If you’re entering a new market or starting a new website, you’re going to need to find as much low-hanging fruit for your SEO strategy as possible. Don’t even think about competing with an already established website or business for keywords; it will just be a waste of time. Instead, you can focus your attention on keywords that might not be popular but still packs a punch by driving some traffic to your site. 

In terms of SEO, the low-hanging fruit is low competition with high traffic queries. This sweet spot is where you find your best opportunities to start getting organic search traffic to your site. There are many ways to discover profitable low-hanging keywords to boost your site’s traffic, but we are going to focus on one today. Semrush.

Semrush can be utilized as a low competition keyword tool in just three straightforward steps — even if you’ve never used Semrush before, this process can be done in a matter of minutes.

Follow the instructions below.

Step 1. Build Your Initial Keyword List

Start with: Organic Research Positions.

Here you have to:

Go to Semrush Organic Research

Enter a competitor’s domain name and click search

You will get a list of keywords your competitor’s website ranks for in Google’s top 100 organic search results. From here, you can dig into their performance and see the keywords that are producing more traffic from search engines.

Take note of the KD% (keyword difficulty) column. This is Semrush’s way of measuring the problem of competing for this keyword if you’re starting from scratch. We’ll shed more light about KD% below in this post.

You can also use filters to discover more distinct search terms that are more relevant to your business. You can also add extra filters for KD%, the number of words per phrase (for example, keywords containing four words or more), and volume to find low competition, long-tail keywords that you can add to your list.

Repeat this process for multiple competitors and assign the keywords you like into the Keyword Manager, where you can store a master list of up to 1000 keywords.

Then you can also use Keyword Gap, a tool to compare keywords between domains to find more long-tail searches.

Enter your site and up to four of your competitors into the input fields and hit the compare button

Tip: If you don’t know five domains that are in your website’s industry, you can use the Competitors report tab in Organic Research.

Now export the keywords you want from this report to the Keyword Manager to connect the list with your other exports so you can keep a master list going.

Use the weak, missing, and untapped filters to find the best opportunities for your site.

The next step will help you find even more keyword ideas to add here.

Step 2. Expand Your Keyword List

Report to use: Keyword Magic Tool

Now it’s time to grow your low competition high traffic keyword list with more phrases you might have missed.

To find phrase match keywords, Go to the Keyword Magic Tool and enter a term from your initial list of search terms or anything that pops into your mind, and click search. 

You will get a list of extended keyword phrases that include your queried term.

Next, use the Related filter to find related keywords.

This will list phrases semantically linked to a particular search term that may not share the same phrasing but have similar search results. You’ll want to add some of these to your plan to cover all bases.

To find question keywords (which make for excellent content topics), use the Questions filter close the “All” tab. This will display only keyword phrases that include who, what, where, when, why, can, or how.

If you look at this list of keywords you typed in— you will notice the KD% (Keyword difficulty) is still pretty high. You would want to avoid KD difficulty of 70% and above, but more on this in step 3.

Again, send your desired keywords to the list in Keyword Manager with all the other keywords you would like to target. And choose the ones you feel are best.

Step 3. Filter for High-Volume Keywords With Less Competition

The average monthly search volume for every keyword shows you how much potential traffic you can receive. The higher your rankings for high-volume search terms are, the more traffic will be driven to your website.

Since competition for the most attractive keywords is very high, there’s no sense trying to rank for keywords you have no chance with. Instead, you need to find that equilibrium between a keyword’s search volume and its competition level.

To assist you with this step, Semrush has two main ways of filtering out high competition keywords:

Keyword Difficulty — an estimate of how difficult it would be to organically (using SEO) outrank the current websites and webpages ranking in the top spots on Google for a particular keyword.

Competition Level — the quantity of paid advertisers using a particular search phrase for their ads(PPC campaigns). Although this metric refers to competition in paid search, it can slightly represent organic search competition.

In all of Semrush’s keyword research reports, as well as the Keyword Manager, you should be able to find a column for these two metrics. Both metrics will help you find the best keywords to start targeting to find success.

Estimating Keyword Difficulty

The keyword difficulty (from 1-100%) gives you an estimate of how difficult it would be to grab your competitors’ positions in the Google top 100 with a particular keyword.

The higher the percentage, the more effort you’ll need to outrank your competition for targeted keywords:

Above 80%: The most difficult keywords. You’ll have to invest a lot of SEO and link-building efforts, as well as time before you will be able to enter the Google top 20. If you have a new site, concentrating on highly competitive keywords might not be a sensible idea.

From 60-79%: Keywords with average difficulty. Entering the Google top 20 with these keywords won’t be easy either. However, with high-quality content and proper backlinks, you might be able to take your competitors’ positions in time.

From 40-59%: Keywords that are possible to rank for when you are starting.

Below 40%: Keywords that are the easiest to rank for, likely with low search volume or highly specific search intent.

Discovering low-competition, high-volume keywords will need hard work and patience. But if you are lucky enough to have a strong list of these search terms and execute them throughout your site, you’ll have a very good chance of ranking high for these high-volume search terms.

Estimating Competition Level

For estimating Competition Level, we can expect the scale to be roughly the same. The main difference here is that the metric is a decimal between 0 and 1 and that it measures the density of paid advertisers.

The closer the score is to 1, the higher the number of advertisers currently bidding on this keyword. Naturally, therefore, the harder it would be to stand out in the search results.

Above 0.80: These keywords are highly competitive among advertisers and therefore likely send traffic to paid results. Thus, you could conclude that if a keyword has a high density of advertisers, the search has some intent on making a transaction.

From 0.60-0.80: Keywords with an average density of advertisers. You can experiment with advertising on these keywords if your organic efforts don’t work out, but it won’t be a quick win on any of these keywords, either.

Below 0.60: Keywords with the lowest density of advertisers. This could either mean that they are below the radar of most competitors that advertise in your niche, or they are not profitable to advertise on. Keep this in mind when dedicating.

Again, you can refer to the suggested ranges above, but the best opportunities to start with are keywords with KD% less than 60. Next, start scanning for keywords in the 50s, 40s, or below that are important to you, and then build up from there.

Measure Difficulty With the Keyword Overview Report

Another clever way to judge the competition for keywords in bulk is with the Semrush Keyword Overview. You can enter a list of up to 100 keywords from this tool’s main page.

Perhaps you have a list of keyword targets or a list of keywords your site already ranks for exported from Google Search Console. You can drop that list in here and instantly see how Semrush rates the difficulty of each keyword.

From the Keyword Overview homepage, you can view the keyword difficulty of up to 100 keywords at once. Enter one search term per line, choose your regional database, and click the Analyze button.

The report will give you the KD scores and other metrics like volume and CPC of your unique batch of keywords.

Bonus Tip: Spot Featured Snippet Opportunities

While you are in the Bulk Keyword Analysis, you can also view which keywords trigger SERP Features like Featured Snippets or Instant Answers.

Featured Snippets are those pop-up answers at the top of the search results page that gives searchers an answer before having to even click on a result. These are huge for SEO, and you should record each keyword in your plan that has a Featured Snippet. Then, if you prepare your content in the right way, you might be able to take over the Featured Snippet with your link.

A low-difficulty keyword with a Featured Snippet on the SERP would be a great opportunity because you could take up more space at the top of the SERP, give your audience information quicker, and look trustworthy.

Recap

With Semrush, you can easily find long-hanging keywords and specific questions people search for online that will be easier to rank for with metrics such as keyword difficulty, competitive density, and volume.

Learning how to do keyword research is crucial for businesses. However, to do it well, you need to be mindful when choosing your targets. Always remember that the principal reason for conducting keyword research isn’t to manipulate search engines into ranking your web page. Instead, you want to understand what your target audience is searching for, what questions keep them up at night, and what they think when using Google search.

Originally posted 2021-11-16 18:44:08.