How to Find Profitable Keywords with High Traffic & Low Competition

When we first started blogging in the SEO niche, we weren’t sure if we could compete with the larger blogs that dominated the niche, but after implementing proper keyword research, we were able to obtain a decent amount of pageviews and make money just fine.

Arguably, the most important part of SEO is being able to find profitable keywords with high traffic and low competition. If you only get part of the formula correct, you may not have success. For example, if you find keywords that are high in traffic but that aren’t low in competition, you are going to have a difficult time ranking with a low authority website against all of the high competition. Thus, it is important to keep in mind that there is more to keyword research than just selecting keywords with the highest search volume.

Below, we outline how to find profitable keywords with low competition:

Step 1: Choose a Niche (If You Haven’t Already)

If you don’t already have a niche selected, it is important that you select one before starting your keyword research. There a quite a few reasons for why, including:

• You can become an authority: It is much more difficult to make your blog an authority if you blog about a bunch of different topics. On the other hand, if you niche down your blog, over time you can become a go-to resource in that niche.
• Contextual relevance: When you consistently publish content on the same topic, you earn backlinks related to that niche and build contextual relevance, which helps your rankings in that niche.
• You can offer specialized products and services: If you run a general blog, it becomes difficult to sell specific items since only parts of your audience will related to each specific item. For example, we are able to offer specific products and services related to the SEO community because that is most of our audience.
• You can create a community: When your audience is comprised of people with similar interests, you can create a community around that interest, via a Facebook Group or another platform, which you can then utilize to build deeper relationships and to sell your products.

Step 2: Choose Some Monetization Methods (If You Haven’t Already)

The profitability of a keyword will vary depending on your monetization methods. For example, if your primary goal is to make money from software subscriptions, you may want to target keywords where the searcher likely needs a software similar to yours. If you are looking to sell Amazon affiliate products, we recommend that you look for keywords that are related to product reviews, product alternatives, product categories, or product comparisons.

Considerations When Choosing Amazon Associates as a Monetization Method

While Amazon products will have a high conversion rate primarily due to the trust of Amazon, you should consider that many other people will choose to use Amazon Associates for this same reason. Therefore, there will be many people out there promoting the same items as you, which also means that many people will be targeting the same keywords as you. In addition, when compared to many other affiliate offers, Amazon Associates payouts are generally pretty low.

In general, the most profitable products are ones that you make yourself (or have somewhat exclusive access to), or those that are underutilized. For example, we have a rank and rent SEO course and local SEO keyword tools. While the low competition keyword “rank and rent” may not be seen as very profitable to people that don’t have these kinds of products, it is profitable for us due to our exclusive offerings.

Step 3: Analyze a Low Authority Blog

This is one of the simplest ways to find low competition keywords that you can rank. Start by finding some blogs in your niche that have an overall low authority. You can check the authority by plugging the sites into various third party tools that offer free searches like Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, and SEMrush. We recommend cross referencing all of these tools because at the end of the day there is no set formula to calculate authority and each tool estimates how powerful a particular domain is in their own way. When viewed together, you will get a clearer picture of how powerful a website really is. Our general guideline is that the competitor’s domain should have a domain authority of less than 20, a trust flow of less than 20, and a DR of less than 6.

Once you have the average of all of these sites and have determined who is a low authority, we recommend that you also use the tools we mentioned above to check which keywords your competitor currently ranks for. You can also get an estimated keyword difficulty score for each keyword, giving you an idea of how competitive a particular keyword is.

Step 4: Check for Volume

While low competition keywords tend to have lower search volumes, ranking enough of them can really get you a lot of traffic. Keep in mind that you can easily rank for low competition variations of a primary keyword with the same page. Our recommendation is to find multiple keywords within the same topic on SEMrush that add up to a sum of at least 400+ searches per month. Ideally, you will want to cross check this volume data with at least one other tool. We suggest using Ubersuggest for this purpose and/or Ahrefs.

Here is an example:

We choose to write an article on the keyword topic of “rank and rent”. While this individual keyword doesn’t have a search volume of at least 400 searches per month, within that topic was the keyword “local lead generation” and other related terms that added up to at least 400 monthly searches.

Even if the seed keyword you were targeting is competitive, targeting multiple keywords with one page gives you a higher chance of at least ranking for some of your keywords. In our example, we ended up ranking higher for the lower competition keyword “rank and rent”, than we did for “local lead generation”.

Step 5: Check the Searcher’s Intent

While there is no sure fire way to determine a keyword’s profitability, and it will vary depending on your monetization methods, you can come to an estimation by looking at a keyword’s cost per click (CPC) and by putting yourself in the mind of the searcher.

CPC

CPC is basically the market rate for a click with Google Ads. If the CPC for a keyword is high, it probably means that advertisers are making money off of it. It is also good news because you can probably get higher RPMs (average payout per 1,000 ad views) with ad networks like Google AdSense for these types of keywords. That being said, just because a particular keyword’s CPC is low does not mean that it’s not profitable. We like to use this number as a general guide rather than as a hard rule.

Putting Yourself in the Mind of the Searcher

This is probably the best way to determine profitability. When people type in a search term, they are pretty much telling you what they are looking for. For example, if someone searches “buy blue shoes online”, they probably have a high intent to buy blue shoes online. If your monetization methods closely match the searcher’s intent for a particular keyword topic, then that topic is probably a good one to target.

Step 6: Check On-Page Difficulty and the Content Quality of Your Competitors

Once you have found a low authority domain and found which of their keywords you would like to target, it is time to check the on-page difficulty of those keywords. You can check this by searching the keyword you are looking to rank for in Google and analyzing the top search results for content quality, relevancy, and depth.

Here are some tactics you can use to determine the 3 factors mentioned above:

Check for Forums

When Google can’t find good content to rank for a particular topic, it may resort to ranking forum pages for some keywords. These pages generally rank based off of their high domain authority rather than their content quality. Therefore, outdoing their content quality is usually easy.

Check for Title Matches

The two main methods you can use to gauge how relevant the search results on the first page of Google are include: checking manually and searching for “allintitle:your keyword” in Google.

Checking Manually

To manually check the search results (our preferred method), all you need to do is search your main keyword in Google and see how many webpages on the first page are targeting exactly the same topic you’re thinking about writing about. If you find lots of content on the first page that is not specific to the keyword you are looking to rank, this is a great sign that this keyword can be easily ranked! This is because when Google does not have a good quality page that specifically addresses the keyword to put on the first page, they usually put something that is only partially related. For example, if the main keyword you are trying to rank for is: “best sleeping bag for backpacking”, if you see that most of the articles on the first page have just “best sleeping bags” in the title tag, you have a ranking advantage if you make a more targeted article.

Searching for “Allintitle:Your Keyword” in Google

When you search this, you will be provided with all of the search results that have that particular keyword in the title tag. If there are less than 60 or so results, that keyword is likely a low competition keyword. If you choose to use this tactic, be sure to do the following when doing this check:

• Remove any filler words out of the keyword like: a, and, etc
• Check the all in title results for various LSI variations of your keyword to make sure those results are relatively low also. The “allintitle” method will not be able to recognize and properly adjust the results to reflect related keywords that Google considers essentially interchangeable. For example, “top cat food” and “best cat food” are basically the same keyword/topic in Google’s eyes.

Step 7: Check Off-Page Difficulty

To check off-page difficulty we recommend looking at the competition scores provided SEMrush and/or Ahrefs. These tools focus mostly on backlinks and domain strength, so they can give you a good general idea of the off-page difficulty. You can also gauge the off-page difficulty by manually searching your keywords in Google with a Chrome extension like Mozbar. This will provide you approximate authority scores on the pages and domains that come up for your keyword. If there are not that many high authority domains on the first page, and it passes the on-page difficulty test we recommended in the previous step, this is likely a low competition keyword!

How to Find Profitable Keywords with High Traffic & Low Competition Conclusion

Even though keyword research can be sort of confusing at first, it is relatively easy if you follow the recommendations in this article.