everyone wants to rank for competitive
keywords but sometimes
it's just not possible in the short term
and that's why everyone
loves low competition keywords they're
easy to rank for
you don't need many and in some cases
any backlinks to the page
and they send you a decent amount of
consistent search traffic
month over month so in this video i'll
show you how to find
low competition keywords and to
confidently determine
if they are indeed low competition stay
tuned
first let's get on the same page and
talk about what a low competition
keyword
is simply put it's a keyword that's easy
to rank for
now with so many different factors that
go into ranking on google
people generally think of low
competition keywords as topics that
don't require a lot of backlinks to rank
high
but the thing is ranking high on google
isn't
always just about backlinks so for the
rest of this tutorial
we'll go through a five step process
which will help you find low competition
keywords
and more importantly validate that these
keywords are indeed easy to rank for
so the first step is to brainstorm a
list of topics
and when i say topics i'm talking about
broad keywords that are related to your
niche
these are called seed keywords for
example
if we have a site on parenting some
broad keywords might include
parenting stroller pregnancy
babies and car seat try to think of five
to ten
broad topics within your niche but try
to be specific enough
that the keywords can't be interpreted
in too many different ways
all right step two is to expand your
topics with the keyword research tool
keyword research tools give you
information about how often words
and phrases are searched they're also
the main way seos generate keyword lists
and the one i'll be using is ahrefs
keywords explorer
so to get started enter your list of
seed keywords you just brainstormed
and then run the search next go to the
phrase match report
now with well over 3 million keyword
ideas
we'll need to narrow this down this
brings us to step 3 which is to filter
keywords for low difficulty scores
a lot of keyword research tools provide
some kind of ranking difficulty metric
at ahrefs we call ours keyword
difficulty or kd
our kd score runs on a scale of 0 to 100
and tries to determine how hard it will
be to rank in google's top 10 results
for a given search query and the way we
calculate it
is based on a weighted average of the
number of websites
that link to the top 10 pages this means
that the top 10 pages for low difficulty
scores
won't have many linking domains pointing
at them so let's set a keyword
difficulty filter with a minimum value
of 0
and a maximum value of 20. and now we
have over 160 000
potential low competition topics the key
word here
is potential again ranking isn't just
about
backlinks there are lots of other things
you need to consider
and we'll go deep into some examples of
false positives in a bit
for now let's move on to the next step
which is to check if you can match
search or intent
search intent tells us the reason behind
the searches query
and if you can't match search or intent
you won't be able to rank
even if the query is so called low
competition
for example when someone searches for
best baby strollers
are they looking for blog posts product
pages or ecommerce category pages
the easiest way to find out is to just
google the query
and look at the top ranking pages for
what we call the three
c's of search intent the first c is
content type
so are the top ranking pages blog posts
product or category pages
in this case they're all blog posts the
second c
is content format so are they listicle
type pages
how-to's opinion pieces or step-by-step
tutorials
for this query they're all listicle
styled posts
and the third c is content angle this is
the dominant selling proposition
that the top ranking pages are using in
this case
they've gone with the freshness angle
seeing as the top pages are using the
current year and their titles
assuming you have a blog you should be
able to match search or intent
now what about a query like baby
strollers looking at the top pages
you'll see that they're mostly
e-commerce category pages
so if you don't actually sell baby
strollers it would be tough to rank
there's more to search in 10 than the
3cs but this should be enough to get you
set on the right path
but i highly recommend watching the
lesson on search intent
from our seo course for beginners so
i'll link that up in the description
all right the final step is probably the
most important
and that's to assess whether the query
is actually low difficulty
metrics like keyword difficulty and
referring domains can only tell you so
much
and while combining these metrics can be
helpful they don't always paint a full
picture
for example the query compact flash card
reader
has a low keyword difficulty score and
if we scroll down to the serp
you'll see that the top 10 pages don't
really have that many links pointing at
them
but that doesn't mean if you can get
more links and match search intent
that you'll be able to outrank these
sites now you might be thinking
well it's because all these websites
have high authority
well in my opinion more than dr it's
about brand equity
sites like amazon best buy and bh photo
video
are places people trust and want to buy
products from
they've built trust and topical
authority in the area of electronics
and photo and video gear and i won't
even get into on-page considerations
like
facets so is this a low competition
topic
definitely not unless you're an equal to
one of these brands
the big thing to take away from this is
that there's no tool that can
accurately determine ranking difficulty
with a one to three digit number
and this is one of the reasons why we've
made our keyword difficulty score
based on just linking domains backlinks
are generally a prominent ranking signal
with that said
you need to manually assess each
individual serp to understand whether
the quarry is indeed a low competition
now we've looked at an example of a
false positive so let's look at an
example of an actual low competition
and how we come to that conclusion so
the key word we'll be looking at is best
convertible car seat for
small cars looking at kd you'll see that
it's relatively low
so what that tells us is that the top
ranking pages for the most part
don't have many referring domains
pointing at them so that's a good sniff
test
but nothing more let's scroll down to
the serp
now the first thing i'm going to look at
is whether i can match the dominant
search intent
because if i can't then there's no point
in looking further
and you'll see that they're all listicle
style blog posts which will be easy to
match
next let's do a quick check of the dr
column and it looks like there's a
mixture of both low
and high dr sites which is promising
because it tells us that the quarry
probably isn't going to be
a matter of just brand and the fact that
very low authority websites were able to
penetrate the top 10
tells us that our hypothetical website
could probably compete too
so far so good now let's look at the
domains that are ranking to get an idea
of topical authority
meaning do these sites likely have lots
of content
related to babies parenting or baby
products like car seats
and it looks like they all do now
assuming our site is related to babies
baby products parenting or whatever
closely related topics
then we'd likely be on a similar playing
field the next thing i'd want to look at
is relevance of the top ranking pages
looking at the top page
the title specifically says best
convertible car seats
for small cars it exactly matches the
query
now it's not to say that they're ranking
high because of an exact match keyword
but convertible car seats for small cars
actually serve a very specific need and
this is likely why some of these lower
authority websites
with low page authority are ranking
ahead of bigger players
for example this page is targeting just
the best convertible car
seats in general and finally let's look
at the referring domains column
as you can see the top ranking page only
has a handful of referring domains
in fact if we click on the referring
domains number for the page
you'll see that all the links come from
relatively low authority sites
and if i click the link type filter
you'll see that only one of those links
is followed so assuming we can outdo
these pages on the content side of
things
this to me looks like a low competition
as a final tip i want to show you one
super cool trick to find low competition
with high traffic potential not just
that but it'll help you find
totally new groups of low competition
keywords in virtually any niche
so to get started go to ahrefs content
explorer which is a searchable database
of over 5 billion pages and since we're
working on a hypothetical parenting site
let's set our query to parenting and run
the search
now we need to set a few filters first
i'll set a referring domains filter with
a maximum value
of something low like 10 meaning the
pages for our search query
won't have many links next i'll set an
organic traffic filter
to show pages with a minimum of at least
500 monthly organic visits
and right away you'll see over 3 500
pages
that mention parenting get at least 500
monthly organic visits
and have 10 or fewer referring domains
now it's just a matter of looking at the
titles for topic ideas
that would be appropriate for your site
for example this one on coconut oil for
diaper rash
seems promising so i'll click on the
page traffic box
to see the top keywords the page ranks
for and judging by the kd values
it does look like another low
competition topic
but you still need to manually assess
the search results
now if you happen to be in a niche
without a ton of low competition
or you just have an unhealthy obsession
with easy to rank for topics
then you can use these keywords as news
feeds and go through the first steps i
showed you in the tutorial again
so i'll go back to keywords explorer but
this time
i'll search for diaper rash as my seed
next i'll go to the phrase match report
and finally i'll set the maximum kd
value to 20 again
and now we have even more great keyword
ideas where some will likely be
very easy to rank for now while low
competition keywords are great to target
when your website is
fairly new or has low authority they
shouldn't be the only strategy you use
higher competition topics generally lead
to more traffic
and links two things that all seos are
after
plus competitive topics usually have
higher commercial value
so it's worth going after competitive
topics but you should set your time
horizon realistically
now go and try this out for your site
and if you enjoyed this video
make sure to like share and subscribe
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i'll see you in the next one
