Find Low-Competition Keywords: A Quick Workflow

Finding Low Competition Keywords from Your Competitor

When you’re first looking for new quick wins a great place to start is with competitor research.

Choose one of your competitor’s sites, look into their organic keywords, and then apply the filter to find the topics they cover on their site that you could pick-pocket away from them.

Here’s how it looks querying a competitor’s site into Organic Research.

Screenshot from Semrush Organic Research, August 2021

This gives you the top-level look at how much organic traffic and visibility the site is getting from its keyword rankings.

Then, go to the Positions report to look at the complete list. From here you can find the KD% filter and choose your desired range.

Screenshot of Semrush Organic Research, August 2021

Now you’ll see the top keywords from your competitor’s site that could be targeted and acquired by your site most easily.

This is where you should scroll through and pick out any keywords that sound like something you could cover on your website.

If you see something in this list you like, you can click on a keyword in the column and dive deeper into it through Semrush’s keyword research tools.

Clicking on any of these keywords will open up a Keyword Overview and show you more about this search term’s qualities.

Screenshot of Semrush Keyword Overview, August 2021

You’ll see the global volume distribution, CPC. and top variations, questions, and related keywords.

If you click on any of those Keyword Variations or Questions blocks, it will open the Keyword Magic Tool.

This is where you can expand on a specific topic, such as “viola strings” and identify all of the subtopics that are also getting search volume and have low keyword difficulty.

Screenshot of Semrush Keyword Magic Tool, August 2021

You can then keep track of your research using this process by either exporting keywords to a spreadsheet from the Export button, or sending them into Semrush’s on-site solution which is called Keyword Manager.

Keyword Manager is a place to save your lists of keywords so you can keep track of everything you’ve discovered in one place.

There’s even an “Update metrics”  button that can refresh the data about the SERP to give you the most recent info possible.

By the end of this workflow, you should have a great list of keywords and topics that you can build content around on your website.

For any question keywords, consider a blog post, FAQ, video, or any combination of those elements.

Summary

To recap the process:

• Look into a competitor’s organic rankings.
• Filter by KD% and find low-competition topics.
• Dive deeper into each topic with the Keyword Magic Tool for subtopics.
• Save your low-competition keyword research into the Keyword Manager or an external file.
• Start building your content!