How to Find Low-Competition Keywords

The biggest mistake in keyword research is picking terms by search volume and hoping to rank. High-volume keywords are crowded with strong, established sites, so a new or small site writes a great article and lands on page seven. The winnable path is the opposite: find keywords with genuine demand where the pages already ranking are weak enough to beat. That's what “low-competition” really means — and this guide shows you how to find those keywords systematically instead of guessing.

What “low competition” actually means

Most tools attach a keyword difficulty(KD) score to every term — a single 0–100 number. It's a useful starting filter, but treating it as gospel is where people go wrong. KD is an estimate, usually derived mostly from the backlink strength of the top results. It doesn't know that half the page-one results are forum threads, that two of them are off-topic, or that the “authoritative” domain ranking #1 has a thin, outdated article on the exact query.

Real competition is the strength of the specific pages you'd have to outrank. A keyword is low-competition when the current top 10 is beatable: low domain authoritysites, weak or partial answers, or pages that only mention the topic in passing. That's a keyword opportunity no difficulty score alone can tell you — you have to look at the SERP.

Start with demand: search volume tells you it's worth writing

Before anything, confirm people actually search the term. Use Seoluma's keyword research tool to pull real monthly search volume and a spread of related terms for any seed keyword. Volume answers one question and one only: does demand exist?It does not tell you whether you can rank. Those are two separate checks, and conflating them is exactly how people end up chasing big numbers they'll never touch.

For a small or new site, you generally want modest but real volume — enough that ranking is worth the effort, low enough that the biggest players in your niche haven't bothered to target it precisely. A term with a handful of searches a day that you can own outright will send more traffic than a headline keyword where you never crack the first three pages.

Go long-tail and specific

Long-tail keywords— longer, more specific phrases — are the natural home of low-competition wins. “Running shoes” is a war; “best running shoes for flat feet and knee pain” is a specific question a much smaller site can answer better than a generic mega-page. Specificity does two things at once: it narrows the field of competing pages, and it sharpens the search intent so your content matches exactly what the searcher wants.

Specific intent also tends to carry buyer intent. Someone typing a precise, problem-shaped query is often further down the funnel than someone typing a broad head term — so these niche keywords frequently convert better even at lower volume. Use the related terms from the keyword tool to branch outward: each suggestion is a potential long-tail door into the same topic.

Mine question keywords

Question keywords— how, what, why, can, does, best way to — are a reliable seam of low-competition demand. Questions are inherently specific, they map to clear intent, and they're often under-served because big brands optimise for short commercial terms rather than the long tail of real questions people ask. A single question can anchor a whole article, and answering it directly and completely is exactly what earns a spot in the results (and often a featured snippet).

To find them, start from a seed term and expand. Type your topic into the keyword research tooland scan the related terms for anything phrased as a question. Prefix your seed with words like “how,” “why,” “best,” “is” and “can” and re-run it. Watch the autocomplete suggestions Google itself surfaces, and read the “People also ask” box on any SERP you're already studying — every one of those is a real question with proven demand and often thin competition. Cluster the questions that belong to the same topic and you frequently have enough for a single comprehensive page rather than a dozen thin ones.

The real test: judge the top 10, not the score

This is the step that separates winnable keywords from wishful ones. Take a candidate keyword, search it, and study who ranks. This is sometimes framed as a keyword golden ratio mindset — look for demand that the strong sites have left thinly covered. Ask:

• How strong are the ranking domains? Run the top results through the domain authority checker. A SERP full of low-authority sites is a green light.
• Do the pages actually answer the query? If the top results only mention the topic in passing, a focused page that answers it directly can outrank them.
• Are there weak result types in the top 10? Forum threads, thin listicles, off-topic pages and ancient articles are all beatable openings.
• Is the intent a match? If results are all product pages but you'd write a guide, the intent doesn't match — that's a fight, not an opening.

Backlinks matter here too: a big part of what makes an incumbent hard to beat is its link profile, so it's worth understanding how many backlinks you actually need to rank before you commit. When the top 10 is weak on both content and links, you've found a genuine opening. Seoluma's index of 118 million domains and 7.1 billion links is what powers the authority and link signals behind these checks.

One caution: a high difficulty score is not automatically a stop sign, and a low one is not automatically a green light. A term can show a modest KD while the actual top results are all major brands that happen to have few links to that specific page — hard to displace despite the number. The reverse is common too: an intimidating score sitting above a page of forum posts and outdated articles you could clearly beat. The score is a first filter to rank a big list quickly; the SERP read is the decision. Spend your manual review time on the terms the score flags as borderline — that's where the mispriced opportunities hide.

A worked comparison

Two keywords can have similar volume and wildly different winnability. The score won't always tell you which is which — the SERP will:

Both are legitimate keywords. Only one is a low-competition opportunity for a site that isn't already an authority — and you only know that by reading the SERP, not the difficulty number.

Build a prioritised list

Don't treat keyword research as a one-off search. Build a running list and rank it, so you always work on the highest-leverage term next. A simple, effective ordering:

1. Confirmed demand — real search volume from the keyword tool, no zero-search phrases.
2. Weak SERP — top 10 is low-authority, off-topic or thin when you check it.
3. Intent you can serve — the result type matches the content you can genuinely produce best.
4. Buyer or business value — where two keywords are equally winnable, prefer the one closer to a decision.

Work top-down. The keywords that clear all four bars are where a small site earns its first rankings, and each one you win adds the authority that makes the next, slightly harder keyword winnable too.

The bottom line

Low-competition keywords aren't about finding a low number in a tool — they're about finding real demand that the strong sites have left weakly covered. Start with volume to prove demand, lean into long-tail and question keywords for specific intent, and always confirm winnability by reading the top 10 and checking the authorityof who's already there. Do that consistently and you build a list of keywords you can genuinely rank for. Start with the keyword research tool, keep a domain authority checker open beside it, and explore the rest of the best free SEO tools on Seoluma to run the whole workflow without paying for a subscription. You can also drill into any single term on the keyword overview page.

Frequently asked questions