What "competition" actually means (most articles skip this)

Almost every beginner guide on keyword research tells you to "target long-tail, low-competition phrases." Very few explain what competition actually is, which makes the advice nearly useless. If you are new to this, a grounding in SEO Basics will make everything below click faster.

Competition, in the context of search rankings, is not about how many websites exist on a topic. It is about how many other websites have links pointing to the pages that are already ranking for that phrase. Backlinks are a strong signal Google uses to decide which pages deserve to be at the top. A page with a hundred quality backlinks from respected sites is much harder to outrank than a page with three.

The practical consequence of this: ten times the backlinks makes a keyword roughly 18 points harder to beat. That is the whole reason keyword difficulty scores exist. They are not measuring how popular a topic is. They are measuring the link firepower of the pages you would need to displace.

When you own a new or small site, you have almost no backlinks. That means you need to find phrases where the pages currently ranking also have almost no backlinks. Those exist. They are just not the phrases you would guess first.

Why broad, commercial phrases are almost always too competitive

Think about a phrase like "how much does SEO cost." That question has been asked for fifteen years. Every major marketing agency, every SEO tool company, and hundreds of established blogs have written about it. Those pages have accumulated links for years. You are not walking into an empty room; you are walking into a room that has been fully furnished by people with much bigger budgets than yours.

The pattern holds across almost every niche. Broad, commercially valuable phrases attract investment. That investment builds up over years into a wall of links you cannot easily get through just by writing a good article. This is also why building your site around well-structured content pillars matters: it keeps you organised around topics you can realistically compete on, rather than scattering effort across phrases that are already taken.

The phrases that remain genuinely open are almost always narrow and problem-shaped. When we tested about twenty keyword ideas for ScribeGap this week, the competitive ones were generic and commercial. The ones that were actually winnable were hyper-specific, like "why are my pins not showing up on Pinterest" rather than "Pinterest marketing." The first phrase describes a very specific problem someone is having right now. The second describes a topic that thousands of well-funded accounts have written about exhaustively.

Specific problems tend to have thinner competition because they are less glamorous to write about, harder to predict in advance, and rarely attract backlink campaigns. That asymmetry is the whole reason specific, problem-shaped keywords exist as a strategy for smaller sites.

How to find low competition keywords in practice

You do not need to master an SEO tool to do this. The process has a few repeatable steps, and the instinct develops quickly once you understand what you are looking for.

Start with a specific problem, not a topic

Your readers do not search for topics. They search for problems. Instead of brainstorming "keywords about X," brainstorm every frustration, question, or stuck moment someone in your niche might have. Write these down as full sentences, the way a real person would type them into a search bar. A more structured approach to this is covered in the guide on finding blog post ideas people are already searching for.

"Why is my sourdough starter not bubbling" beats "sourdough starter" by a wide margin in terms of winnability. "How to write a product description when you hate writing" beats "product descriptions." The more precisely the phrase mirrors an actual problem, the better your chances.

Check what is already ranking for that phrase

Before writing anything, search for the phrase yourself. Look at the pages that come up on the first page. Ask two questions: are these massive, well-known sites, and do the articles look like they were built specifically for this phrase or do they just happen to mention it?

If the top results are from Reddit, Quora, small niche blogs, or forum threads, that is a meaningful signal. It means Google has not found a truly authoritative page on this topic yet, which gives you an opening. If the top results are from major publications with millions of visitors, move on.

Look at the phrase length and specificity

Longer, more specific phrases tend to have lower competition for a structural reason: fewer people search for them, so fewer people have bothered to target them. "Dog training" has been targeted by thousands of sites. "How to stop a rescue dog from guarding the food bowl" has been targeted by almost no one. The search volume on the second phrase is obviously smaller, but the competition is often near zero, and the person searching it is exactly the reader you want.

You are trading volume for winnability. For a small site, that is almost always the right trade.

Use autocomplete and related searches honestly

Google's autocomplete and the "related searches" section at the bottom of a results page surface real queries that real people have typed. These are genuinely useful for discovering problem-shaped phrases you would not have thought of. Type your broad topic into the search bar and pay attention to the suggestions. Note the ones that feel specific and answer-able. Those are candidate keywords.

This costs nothing and takes ten minutes. It is also how you build a list of dozens of potential targets rather than three.

Be honest about your niche: some markets are genuinely locked

Not every niche has low-competition keywords left. Finance, insurance, weight loss, and general marketing have been intensely competitive for years. In those spaces, every specific phrase that gets any meaningful search volume has already been claimed by sites with enormous domain authority and serious link profiles. If you have been publishing for a while and nothing is moving, it may be worth reading about why your blog still isn't getting traffic before concluding the problem is your writing.

If you are in one of these niches, this is not a failure of your research method. It is a fact about the market. The honest options are: go narrower than you think is reasonable (a blog specifically about budgeting for single parents in their thirties, rather than "personal finance"), build content that targets zero-search-volume phrases where you are simply the only resource, or accept that search traffic will be a slow burn and invest in other channels alongside it.

Pretending otherwise does not help you. Some rooms really are full.

What makes a keyword worth targeting, beyond competition

Low competition alone is not enough. The phrase also needs to attract the right person at the right moment. A keyword with zero competition but no connection to what your site actually does is just a traffic number with no value attached.

Ask yourself: if someone searches this phrase and lands on my page, do they need what I offer? For a blog, the test is simpler: can I write something genuinely useful on this topic, or would I just be guessing? If the answer to either question is no, the keyword is not worth your time regardless of how easy it looks to rank for. There is a fuller explanation of what actually moves the needle in the guide on getting your blog onto the first page of Google.

The best low-competition keyword is one where you have real knowledge, the searcher has a real problem, and the pages currently ranking are thin or off-target. All three together is a green light.

A realistic approach for site owners who are not SEO experts

The practical workflow is not complicated. Write down twenty to thirty specific problems your audience has. Search each one. Check what is ranking. Notice whether the ranking pages are from giant sites or from smaller ones. Prioritize the phrases where smaller pages are ranking, especially if those pages do not answer the question particularly well. Write a better, more specific answer than what is already there.

Do not obsess over difficulty scores if you do not have access to an SEO tool. The manual check, searching for the phrase yourself and looking at what comes up, tells you most of what you need to know. You can read a room.

Repeat this consistently. If you are wondering about how many posts you actually need to start seeing traffic, the honest answer is that ten well-chosen, specific, low-competition articles will outperform one ambitious piece targeting a phrase you have no chance of ranking for. Volume without strategy is just a backlog.

If you want a faster starting point, ScribeGap checks whether a topic has real search demand before you write, drafts the article in your own voice, and then produces the social posts, video scripts, and images that go with it. No SEO knowledge required. You can see how it works at scribegap.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if a keyword is low competition without a paid tool?

Search the phrase yourself and look at the first page of results. If you see forum threads, small blogs, or pages that only mention your phrase in passing rather than answering it directly, competition is likely low. Large media sites and well-known brands dominating the first page are a sign to move on.

Do low competition keywords get enough searches to be worth it?

Often, yes, though not always in the numbers you might hope for. A specific phrase might only attract a few hundred searches a month, but those searchers are looking for exactly what you offer. Ranking for twenty such phrases adds up faster than you might expect, and it is far more achievable than ranking for one competitive phrase with huge volume.

Should I only ever target low competition keywords?

Not necessarily. As your site grows and earns more links over time, you can reasonably target more competitive phrases. Low competition keywords are a starting point, not a permanent ceiling. They give you a foothold, build your site's track record with Google, and bring in readers who can become regular visitors or customers.