How To Find Low Competition Keywords in Your Niche

Knowing how to find low competition keywords, especially those that are highly targeted to your niche or topic matter, is essential in search engine optimization. Effective keywords are needed to optimize a website, rank well on the search engines and reach your target market.

Low competition keywords will give you a greater chance of appearing on the coveted first page of search results for a particular term, reach your market more easily, win a higher overall search engine ranking and ultimately generate greater online sales.

Overuse of Keywords

While keywords are important to SEO, overdoing the use of keywords on your website or sales page goes against the rules of organic optimization and will likely trigger red flags from Google and the other search engines. Overuse of keywords is known as “keyword stuffing” and falls into the “gray hat” area of search engine optimization. Besides that, it just doesn’t work very well; the overuse of keywords can make your text come across as boring and repetitive.

To get the best results from your use of keywords, you should understand the basic tenets of search engine optimization. The secret of keywords is not in over stuffing them but choosing those that are optimized and highly targeted.

Using Google’s Keyword Planner

When it comes to knowing how to find low competition keywords, remember that Google is your friend, specifically its Keyword Planner. There are a number of paid keyword tools for Mac and PC, such as Market Samurai and SEO LinkAssistant, but when you are first starting out in Internet marketing, you will likely be on a budget. Therefore, you will want to favor the free and low-cost methods of search engine optimization.

There is a lot of sophistication to the Keyword Planner tool, but the basics are quite easy. Simply type in a word or two Into the Word Or Phrase field describing the topic you want to optimize for and click the Search button.  You can sort the columns of resulting keywords by clicking on the appropriate column header. The most important parameter, however, in my view is the Google monthly search volume and the number of competitors for that particular keyword phrase.

After finding a few keywords of interest, your next step is to paste each one “in quotes” into Google’s regular search field. The number of relevant websites that come up on the first page of results for each keyword is your best gauge as to how easily you will be able to target that particular keyword.

Keyword Analysis

Keyword analysis is essential to targeting the right keywords. This is made easier with the various SEO optimization tools, which can help to ease the burden of finding and analyzing low competition keywords.

So where do the paid keyword tools come in? These can save you time in having to bounce back and forth between the Google Keyword Planner and Google search results in choosing the most effective keywords, but Google’s Keyword Planner, while targeted towards Adwords advertisers, is a good choice if you have more time than money.

The secret, once you know how to find low competition keywords, is to simply do it. Spending a few moments to find quality keywords is a lot better than risking having your site banned from the search engines due to keyword stuffing or other black hat techniques. After all, when you find and optimize for the right keywords, you are giving Internet searchers what they want: quality content targeted towards a particular subject.