How to Find Low Competition Keywords and Dominate SEO in Competitive Niches

Some websites have experienced massive SEO traffic growth in the world’s most competitive online niches. What’s their secret? They all use the exact same SEO strategy.

The Winning SEO Strategy

The process is straightforward:

1. Find low-competition keywords with business potential.
2. Rank for these keywords to build your site’s authority and revenue.
3. Use that authority and revenue to target more competitive keywords.
4. Rinse and repeat until your site is so authoritative that it can rank for nearly anything.

Sounds simple, right? But the biggest challenge is step one—finding low-competition keywords with high business potential.

The Golden Keyword Research Strategy

The solution lies in a unique approach to keyword research, which we’ll illustrate with four items: a notebook, a bag of seeds, a Connect Four game, and a toy rabbit. While these items may seem unrelated, they hold the key to an effective keyword research strategy.

1. The Notebook: Focus on Business-Relevant Keywords

Just like a company’s internal roadmap, your keyword strategy should be laser-focused on your product and business. This ensures that the traffic you attract aligns with your business goals.

2. The Bag of Seeds: Use Unique Seed Keywords

Most people use the same basic seed keywords when researching keywords, leading to oversaturation. Instead, you need to find unique seed keywords.

For example, in the credit card niche, generic seed keywords like “credit cards” or “best credit cards” will yield highly competitive results. However, by using a tool like ChatGPT to generate unique variations, you can uncover untapped keyword opportunities.

Here’s a quick method:

• Ask ChatGPT: “Give me 20 words or phrases related to credit cards.”
• Use these unique seed keywords in a keyword research tool.
• Apply filters to find low-competition keywords with business potential.

3. The Connect Four Game: Identify Keyword Patterns

SEO is about recognizing patterns. When you analyze keyword reports, look for trends. For example, in the personal finance niche, we discovered a pattern where keywords related to specific credit scores (e.g., “650 credit score mortgage”) had lower competition.

To capitalize on this:

• Search for a common phrase like “credit score.”
• Use wildcard filters to find variations (e.g., “*0, *5” to find scores ending in 0 or 5).
• Identify clusters of low-competition keywords and create content around them.

4. The Toy Rabbit: Follow the Rabbit Hole to Discover More Keywords

Once you’ve identified initial low-competition keywords, the next step is to analyze competitors who are ranking for them. Use Ahrefs’ “Traffic Share by Domains” report to find sites benefiting from these keywords.

• Export the list of competitors and analyze their authority levels.
• Identify low-authority sites with high traffic.
• Use Ahrefs’ “Top Pages” report to find their highest-traffic pages and extract additional keyword opportunities.

If you exhaust your keyword list, go back and play “Connect Four” again—find new patterns and dig deeper into competitor research.

Turning Keywords Into SEO Success

Once you’ve gathered your low-competition keywords:

1. Create high-quality, optimized content targeting these keywords.
2. Build internal links and earn backlinks to strengthen your site’s authority.
3. Repeat the process, scaling up to more competitive keywords over time.

Eventually, your site will be powerful enough to rank for nearly any keyword. And when that day comes, kick back and enjoy the fruits of your SEO labor—just like the guy lying on the grass.

By following this keyword research strategy, you can gain an edge in even the most competitive online niches. Now, it’s time to start digging into your keyword opportunities and take action!