Everyone loves a good competition, but one matchup you won’t see is the San Francisco 49ers versus the Bellflower Buccaneers youth football team. It doesn’t take a genius to know that pro athletes would crush eighth graders every time. The same goes for SEO. When choosing keywords for your content strategy, you should focus on search terms you don’t have much competition for. What are low-competition keywords?
What Low-Competition Keywords Are and How They Work
Low-competition keywords are search terms that are easier for your website to rank for. They’re keywords that you have a better-than-average chance of winning. In organic SEO, this concept is also called keyword difficulty.
Factors That Influence Keyword Difficulty
The “low-competition” part can be misleading because success doesn’t always depend on the number of other websites that target the same. For example, even if your business and Forbes.com were the only two websites going after the search term “how to get a small business loan,” the fight would be over instantly. It’s like trying to go up against Taylor Swift or Adam Levine at karaoke.
So, what factors go into determining low-difficulty or low-competition keywords?
Domain authority: One of the biggest ranking factors, domain authority is your website’s overall reputation, visibility, relevance, and keyword success on Google. It’s the reason Adobe.com ranks first for PDF queries and why WebMD can create an article on diabetes and rank in the top position right away.
Backlinks: When your page has many inbound links — especially links from high-quality websites — and lots of traffic, Google takes it as a sign that your content is trustworthy. Put simply, the better your backlink profile, the more traffic you get and the higher you rank.
Number of competitors: When 500 e-commerce businesses are targeting the same search term, success becomes a numbers game. In these cases, the companies with a bigger marketing budget are more likely to win.
Content quality: Choosing smart keywords and shoving them into spammy or AI-generated content is like putting lipstick on a pig. If you want great results, always pair your best keywords with top-quality writing.
What’s the lesson for your website? You should fight hard to improve your search rankings — in fact, it’s essential for online success — but you need to know how to pick your battles.
Examples of Low-Competition Keywords
SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush show low-competition keywords from the point of view of a brand-new website. Here are a few examples for different industries:
- Manufacturing: Commonly searched for terms such as “stainless steel” are hard to compete for, but narrowing your focus with “alloy steel vs stainless steel” or “18-8 stainless steel” puts business leads within reach.
- Fashion: Your new e-commerce site would be out of its league with “fall fashion ideas,” but “fall outfits for girls” has a KD of just 29.
- Digital marketing: There’s tons of competition for marketing search terms, but “long-tail keyword generator” and “SEO keyword examples” stand out in a sea of hard options.
- Health and medical: Not surprisingly, ranking for trending health products like Ozempic is practically impossible. Informational queries can be easier to target, such as “Why am I not losing weight on semaglutide?” or “medical weight loss products.”
Some low-competition keywords are easier to rank for because they have a low volume of monthly searches. Targeting highly specific concepts instead of broad ideas also makes a difference.
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