Organic traffic is the holy grail of conversion in the year 2024. Today, it is nearly impossible to convert leads without obtaining them naturally.
The most effective source of organic traffic is SEO. It allows you to appeal to your prospects in the most non-invasive way. The trick is, however, to get through the competition. SEO is so popular a strategy all marketers use it! Therefore, to stand out you need to seek alternative options.
Today, one of the most effective methods of getting more traffic through SEO is ranking for low competition keywords.
Benefits of Ranking for Low Competition Keywords
There’s a lot of debate surrounding the subject of using low competition keywords to gain more traffic. Some marketers claim that it is an ineffective strategy as it has been overused: too many good low competition keywords have been converted into high volume ones once the marketers started searching for opportunity gaps in SEO.
However, this claim is wrong in the very root of it. Regardless of how specific your niche is, there will always be new low competition keywords that you can use to your advantage and generate more organic traffic. The reason for this is the fact that keywords are not static but rather dynamic as they change over time. Socio-cultural events have a lot of effect on the ranking of keywords, which means you can always hunt down a couple of ones that are still at the early stages of their life cycle.
Combined with the other benefits of ranking for low competition keywords, you get an effective SEO strategy! Here are just a few of the most prominent advantages of doing that:
- Ranking for low competition keywords helps to attract more high-quality leads. Whenever you go for low competition keywords, you are choosing more niche-specific keywords to optimise your content as opposed to using more generic ones. This implies that you are targeting a specific audience that will find the content you share on the pages of your optimised platform more relevant. This is the bedrock of organic traffic as you will not only raise the visibility levels of your pages but also improve other metrics such as the click-through-rate, the time spent browsing your website, etc. On top of that, using low volume keywords will drastically decrease the bounce rate.
- Ranking for low competition keywords boosts conversion levels. This benefit stems from the previous fact. Long-tail keywords (usually, the ones that have the lowest volume because of how specific they are) are way more relevant to your target audience tas they are specific to their particular searches. Therefore, you can expect higher conversion rates as you provide your target audience with exactly what they are looking for.
Recent research conducted by WordStream has found that the top 10% of landing pages convert at just 11.45%. At the same time, the average conversion rate for long-tail keywords is almost triple that figure, a whopping 36%!
- It helps you to build interest around a new niche. If you are a startup business or merely a business that does not have a huge market to attend to, you can use low competition keywords to adjust the market to your needs and build customer interest around your niche. In fact, you can even make the specific keyword intrinsic to your brand and subsequently use it as a competitive advantage as it will contribute toward raising brand awareness in the future.
- The diversity of all the different low competition keywords that you can rank for creates a higher cumulative traffic figure. Whenever you are trying to rank for high volume high competition keywords, you are putting all the effort into that. However, when you are going for less populated keywords, you can afford using several long-tail keywords at a time. Chances are, you will rank high for the majority of them (granted that your content is relevant to the keywords chosen), and the cumulative traffic for all the keywords used will be higher than for singular high competition keywords.
- It has a high ROI. As targeting low volume keywords provides less competition in the SERPs, you get more organic traffic by investing less in the process of optimizing your content.
Reasons to Avoid Keywords with High Volume
At the same time, it is important to cover the topic of high volume keywords to make a point of their redundancy for small businesses that are only entering the market (and even larger businesses that want to cut down on the marketing costs).
Here are the key reasons to avoid keywords with high volume:
- High volume keywords are extremely expensive. Ranking for the broad keywords with the highest volume can be a very expensive pleasure. In fact, the top 10 most competitive keywords start at $50 per click. However, no matter how crazy it is, it isn’t just the costs associated with the clicks. On top of that, we can also add costs associated with the efforts put into identifying the top-ranking words and optimizing your content to fit those.
- They have a high bounce rate. Too often, high volume keywords are the most generic ones. This means you are not targeting your audience well but rather try to appeal to a broad selection of different users. Unless you are offering an extremely diverse and mainstream product or service, you are not going to please everyone who clicks on the link in the SERP. Therefore, the bounce rate will go up and level all of your previous SEO efforts.
- A higher likelihood of low conversion rate. Again, because you are not targeting a specific audience with your keywords, you are going to kill your conversion. While it might not seem like a problem too big at first, you will soon realize that it has a hugely adverse effect on your analytics. You cannot tell whether your strategy doesn’t work or if you’re just not targeting the right prospects to turn them into qualified leads.
How to Find Low Competition Keywords
Now that you have a basic understanding of why it might be a better strategy to focus on targeting low-volume keywords as opposed to trying to get ahold of the most competitive ones, it is time to find out how to find the best low competition keywords.
While you can try to brainstorm for ideas with your marketing team, it is likely that you will only scratch the surface with your shared efforts. Even if one of your collaborators has a very unconventional approach to searching stuff online and can come up with a keyword that is not generic and overused yet still popular, the chances of them grasping all of those keywords are very slim.
The best way of finding low competition keywords is by using the appropriate software. Fortunately for all marketers out there, there are currently a lot of advanced yet easy-to-navigate tools available on the market. Those are aimed at making your keyword searching process significantly more effective and time-efficient.
Below, we have compiled a list of the best-performing tools for keyword hunting.
Ubersuggest
Remember this: stealing is bad! You can face serious legal consequences for stealing your competitors’ content. However, borrowing is not! It turns out, you can easily intercept your competitors’ best-performing keywords and inhabit the pages returned for them with the content from your platform.
Ubersuggest is one of the best tools available on the market for that. It can effectively help you to reverse engineer not only your competitors’ SEO, but also their content marketing, and social media marketing strategies.
There’s also a dedicated tab for top SEO pages that allows you to determine which of your competitor’s pages get ranked for popular organic keyword phrases and which ones are more likely to get the most of its traffic from social media platforms, e.g. Facebook.
Most importantly, Ubersuggest also is there to suggest the best-suited keywords (both generic and specific long-tail ones) for your business/your industry, as well as show you their volume, the competition, and even seasonal trends keyword by keyword.
Prices for Ubersuggest start at $29 USD/month.
Ahrefs
Another highly useful tool for finding low competition keywords to rank for on search engine results pages is Ahrefs. It is by far one of the most well-known software for keyword hunting. The popularity of this tool implies that it is well-liked and, therefore, effective!
The data obtained from the tool is highly reliable as Ahrefs uses the existing keyword volume data from Google Keyword Planner and subsequently combines it with clickstream data to create a detailed model of accurate search volumes for almost any keyword.
On top of that, Ahrefs also provides a ‘Clicks’ feature that uses clickstream data to determine the CTR curve for every individual keyword and, therefore, give the marketers using this software a clear understanding of whether the keyword they are intending to use is going to have a high CTR or not.
Prices for Ahrefs start at $99 USD/month.
Search Console
Search Console is the most organic tool for analyzing keywords and searching for the best low competition ones as the data comes directly from Google. Search Console is a web service developed by Google that allows marketers to check the indexing status of their websites and optimize the visibility of pages accordingly.
The tool helps you to analyze the keywords you use for optimization of your website and see how each individual keyword performs.
The best thing about the Search Console is that it is absolutely free!
Moz
Moz is an interesting SEO tool that works a little bit different from the other tools mentioned in this list. Unlike the rest of the apps and extensions, Moz does not simply show you the keywords you’d benefit most from using or analyses the volume of each manually entered keyword. Instead, the tool automatically examines your website to help you discover and prioritize the best keywords to target.
However, if you don’t feel like delegating the whole process to the machine, you can receive a report on a specific keyword, too! Besides, the app will help you to find alternative keywords and receive accurate (over 95% accuracy) suggestions within the preferred keyword volume range.
You can try the tool out for free during the 30-day free trial period, and then, if you like it, it costs $149 per month.
Long Tail Pro
Long Tail Pro is the tool that was designed specifically for those businesses embracing a low volume keyword ranking strategy. From the very name of it you can understand that it works best for finding long-tail keywords.
It’s extremely easy to navigate: all you need to do is enter your keyword and get all the alternative keyword suggestions that you can run through the keyword and competitor analysis based on 13 different metrics. At the end of your monitoring session, you will be able to tell keyword profitability with rank value.
On top of that, there are also different settings for all the research tools within Long Tail Pro: you can customize your software to fit your specific needs.
Prices for Long Tail Pro start at $25 / month.
KWFinder
KWFinder is one of the best traditional keyword researching tools as it combines features of both traditional and competitive keyword ranking. It helps you to find the words that would help you rank higher in your niche without much effort and for the lowest price possible. The tool genuinely cares about your business success with all the features it offers!
Prices for KWFinder start at $29/month.
Link Building Strategy to Boost Your Ranking
The keywords you use are not the only way to get ranked higher in SERPs. The most important factor that affects your positioning in the search engine results is the number of backlinks you get. These help the crawlers determine how relevant, high-quality and overall good the content on your pages is and push you up the search results page.
The best way to boost your ranking is to increase the number of high-quality links linked to your targeted keywords. That way you will kill two birds with one stone and not only rank higher because of the keyword itself but also prove the relevancy of the keyword to the contents of the page you’re seeking to optimize.
Conclusion
Overall, SEO is a laborious and time-consuming process. However, also a very rewarding one, If you adequately assess your needs and approach the optimization process wisely, you will be able to get a lot of traffic without investing too much money into it. One of the best ways to rank higher is targeting low competition keywords. Especially since you can easily do so with the use of modern highly functioning tools.
