How to Find Low Competition Keywords Easily: 7 Simple Tricks

You type a keyword into your tool of choice, and the numbers make you wince. Search volume looks decent. Then you check the difficulty score and it reads like a brick wall. Every good term already has a Wikipedia page, three major brands, and a forum thread from 2019 sitting in the top five results.

Sound familiar? I get asked this constantly, usually by someone who has published eight posts, gotten eleven total visitors, and is starting to wonder if the whole thing was a mistake. It wasn't. The problem is almost never the writing. It's the target.

Here's what most guides won't tell you: finding low competition keywords easily isn't a tooling problem. It's a filtering problem. The tools hand you thousands of options. Your job is to throw away 99% of them, fast, and most people never develop that reflex.

Why your keyword tool is lying to you about competition

Every difficulty score you see is a model, not a measurement. Ahrefs, Semrush, and the rest take the links pointing at the pages currently ranking and compress that into a number between 0 and 100. That's it. They aren't evaluating whether the content actually answers the query. They aren't checking if the page is about something else entirely. They aren't noticing that a competitor ranked in position three with a 200-word stub.

I learned this the hard way. Two years ago I targeted a term with a difficulty of 8. Eight. I wrote 2,400 words, structured it properly, published it, waited. Nothing for five months. When I finally dug into why, the top result was a domain with enormous authority and a page that had been updated the previous week. The difficulty score never saw the domain, only the page-level link profile. Which, on a page nobody had ever linked to, is always going to look weak.

The score was technically accurate. It was also useless.

What the score actually measures

Page-level backlinks, mostly. Sometimes domain-level authority gets folded in, depending on the tool. What it does not measure:

• Whether the ranking page is fresh or abandoned
• Whether the content matches the search intent
• Whether the domain behind it is a giant that will outrank you on reputation alone
• How many other pages on that same site already target the topic

So the number is a hint. A cheap first filter. Treat it like a metal detector on a beach, not a treasure map.

The step-by-step workflow I actually use

Here's the sequence. It takes about ten minutes per keyword once you've done it a few times, and I'll walk through the exact filters rather than the vague "just find easy keywords" advice you've read a hundred times.

Step 1: build a seed list with Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is free and remains the fastest way to see real query variations. Enter three or four broad terms related to your niche. Not one. Three or four, because the tool returns suggestions that a single seed will never surface.

Set the location and language to match your audience. Then export everything. Don't filter yet. You want the mess.

Step 2: sort by difficulty, not volume

Import the list into whatever tool you have access to. If you're on a budget, the free tiers of most platforms will let you check a limited number of keywords per day. That's fine — you don't need thousands.

Sort ascending by difficulty. Now here's the counterintuitive part: ignore anything above 25 for now. Not forever. Just for your first pass. You're looking for the easy wins so you can build traction before aiming at anything harder.

Step 3: open the results page and actually look

This is the step everyone skips, and it's the one that decides everything. Take your shortlist — maybe twenty terms — and search each one manually. What you want to see:

1. Forum threads, Reddit posts, Quora answers
2. Pages older than three years that clearly haven't been updated
3. Content that doesn't answer the query
4. Small sites you've never heard of
5. YouTube videos with modest view counts

If three or more of those show up, you have a genuine gap. If the entire first page is major publishers with fresh, comprehensive content — walk away. The difficulty score said 12 and it doesn't matter. You will not win that fight this year.

Step 4: check intent alignment

One more filter. Does the query want a blog post, a product page, a video, or a calculator? If the top five results are all tools and you're planning an article, you're swimming upstream. Match the format that's already winning, then beat it on depth.

Manual methods that beat paid tools

Some of my best-performing pages came from queries I found outside any keyword database.

Reddit is the obvious one, and it works because people write in their own words. Search your topic plus "how do I" and read the thread titles. Those are real queries, phrased the way real people phrase them. The volume is usually low. The intent is usually perfect.

Google Trends is your second stop, but not for volume. Use it to compare two similar terms and see which one is stable versus which one is declining. A term that peaked and crashed three years ago is a trap. A term that's flat and boring will still be searched next year.

And the third source, which almost nobody mentions: your own search console. Once you have any traffic at all, go to the queries report, filter for positions between 11 and 30, and look for terms with impressions but no clicks. Those are queries Google already thinks you're relevant for. One good update to the matching page and you often jump straight into the top ten. I've done this on pages that had been sitting on page two for eight months and watched them move to position four within a week of a rewrite.

The YouTube angle

Video is a different game. On YouTube, competition is about the videos already ranking, not the domain authority of a blog. A small channel can absolutely rank for a term with a million monthly searches if the top results are weak, old, or off-topic.

The filter is simpler than it is for Google: sort by relevance, then check the view counts and upload dates of the top five. If two of them are over three years old with fewer than 50,000 views, that's your opening. Pair the video with a written version of the same content and you cover both surfaces with one piece of research.

A comparison of your options

Here's how the tools stack up for the specific job of finding low competition terms, based on what each one is actually good at.

Tool	Best for	Weakness	Cost
Google Keyword Planner	Query variations, real search demand	Bundles ranges instead of exact numbers	Free
Google Trends	Direction and seasonality	No volume data, no competition data	Free
Ahrefs	Difficulty scores, backlink data	Expensive, page-level bias	Paid
Semrush	Breadth of keyword database	Overwhelming without filters	Paid
Manual search	Truth	Slow, doesn't scale past a few dozen terms a week	Free

My honest opinion: the free combination of Keyword Planner plus manual checks will beat a paid tool used carelessly. I'm not saying skip Ahrefs. I'm saying the tool is a shortcut to a shortlist, and the shortlist is where the real work starts.

The numbers that should make you say no

Not every low competition keyword deserves your time. Here's my personal rule set, and I'll own the fact that it's opinionated:

• Volume under 30 with commercial intent? Skip unless it's a stepping stone to a bigger topic.
• Volume under 30 with pure informational intent and no monetization path? Skip entirely — you'll spend four hours for twelve visitors.
• Difficulty under 15 but the top three results are all huge brands? Skip. The score is misleading.
• Any term where you can't picture the exact person typing it? Skip. You can't write for someone you can't imagine.

That last one has saved me more wasted effort than any score. If I can't describe the searcher, I can't answer their question properly, and a vague post never ranks for anything.

When low volume is actually a trap

There's a category of keyword that looks perfect and delivers nothing: hyper-specific terms with zero competition because nobody actually searches them in a meaningful way. A term with twelve monthly searches and no competition isn't an opportunity. It's a rounding error. You'll rank position one within a week and get maybe one visit.

Volume of 100 to 500 per month, with clear intent and weak competition, is the sweet spot. That's enough traffic to matter and enough weakness to win.

Putting it together

Finding low competition keywords isn't about finding a secret tool. It's about building a habit: shortlist fast with free data, verify manually every single time, and judge the searcher rather than the score.

The instinct to chase the biggest number is the instinct that keeps new sites invisible. Fight it. Go for the queries where you can be the best answer in a week, not the tenth-best answer in a year. Once you've banked a dozen of those, the harder terms start looking less impossible — and your domain, quietly, has grown strong enough to actually compete.

Which raises a question worth sitting with: if you stopped measuring keywords by how many people search them, and started measuring them by how many you could genuinely help, how different would your content calendar look next month?