How do you find "Low Competition - High Volume Keywords"?

Hi Jeremy,

Here are the steps that I use to discover keywords like these: -

1) Go to the Google Keyword Tool

2) Enter your keyword / niche term e.g. dog training, golden retriever dog training etc.

3) Set the Match Types setting to "Exact"

4) Download the results to an excel spreadsheet, and filter out the keywords that have below 880 searches per month. We are interested with keywords that have high search volumes although sometimes you may need to go lower, depending on your niche.

5) Using this filtered keyword list, go to Google and type in each keyword into Google Search with "" e.g. "golden retriever dog training"

6) Choose the keywords between 50k - 100k competing pages. This is my personal choice and it might not suit your niche.

I hope these brief steps will help you get started in finding those keywords.

Alternatively, if you have the budget you can purchase Micro Niche Finder which is very effective and it is a real time saver.


Kind regards,
Raymond

I like MicroNiche Finder. There are others who prefer Market Samurai. You could also just use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find low competition, high search keywords for niches you find from the best sellers list on Amazon.com, eBay, and even Google Shopping itself.

It may be easy to rank for low-competition/high-volume keywords, but realize that a lot of these keywords are not going to be "buying" keywords. The money keywords are typically those that show commercial intent, as opposed to keywords that suggest that the searcher is merely looking for information and may not be interested in making a purchase.

I wouldn't put much faith in an SEO strategy that consists only of ranking for low-competition/high-volume keywords. For any niche that you choose, try to pick out keywords that are purchase-oriented. Take digital cameras, for example. "Digital cameras" is actually not a good keyword because it's too broad, not to mention too competitive. However, if you focus on more specific queries that include the brand, model name, part number, color, etc., then that does two things: 1) it reduces your competition; and 2) it increases the likelihood that you'll get a sale/conversion because that person has finished the research phase and finally made up his or her mind about what to buy.

As for software, there are several tools that you can use, but they require input from you first. They don't magically give you a list of profitable keywords -- you must first give them one or more "seed" keywords and then evaluate the results according to your own criteria.

I rarely use keyword tools. My preferred method of doing keyword research is to think of a niche and then use the autosuggestion feature of various search engines and websites because they'll tell you what people are really searching for. When you go to Google or Bing and start typing a search, a list of related queries will show up in a box below that. I've found that many of these keywords don't show up in the Google AdWords keyword tool or any other tool that pulls data from the AdWords tool, but that doesn't mean that they're not good keywords. For one thing, a lot of people rely on the keyword tools exclusively, so they'll never even see these gems, meaning less competition for you.

In my opinion, people pay way too much attention to the data that they get from keyword tools, especially the number of searches for each keyword. You'd be better off focusing on profitable niches and looking for keywords within those niches that suggest commercial intent (and, incidentally, you don't need yet another tool to determine intent like the one from Microsoft -- just use common sense).

Once you have some keywords that you think might be good, do a search on each one of them individually and analyze the results on the first page of Google, Bing, etc. Reverse engineer their SEO strategies and replicate them, only do it better. In order to do this effectively, you need to understand both on-page and off-page SEO. There are a couple of good free guides that you can learn this stuff from, such as the e-course offered at seobook.com and the course offered at seofaststart.com. I think that these would be good starting places for you.

Thanks RemingtonSteele. Your tips are so nice and broaden my knowledge for keyword research.

I use the allinurl and allintitle, but I also use terapeak to see if my keyword phrase comes up for sale on ebay and what the sell through percent is. If it's got a good sell through, people are looking to buy.

Just a thought....

Using my brain, imagination and hours of tedious research.


What you just did. Erase it from your memory and never do it again.

Never use quotes. It's a waste of time.

That big number for competition is irrelevant and misleading. Worry about the top 10-20 sites, they are all that matter. Forget about the other 2,456,765,876

Use whatever tool you want to determine how many searches a keyword gets per day/month.

*google keywords tool, seobook keyword tool, wordtracker etc...

Use whatever tool you want to bring up a listing of the top 10-20 sites plus all relevant information. Number of backlinks, page rank, headings, etc...

*market samurai, traffic travis etc...

At that point you can usually tell just from looking at those results what the competition for a keyword is going to be. It's something you get better at with experience. The tools will even give you their opinion as well.

When you see something that looks like it's in your league you can start fine-tuning your research. Checking the backlinks of the top sites to see if they are good or garbage. Are the ranking pages really trying to rank for those keywords or only ranking well due to zero competition etc...

The hardest part is finding great untapped keywords and niches. The is it hard or not is easy.

All of this allinurl stuff is totally Bogus
means nothing

all the matters is the top 10 competition on a google search with no quotations
SEOC, competion that comes up lets say I go into google and enter

Blue Widgets
and up comes .............10,500,000

Most people would look at that and say oh my god no I want one with 100k or less
preferablly 50k or less
to that I say poppycock, that is totally irrelevant

I dont care if that number is 100 million
thats not relevant
all that matters is Google top 10 competition,
1, what are their backlinks to their page like?
2. what is their PR?
3, what is their onpage SEO like? (kw in title, url, header, and desc)
4. What is the PR of their backlinks like"? What is the PR and number of backlinks on their pages with anchor text that matches my kws? ( I think this is HUGELY important)

Who cares if they have 10k backlinks if they are all PR0
Who cares if they have 10k backlinks if only 20 of them are anchor text for the kw I am targeting

course this is a bit more advanced for the newbies but this is What the more experienced webmasters look at

Wow great tips. I use market samurai but when that goes down, this is a great alternative!

Hi friends!
I believe if you are serious to get ranked on top results, you should use Low Competition niches for your domain name and SEO.

There is a very important issue missing in this conversation and input from RemingSteele would be greatly appreciated.

The issue us the difference between opinion and fact. Way too often, in the SEO arena, so much informaiton is what people believ, the things they have heard again over and over and thnik these are true. Let me provide an example.

It makes perfect sense that Remington says look for niches that indicate buying and not just high traffic/low competition. This make perfect sense, but is it what really works? I have some evidence that says the opposite. My hubpage Insurance Leads -- How to Generate Insurance Leads Yourself is one of my highest CTR adsense sites (10%) and you will notice that it does not sell anything. So we can get a lot more value from one another if we dont repeat what we beleive (or have herad form others) but rather illustrate data, facts or what is actually so. Why would this site offer such impressive CTR?
1. it could be that people who visit hubpages are "clickers" i.e;. people that like to click on anything and will do so. The only way to test this is I need to put up other hub pages, on other topics and see if the CTR is consistently high. If so, then this hypotheisis, that people whio visit hubpages, like to click, would be valid. But I cannot yet make this guess from one hubpage.
2. it could be that people attracted to this topic are looking for insurance leads and the adsense is particularly applicable to them so they click on it.
Notice that the title is not "BUY insurance leads" or anything that indicates the idea of purchasing but rather, people looking for do-it-yourself info. So we have at least one experiment here which indicates that it IS viable to turn non-buying-keywords (e.g. information keywords) into revenue.
Can everyone do some experioemcnts and then we KNOW the facts and dont rely on conventional wisdom and opinion?

yeah I have to agree with remingtonsteel....too much emphasis is put on keyword tools and not on common sense.

So using the auto suggestion tool is awesome because that is essentially what people are typing into google. Also buyer keywords are so important to focus on vs just another keyword you can rank on page 1 for. You don't really want the lookie-loos..unless maybe just building an adsense site and happy to get the clicks.

But I've found that I would try and rank for keywords using this strategy and my conversions were much higher.

I do use the Google Keyword Tool in looking those high competive and low competitive keywords..

You can't find low competition on high traffic keywords. if you are new in SEO you should choose long tail keywords most of keywords have low competition and you can ranked fast than high competitive keywords. After some practive you can move to primary keywords

you should choose, Google adword keyword tool + Google search suggestion + guessing

If you have cash, Market Samurai. Otherwise, Google Keywords Tool

You may try Brad Callen's Micro Niche Finder tool, it works like a charm. It can give you the exact keyword statistics (competition level, search volume, etc.) for real.