usually, everybody wants to rank for the most in-demand keywords. For example, let’s say you run an ecommerce store that sells products for dogs, including food. The most ideal keyword you could rank for is “dog food.” It has a search volume of 285,000.
Ranking for this keyword will get you a ton of high-intent search traffic, which will likely yield significant sales, but actually ranking for that term is easier said than done. This is because all the top sites with high authority are vying for it.
To rank towards the top of page one for it, you need to create an impeccable product/category page and build hundreds of links from high authority sites. And your site’s own authority likewise needs to be high. Even if you build all those links, it will take you months and maybe even a year to rank for this keyword.
This is why if your authority is low or you don’t have a vast budget to build all those links, you should opt for low competition keywords.
An alternative to “dog food” might be “best dog food for senior dogs.” It has a search volume of 2,900, but you can potentially rank for it quickly. An even easier alternative would be “best wet dog food for senior dogs.” It has a search volume of 1,100.
As the keywords and search strings you aim for get longer, they see less volume of people searching for them each month. However, they also get more specific, which means that the bigger businesses you compete with will be less interested. You can use the grep command to search a file for a particular string.
What’s more, assuming that you have a great landing page that offers quality resources about the “best wet dog food for senior dogs,” the people who do search for these terms are all the more likely to actually engage with your content.
As you rank for these low competition keywords, your authority will improve, and you can then set your sights on high competition keywords.