Low Competition Keywords: A Simple SEO Strategy that Works

There’s one search engine that matters to your business and just one page for any given search term that truly counts. The competition is fierce with hundreds of thousands of other websites in your industry competing for the same top spot. The largest companies have the most resources to devote to the cause, giving them a leg-up when it comes to dominating the first-page results. The odds certainly favor them, but does that mean you’re out of luck? Not if you play your cards right.

While big companies may be able to produce a high volume of content or target very difficult keywords with confidence, ranking a small website is entirely possible, you need to focus on a proven strategy. This means paying close attention to keyword difficulty and taking the time to create high-quality content around ultra-targeted SERPs.

Invest in Top-Ranking Pages and Posts

Are you worried that you’ll never rank for highly competitive keywords? There are many aspects to consider when you set out to achieve the goal of driving organic traffic to your website and copying your top competitor’s website isn’t going to get you anywhere fast. If you’re ready to work with a skilled team that can help you rank for a particular keyword, look no further than Scripted. Start your 30-day free trial today and see how we can help your new website rank.

What You Need to Know About Organic Search

Let's myth-bust here and now. Regardless of what they say or do, no superhero SEO company and no amount of money could catapult your pages to the top spot. The algorithm doesn’t care how much money you spend on your content or what SEO company you have standing beside you.

While we're myth-busting, we also want you to understand your website will never be ranked. Search engines don't rank websites; they rank web pages. Equally important, it has to be acknowledged that short-tail keywords (that is, one- or two-word search queries) are not worth targeting. They have far too high of a search volume and they are simply too broad and vague to drive valuable traffic even if you could make your way to the top spot. So, you're left with these realities:

• You need to do the work instead of trying to buy your way up the page.

• You need to focus on one page (or post) at a time.

• You need to target search phrases longer than one or two words, commonly called "long tail keywords."

The strategy you’re about to learn revolves around the concept of a long-tail keyword. Once you get into it, you’ll be convinced that they are the low-hanging fruit in the SEO world. These keywords are extremely targeted but far less difficult to rank for. The key is learning how to balance low keyword difficulty and high search volume.

Why Are Low-Competition Keywords Better?

Assuming you’re not a big fish, you need to move out of the ocean of short-tail keywords and find a pond of low-competition keywords where you can thrive. Now, this strategy is by no means some sort of compromise or surrender. In fact, you're about to understand why a long-tail keyword strategy is likely to be more lucrative for your business and sure to bring results with a lot less effort.

When choosing target keywords, many businesses make the mistake of looking only at search volume, setting their sights on keywords with hundreds or thousands of searches each day. In truth, these terms make up less than 30% of the search queries performed on the web, with the remaining 70% representing the long-tail keywords you should be targeting. Generally, long-tail keywords see a lower search volume, but that’s a good thing.

Discovering Long-Tail Keywords

Search experts agree that "long tail" phrases are easier to rank for and deliver superior conversion, so how do you find them? There are multiple methods that you can employ, but it’s important that you don’t overthink or overcomplicate the process. You can quickly begin discovering lucrative keywords with methods like:

• Brainstorming: Begin the old-fashioned way. Get some people in the room and brainstorm. If possible, have employees join you who have customer-facing jobs. Think about what your prospects and customers have questions about. Get the ideas down on a whiteboard and expand on them by mind mapping. Don't resist wild ideas, just blurt 'em out and jot 'em down to see what comes of them.

• Use social media: You can easily find valuable keyword ideas on Q&A sites, forums, social media groups, and review sites. Social media is an instantly accessible, free and powerful research tool and you'll benefit from gathering insights based on how people actually express themselves. Look for users that represent your ideal customer and see what type of content they’re interacting with and the queries, keywords, and pain points related to it.

• Use keyword tools: Tools like KWfinder.com offer free and paid plans, enabling you to quickly find long tail keywords with low competition. You should also try Answer The Public, which shows you many long-tail keywords and different types of questions people are asking based on a specific topic or phrase that you enter.

The idea in this stage is to come up with a long list of potential long-tail keywords, but it’s important that you don’t get carried away and start trying to target them right off the bat. You need to take time to evaluate each keyword before you go any further to make sure that it is capable of driving valuable traffic to your website, and that evaluation process starts with understanding search intent.

Evaluating Long-Tail Keywords

The reason why long-tail keywords have a lower search volume is that they are very specific and targeted. For starters, this means that it is easy to identify the search intent. For example, someone searching for “best price on Air Jordans” is far more likely to be looking to buy than someone just searching for “Air Jordans.”

There are different types of search intent, like:

• Navigational: Queries that show someone is looking for a specific site or page, like “Nike login”

• Informational: Queries that show someone is trying to learn something, like “do I need special running shoes?”

• Commercial: Queries that show someone is researching and comparing options, like “what’s the best running shoe for snow”

• Transactional: Queries that show someone is trying to make a purchasing decision, like “coupon for Air Jordans”

By understanding search intent, you can also save yourself time and energy by choosing to dismiss keywords — even if they have a high search volume — when the intent clearly doesn’t match up with the content you’re able to create.

While evaluating keywords, it’s important to pop them into Google for yourself and see what type of content comes up. For example, even if you think you could write a great article on the best running shoes for wet weather, you’d be wasting a whole lot of time if the SERPs are flooded with product pages instead of articles. Google ranks many different types of content, from blog posts to videos to recipes to products, so don’t skip this step.

Once you have begun scratching some keywords off your list, and maybe highlighting some that stand out to you, the next step before you decide on the keywords you’re moving forward with is to plug them into your SEO tools. You can use any keyword research tool, from Semrush (expensive) or Google Search Console (free), but the idea is to see key metrics like search volume and search trends.

There is no rule of thumb when it comes to how much search traffic a long-tail keyword should have. If you find a super-targeted long-tail keyword with purchase intent, it might be worth targeting even if it only gets ~50 searches a month. Low search volume does not mean low value, it all depends on who those searchers are, and you should be able to ascertain that pretty well based on your evaluation.

So, as you confirm that the keyword phrases are being searched and are not seasonal or dead, you can now move forward with your list of keywords and get to the fun part: Creating content!

Mastering The Writing and Optimization Process

While it’s vital to lay a solid foundation before delving into the content creation process, no amount of keyword research can salvage your rankings if you don’t invest enough time in the writing process itself.

For many businesses, writing and optimizing content puts a major damper on their activities because they simply don’t have the specialized, in-house talent they need to get pieces in and out the door at a good pace. However, with the right tools and processes, it’s entirely possible to create a productive workflow that leads to rankable content.

Outline Your Content with Related Keywords

A big mistake people make when they aren’t familiar with SEO is focusing all on one keyword. Naturally, multiple search terms could and should lead to the same piece of content. The trick is figuring out what all those search terms are and incorporating them into your piece. This accomplishes two things: First, it helps Google see that your content is highly relevant to searchers. Second, it prevents “keyword cannibalization” down the road by preventing you from creating very similar pieces of content around those related phrases.

So, when planning your content, take the time to group similar keywords. You can use partial phrase matches, the “people also ask” section in Google search results, and other tools to help you find them. You may end up with a lot of keywords by the end of this process, and another tip is to avoid feeling like you have to use them all. Any time you use a keyword, it should add value to the reader — don’t stuff them in just for the sake of including them.

Apply The Skyscraper Method

Once you have all the related keywords down on paper, it’s your job to identify a couple of them that embody what your content is about. Next, take those keywords and put them into Google and then click on the top 3-5 results. Compare these results to find similarities in structure, questions they’re answering, and terms/phrases they’re using.

The goal of the skyscraper method is to create a piece of content that’s even better than anything else on the web. This means compiling all the best qualities of these top-ranking pieces into your outline and then adding even more. This could be a unique twist from your company, your own personal insights as the author, or an additional resource that the user may find helpful. For instance, if they’re searching for a comparison of the different service tiers available for a product, adding a table to make that information clearer would be fantastic.

If you don’t write all day every day like a professional writer does, it may take a while before these techniques become second nature, and it’s well worth investing in the process and building your knowledge about what makes for great SEO content. With time, it will certainly pay off.

Reach Your Target Audience with Content They’ll Love

We love creating content here at Scripted, but we know that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. If you’re trying to grow your website and you don’t have the spare time and energy to invest in learning the best practices of SEO and crafting content from scratch, let our team of experts do it for you. Start your 30-day free trial today and get on track to claiming the top spot.

Best Practices for Driving Results with Low Competition Keywords

Now that you know the ins and outs of finding low-competition keywords and building great content around them, here are some best practices that you can apply to help power your digital marketing strategy even further.

Share Your Content Often

The “build it and they will come” mindset simply doesn’t apply in the world of content marketing. There are countless pieces of content going live in your exact niche in any given moment and you can’t count on pure luck to bring readers your way. Even if you have a good inflow of website visitors, whenever you post a new piece of content, you should go out of your way to share it.

Some of the ways you can make sure people who need to see your content actually can, try:

• Pulling an insight or quote from your article and sharing it on social media

• Linking to your latest article in your weekly email newsletter

• Messaging relevant creators asking for their feedback

• Repurposing your content into other formats, like infographics

80% of the effort that goes into content marketing is creation, but promotion drives 80% of the results. If you overlook this part of the equation, you’ll always feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle and investing so much time into the process just to barely see the needle move.

Work to Earn Backlinks

One of the many factors that Google looks for when determining what content to rank is the number of backlinks each piece has. The more backlinks your site earns on various posts and pages, the higher your domain authority will become, which overall gives you a better chance of claiming those top spots because it shows that you consistently share valuable resources. So, when you put out a new piece of content, you should always strive to earn backlinks.

Let’s be clear: The risks involved with employing unethical link-building techniques are great and likely to amount in search engine penalties or banishment, so don’t attempt to purchase links or mentions. It takes time to earn them, but you can do it through a combination of creating great content that organically earns shares as people discover your content and by reaching out to bloggers who may be interested in linking to your resource.

Make Old New Again

Content doesn’t get better with age. Every day that your content sits around, it’s another chance for someone else to come along and apply the skyscraper technique to see what they can do even better than you did. That’s the nature of SEO and it means that you always need to be on your toes looking for ways to keep your content fresh and competitive.

If you have a site monitoring tool set up, it may alert you to these opportunities by tracking things like “content decay.” Regardless, you don’t need a fancy tool to make sure your content continues to drive results as time goes by, you need to make a habit to re-check each piece every 3-6 months. At this point, you should:

• Update statistics and quotes

• Fix or remove broken links

• Swap links if better resources have come along

• Ensure your CTA still fits your objectives

It won’t take that long to keep your content up-to-date as long as you create a system and stay ahead of the changes. If you let months' worth of content pile up, you will end up with a major project on your hand and you’ll likely have missed some opportunities in the meantime, so don’t let that happen!

Get a Roadmap to Long-Term SEO Results

Now that you know everything that goes into creating a sound SEO strategy, what’s stopping you from taking the next step? Here at Scripted, we help businesses everyday plan, execute, and manage their end-to-end content strategies with the help of our talented writers and editors. If you’re ready to take the next step and level up your content game, let us help. Sign up for your 30-day free trial today and see what Scripted can do.

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Published by Scripted Writers on Monday, April 24, 2023 in Content Marketing, Keywords, Low Competition Keywords, Seo.