How to Find Low Competition Keywords & Topics

A client in the pet supplies space once insisted on targeting “dog food” as a primary keyword, convinced the volume alone made it worth chasing. We pulled up the top-ranking pages together—every one of them was a massive, decades-old retailer with thousands of backlinks. We pivoted instead to “best dog food for senior dogs with sensitive stomachs,” a phrase with a fraction of the search volume but genuinely thin competition: most of the pages ranking for it were generic and didn’t actually address the sensitive-stomach part at all. That page went to position one within two months and, despite the much lower search volume, converted at a far higher rate than the broad term ever would have. That trade-off—accepting less volume in exchange for a realistic shot at ranking and an audience that’s actually looking for what you offer—is the entire logic behind chasing low-competition keywords in the first place.

Starting With the Right Kind of Keyword

Long-tail phrases, generally three or more words, tend to be considerably less contested than short, broad terms, partly because they’re more specific and partly because fewer sites bother targeting them precisely. “SEO checklist for small business blogs” will always be easier to rank for than just “SEO,” and it usually converts better too, since a longer, more specific phrase tends to come from someone closer to actually wanting a particular answer rather than browsing broadly.

Most keyword research tools provide a difficulty score that estimates how hard a given term will be to rank for. Aiming for a low-to-moderate score, while still checking that there’s a reasonable amount of actual search volume behind it, is the basic filter worth applying before investing real time into a topic—a keyword that’s easy to rank for because literally nobody searches it isn’t actually an opportunity.

Reading the Search Results Directly

Pulling up the actual top 10 results for a candidate keyword tells you more than any tool’s difficulty score on its own. Looking at how long those pages are, how they’re structured, and what kind of media they use gives a realistic sense of what it’ll take to compete. More usefully, it often reveals what those pages are missing—a subtopic none of them cover well, a question left unanswered—which is exactly the gap a new piece of content can fill rather than just rewriting what already exists. Pages that show featured snippets, lists, or comparison tables in the results are also worth noting, since that’s a signal the format itself (not just the topic) has snippet potential worth designing for.

Mining Real Questions From Search Behavior

Google’s own autocomplete suggestions and the “People Also Ask” boxes that show up for a seed keyword are an underused, free source of genuinely low-competition phrasing—these are real questions people are actually typing, often with far less direct competition than the main keyword they’re related to. Beyond Google itself, forums and community sites like Reddit and Quora are worth browsing for repeated questions or complaints in your niche; the natural, slightly rough phrasing people use in these spaces often becomes a long-tail keyword opportunity that more polished, marketing-oriented competitors haven’t bothered targeting.

Checking Who You’d Actually Be Competing Against

Before committing to a keyword, it’s worth glancing at the authority and backlink profile of whatever’s currently ranking for it. A keyword where the top-ranking pages have weak backlink profiles and modest domain authority is a far more realistic target than one dominated by long-established sites with deep backlink profiles, even if both keywords show a similar difficulty score on paper—the score is an estimate, and actually looking at who you’d be displacing gives a more honest picture. Checking which keywords your competitors already rank for and what gaps exist in how they’ve covered those topics often surfaces opportunities faster than building a keyword list completely from scratch.

Organizing What You Find

Once you’ve gathered a reasonable list, grouping keywords into clusters—one primary term supported by several closely related secondary and supporting phrases—tends to produce a stronger result than treating each keyword as an isolated, standalone target. Building these clusters into connected content, with genuine internal linking between the pieces, reinforces topical depth in a way that scattered, disconnected posts never quite achieve, and it mirrors the same logic that makes topic clusters valuable for off-page authority more broadly.

Putting Keywords Into Actual Content

Working a target keyword naturally into the title, the opening paragraph, and relevant subheadings helps without needing to force it into every sentence—readability should always come before keyword density. From there, building supporting content around the same cluster and linking between the related pieces strengthens the whole group rather than each page fighting for relevance on its own.

Keeping the List Current

A keyword list isn’t a one-time research project—search behavior shifts, seasonal interest changes, and competitors improve their own content over time. Revisiting your tracked keywords periodically, checking actual ranking movement through Search Console, and refreshing older content with new examples or updated information keeps a page from quietly losing the ground it originally earned.

The Realistic Takeaway

The pet supplies example above captures the trade-off well: chasing the keyword with the biggest number on paper is rarely the better move when the competition for that term is dominated by sites with resources you can’t realistically match anytime soon. A more specific, lower-volume phrase that you can genuinely rank for and that brings in visitors who actually want what you’re offering will outperform a vanity ranking attempt on a broad term almost every time. Small, realistic wins compounded across several well-chosen keywords tend to add up to considerably more traffic — and far better-converting traffic — than one ambitious swing at an impossible term ever does.