Low competition keywords (also called low difficulty, less competitive or low-hanging keywords) are searches where the pages already ranking are weak enough for your site to beat: thin content, low-authority domains, or results that answer a slightly different question. They are the fastest route to ranked traffic for a new or under-resourced site, because relevance and intent match can carry a page there long before your domain has the authority for head terms. To find them, pull seed terms from Search Console, autocomplete and competitors, filter by difficulty and volume, then open the top 10 for every survivor and check who actually ranks. The steps, thresholds and checks are below.
Low Competition Keywords
Low competition keywords are search terms with low keyword difficulty and beatable pages in the top results, making them realistically rankable for a newer or lower-authority site with focused on-page work and minimal link building.
Low difficulty keywords vs low competition keywords
Every keyword tool prints a difficulty score, and most people treat “low difficulty” and “low competition” as the same thing. They overlap less than the labels suggest. Ahrefs computes Keyword Difficulty (KD) mainly from the number of referring domains pointing at the pages in the top 10, and other tools blend in further signals. A low KD therefore tells you the ranking pages carry few backlinks each. It says little about how strong the domains behind those pages are, how well they match intent, or whether anyone targets the query on purpose.
We tested this in our Keyword Difficulty validity study. Across 30 keywords and 241 ranking pages, KD tracked page-level referring domains closely (Spearman ρ = .91) and the Domain Rating of the sites that rank only loosely (ρ = .36). For 29 of the 30 keywords, the median DR of the top 10 sat between 72 and 94, whatever the KD. Four of the low-KD terms from that sample:
| Keyword | Ahrefs KD | Median DR of top 10 | Weakest page (DR) | Low competition? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| things to do in lisbon | 1 | 17 | 2 | Yes |
| fractional cfo | 6 | 78 | 43 | Barely |
| best protein powder | 12 | 94 | 85 | No |
| best mattress | 16 | 82 | 55 | No |
Ahrefs, US, top 10 organic results, pulled 2026-06-27.
“Best protein powder” is a low difficulty keyword and a fortress at the same time: the ranking pages have few links each, and every one of them sits on a DR 85+ domain. So use KD to thin the list, then read the SERP with your own eyes. The real signal for a low competition keyword is a top 10 you can plausibly out-write and out-structure today, whatever the dashboard number says. That manual read is the whole game, and it is what separates this from generic keyword research advice.
A keyword is only “low competition” relative to your site. KD 20 is a wall for a brand-new domain and a layup for one with a hundred referring domains. Always anchor difficulty to your own authority.
How to find low competition keywords in five steps
1. Generate seeds you have a right to win
Start where you have topical credibility. List your core services, the questions customers ask in sales calls, the things your support inbox repeats. Then expand mechanically:
- Google Autocomplete and People Also Ask: free, and they reflect real demand.
- Search Console: the highest-signal source you own. Pull queries where you sit at positions 8-25 with real impressions; these are pages Google already half-trusts you for.
- Competitor gap: pull the keywords your rivals rank for and you don’t. Mining competitor keywords surfaces low difficulty terms others rank for almost by accident and never optimized on purpose.
2. Filter the list with sane thresholds
Run the seeds through a tool (Ahrefs, Semrush, or even Keyword Planner) and filter hard:
| Signal | Low competition target | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword Difficulty | Below your authority threshold | Filters out backlink walls you can’t scale |
| Monthly volume | About 30-500 for niche sites | Enough to justify the page, small enough that big sites skip it |
| Referring domains to top pages | Often under 10-20 | If the leaders have few links, links aren’t the moat |
| Top-result page type | Forums, thin blogs, off-target pages | Beatable formats signal an open lane |
| Intent clarity | Specific, often long-tail | Specific intent ranks faster and converts better |
Export, deduplicate, and drop anything whose intent doesn’t match a page you would actually build.
3. Read the SERP manually
This step decides everything. Open the top 10 in an incognito, location-correct window and ask:
- Who’s ranking? Big brands, Wikipedia, Amazon and exact-match domains are a yellow flag. A row of mid-tier blogs and forum threads is a green light.
- How good is the content, really? Short, dated, off-intent pages are the opening. If the top result thoroughly answers the query and matches search intent, the keyword is hard, whatever KD says.
- What’s the intent? Confirm informational vs. commercial. A “best X” SERP full of affiliate roundups behaves very differently from a “how to X” SERP of tutorials.
- Is the SERP crowded by features? A featured snippet you can capture is opportunity. An AI Overview plus a local pack plus shopping results that push organic below the fold is a trap: the clicks are gone before they reach you.
4. Check who ranks and how many links they needed
Pull Domain Rating and referring domains for every page in the top 10, then find the weakest one. If a page ranks with single-digit referring domains on a domain close to your own DR, the barrier is content and relevance, and those you control. If nothing in the top 10 sits below roughly DR 40, the SERP is link-gated whatever its KD. In our 30-SERP sample, only 6 had even one top-10 page under DR 40. Park those as long-term link building plays and move on.
5. Mine local, niche, and seasonal modifiers
The cleanest low competition keywords hide in modifiers:
- Geographic: ”+ [city/neighborhood]” for local intent the national sites ignore.
- Long-tail specificity: “vegan waterproof hiking boots women size 7” in place of “hiking boots.”
- Seasonal or event windows: short-lived terms the slow incumbents never bother to target.
These often live in a micro niche where demand is real and no one with authority has shown up yet.
A low competition keywords list you can start from
People search for a ready-made list of low competition keywords. A published list stops being low competition once enough sites work through it (a list from 2023 has had three years of that), and difficulty only means something against your own domain, so a list built for someone else’s site will mislead you. What carries over is the pattern. These query shapes produce beatable SERPs more often than most:
| Pattern | Example | Why it tends to be open |
|---|---|---|
| Named entity + task | ”cancel [brand] contract”, “complaint to [store]“ | Thousands of small variants, too many for big sites to cover one by one |
| Problem + exact spec | ”vegan waterproof hiking boots women size 7” | Category pages don’t answer the specific need |
| Service + location | ”[service] in [neighborhood]“ | National sites ignore it |
| Two small players compared | ”[tool A] vs [tool B]“ | Big publishers only cover the market leaders |
| New or seasonal terms | A regulation, release or event from this year | Incumbents are slow to publish |
| Unglamorous topics | What a category is embarrassed to name | Serious competitors stay away |
| Your own near misses | Search Console queries at positions 8-25 | Google already half-trusts you there |
For worked examples with dated data, our Savage Keyword series takes one keyword per episode whose demand badly outruns its competition and tears down the pages that rank for it.
How to qualify a keyword before you commit
Volume and KD get a term onto the list. These checks decide whether it earns a page:
- Intent match: does the query map cleanly to a page you’d actually build, and to a conversion?
- Beatable top 10: can you out-cover and out-structure the current leaders today?
- Closeable link gap: would 1-5 contextual links plus a better page be enough to compete?
- Strategic fit: does it reinforce a cluster, or is it a one-off you’ll orphan?
- Click reality: after ads, AI Overviews and SERP features, how many organic clicks are left? In our search volume study, Ahrefs estimated that a median of 51% of searches across 30 keywords ended in a pure-organic click, and commercial terms kept as little as 35%. Size the opportunity as volume × organic click share × a realistic organic CTR for the position you can reach.
Score each on those, weight by what your business needs, and rank. A simple weighted model (intent, volume, top-page strength, link gap, commercial value) beats gut feel and survives a stakeholder argument. The output should be a short ranked list. A 4,000-row export nobody opens is a backlog of guesses.
How to rank for low competition keywords
Finding the keyword is half the job. The other half is shipping a page that deserves the spot:
- Match intent in the title and H1, naturally. Skip the exact phrase if it reads like a robot wrote it.
- Cover the topic completely: answer the subtopics in the top results and the People Also Ask, then add the angle they missed (original data, a template, a sharper opinion).
- Show real experience: a credited author, first-hand detail, original examples. Generic AI filler loses to a practitioner who has done the thing.
- Match the page type to the SERP. If the top 10 are tools or templates, build the tool or the template. When your product answers the query itself, the page should be the product, which is the idea behind product-led SEO.
- Internal-link from related pages so the new page inherits relevance and crawl priority; this is where topic clusters do the heavy lifting.
- Add 1-3 contextual links for quick wins, more for anything contested.
When the same pattern repeats across hundreds of entities, this loop becomes programmatic SEO: one template, one dataset, and a page per query that matches its intent.
Common mistakes that waste the sprint
- Trusting KD blind. KD counts the links behind the ranking pages. Read the SERP before you believe it.
- Ignoring intent. A low-KD term whose SERP is full of tools will never rank your blog post.
- Chasing zero-volume terms. A keyword nobody searches has no competition for a reason.
- Forgetting click loss. AI Overviews and rich features can eat the clicks before you ever rank. Put that in the estimate before you build.
- Targeting commercial intent you can’t fulfill. Match the page type to the money.
When low competition keywords become a business problem
Finding a handful of easy terms is a weekend job. If you run one site, have a few dozen pages to plan and can spare the time to read SERPs, the steps above are all you need.
It is worth paying for when the signs pile up: a year of posts aimed at low KD terms that still sit on page two, a keyword export with thousands of rows and no order, or traffic from easy terms that never turns into signups. Each one points to keywords chosen by a tool’s color code with no check against your own authority.
That check is the core of our fractional SEO service: the two founders build the shortlist against your domain, read the SERPs and ship the pages. On Prawomat, a young domain, that meant 1,125 long-tail pages and 4,863 search clicks a month by November 2025.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are low competition keywords?
Low competition keywords are searches where the pages currently ranking are beatable: low keyword difficulty, few referring domains, lower-authority domains, and thin or off-intent content in the top 10. They are relative to your own site’s authority, so a term that is easy for one domain is a wall for a brand-new one.
Is a low difficulty keyword the same as a low competition keyword?
Often it isn’t. A low difficulty score means the ranking pages have few backlinks each, while competition also depends on how strong the domains behind them are. In our 30-keyword audit, almost every low-KD term was still ranked by DR 72-94 sites. Check the DR of the weakest page in the top 10 before you trust the score.
What’s a good keyword difficulty score to target?
There’s no universal number. Difficulty is meaningful only against your own authority: a fresh site should target the lowest KD bands and verify the SERP manually, while an established domain can comfortably chase mid-range scores. Treat KD as a filter to thin the list, then confirm by reading the actual results.
How do I find low competition keywords for free?
Use Google Autocomplete, People Also Ask, and Google Trends to expand seeds, then pull your own Search Console for queries where you rank at positions 8-25 with real impressions. Keyword Planner gives rough volume. The decisive free step is reading the live SERP to judge whether the top pages are genuinely beatable.
Where can I get a list of low competition keywords?
Build your own. Published lists are generic, quickly targeted by everyone who reads them, and blind to your domain’s authority. Start from the query patterns above (named entity + task, exact specs, locations, small-player comparisons, new terms) and your own Search Console near misses, then run each candidate through the SERP check.
Are low competition keywords worth it after AI Overviews?
Yes, if you vet click loss. AI Overviews and SERP features can absorb clicks before they reach organic, so prioritize queries that still send meaningful traffic. Specific, intent-rich long-tail terms tend to keep their clicks better than broad informational ones. Where the AI Overview answers the query in full, being cited in it is the prize that remains, and that is a separate job (AI SEO).
How is keyword difficulty different from competition?
Keyword difficulty is a tool’s estimate of how hard ranking is, built mostly from the backlinks of the pages that already rank. “Competition” in Google Keyword Planner measures how many advertisers bid on a term, which says nothing about organic rankings. Neither captures content quality or intent match, so reading the live SERP is the only reliable test of how competitive a keyword really is.