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

[InTheMaking]

Hey everyone, I only started this business a couple months ago and I've been previously trying to do CPA through PPV and I'm up to around $30-50/day.

Anyway, I want to now move into SEO. I learned that it's really crucial to learn how to jump into low competitive, highly targetted traffic with lots of volume.

I'm just curious.. what's your method to finding those keywords as there are millions of keywords out there?

Are there software to help, or do you use your imagination and keep trying to find one?

Thanks,

Jeremy

[rjweng]

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

[Piper Anderson]

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.

[RemingtonSteele]

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.

[InTheMaking]

Originally Posted by RemingtonSteele

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.

Thank you so much, that was a huge help.

[InTheMaking]

Okay I have an example I'd like to share with you guys and any help along what to do is very appreciated.

Okay so first of all, I went on clickbank and found a clickbank product I decided to promote.

I then searched for a main keyword to rank for (That i thought was a buying keyword) and found that one with 4400 Broad searches locally was available in an ext so I would have the keyword in my domain.

example - If my keyword was "Horse Training" I found that "Horsetraining.net" was available.

I then took a look at my competition, with the "Horse Training" in google with the paranthesis it showed around 1,000,000 competition, and from what people said that's awfully high, but the #1 ranked site is just a blog too, without affiliate links in there..

What would you reccomend me do? Keep moving forward with this keyword or go on to the next?

Is there any tips/advice you can give me before I start my SEO?

Any and all help is appreciated,

Jeremy

[tennisconnexion]

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

[evazk]

Originally Posted by Piper Anderson

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.

Instead of using Market Samurai, I use SerpAnalytics it woks good for me, however, Market Samurai is also good but you have to pay a great price for using so why not we should use other tools like Adowrds keyword tool, Keyword Discovery etc.

[pons_saravanan]

Originally Posted by InTheMaking

Okay I have an example I'd like to share with you guys and any help along what to do is very appreciated.

Okay so first of all, I went on clickbank and found a clickbank product I decided to promote.

I then searched for a main keyword to rank for (That i thought was a buying keyword) and found that one with 4400 Broad searches locally was available in an ext so I would have the keyword in my domain.

example - If my keyword was "Horse Training" I found that "Horsetraining.net" was available.

I then took a look at my competition, with the "Horse Training" in google with the paranthesis it showed around 1,000,000 competition, and from what people said that's awfully high, but the #1 ranked site is just a blog too, without affiliate links in there..

What would you reccomend me do? Keep moving forward with this keyword or go on to the next?

Is there any tips/advice you can give me before I start my SEO?

Any and all help is appreciated,

Jeremy

On page
1) do allinurl:keword
2) do allintitle:keyword
the above says about the competetors on page optimizations. I take if the values are less than 10,000

Off Page
Installl tools like seoquake addon in firefox and

1) Lookfor any PR0, PR NA pages ranking in top 10 and also esure they are not backlinked heavily. Because the PR you are seeing might be updated 2 months before but actual PR calculation is likely realtima and way off from what you see in results.

2)Lookfor any ezine articles or anyother article directory links rank in the first page also check backlinks as you did in the point 1(in off page)

I am using these to find keywords for EMD, so far I could see some good keywords.

[OKFarmgirl]

I came here this morning bent on asking this exact question so thanks! I find that I can spend hours just putting random stuff into the keyword tool and I don't find much. Or, if I do, the EMD is already taken. I guess I'm just asking how do you think up what niches to delve into? Do you just throw in random commercial-type keywords and cross your fingers? Or do you start with long-tail phrases? I just don't want to spend hours and hours looking for a niche market when I could be building websites.

I am starting on a shoestring budget (I have 3 more add-on domain spots on my already existing hosting service) and I just want to get started right. How do you recommend I get to the point that I'm not spinning my wheels with the keyword tool if I'm unable to pay for a keyword finder?

[RemingtonSteele]

Originally Posted by OKFarmgirl

I guess I'm just asking how do you think up what niches to delve into?

You can start by taking a look at what's around your house/apartment. What, if anything, did you buy recently? What have your friends purchased recently? Also look at Amazon.com and other shopping sites. Pay attention to what gets advertised on TV and radio, and in magazines. Go to the public library or a bookstore and look at the magazines and go through the non-fiction bookshelves. Once you get on a roll, you'll find out that there are far too many niches for you to "delve into" in your lifetime.

Originally Posted by OKFarmgirl

How do you recommend I get to the point that I'm not spinning my wheels with the keyword tool if I'm unable to pay for a keyword finder?

You don't need to spend money on keyword tools. These tools normally pull data from other tools that are freely available. The main benefit of using keyword software is that it can analyze a bunch of keywords at once, so it saves a lot of time. However, I believe that it's worth learning how to do keyword research the "hard way" first and getting good results before you invest in software. Even if you do end up buying software in the beginning, you still need to understand the basics of SEO in order to know what to do with the data.

So, to avoid spinning your wheels, take the time to learn SEO first and maybe just practice with optimizing content and web pages for a few non-competitive keywords so that you get a feel for how it all works. There's a lot more to SEO than keywords, which is why I'm suggesting this approach.

[cmghome]

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....

[christopher jon]

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

Using my brain, imagination and hours of tedious research.

I then took a look at my competition, with the "Horse Training" in google with the paranthesis it showed around 1,000,000 competition, and from what people said that's awfully high, but the #1 ranked site is just a blog too, without affiliate links in there..

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.

[eniggma]

I really like your post here. I learned from a podcast once with a guy who was making over a thousand bucks a month from a niche site that was getting a bunch of low volume long tail traffic, we are talking like 150 searches a month for his main term. Like you said its because its more targeted. Im so sick of seeing these gurus teaching you to look for these low comp high volume keywords cuz they are WAY to broad or difficult to rank for. For an Adsense site its a must but when you are selling a clickbank product or your own product you dont need it to have that many hits when just 10 sales a month (if you're going with at least a $30/ sale commish) is giving you a $200/month site. Make 20 to 30 of those and.....

[outwest]

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

[alanross]

I agree with the above post, the level of competition is not the thing to worry about. I have had sites on page 1 on google with over 3 million competitors!.

To find the right keyword think of one category like dating.
then write a list of about 5 words around that i.e talking to women, picking up girls etc.

These keywords you enter into google keyword tool.
Remember these keywords are not the keywords your targeting yet you need to dig deeper. so enter each one and find what google suggests.
Then enter these keywords.

When you see keywords with high monthly search ie over 3000+ these are your keywords.

Remember to then enter these in the keyword tool again, but this time click the exact match button. This will show you search volume. Remember though this is not an exact number but close enough.

[jharr53301]

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

[drseo]

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.

[bobrichards]

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?

[killerobotninja]

I have a question. Say my keyword is searched 5200 a month globally. This is the highest search. The rest go down to 2900, 1300, and then lower. Would it be wise to still optimize my site for the 5200 a month word? Or do I want to go into lower long tail keywords instead? I'm still new to optimizing and could use the help.

[tylerjaysen]

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.

[wordsofmagic]

Many years ago I use to use keyword analyzer and nichbot but now I use market samurai.

The trick is to find the root keyword and type the keyword into the keyword tool and let the tool do the hard work and generate hundreds
of keyphrases related to the root keyphrase.

Hope this helps,

[Davidhudson]

Through Google adwords you can find easily low competition with high volume keywords.

[Somali]

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

[Clarkjackson]

Originally Posted by InTheMaking

I learned that it's really crucial to learn how to jump into low competitive, highly targetted traffic with lots of volume.

Jeremy

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

[BigNorm]

Originally Posted by outwest

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

Lets also not forget the ranking pages as well. I see so many people talk about so called authority sites like youtube, wikipedia, howto, about.com etc being in the top spots so you should move on....are you series!?

If I see these sites sitting in the top spots then chances are the niche is wide open for the taking. These sites are hardly ever optimized properly for their KW's they're ranking for.

Lets take YouTube as an example.

Lets say the top second spot has a YouTube video ranking. What I would do, is take the first half of an article targeting that keyword, turn it into a 40 second - 1 minute YouTube video using powerpoint slides with the end providing a link to my website to get the remainder of the information. I would then add my sites link at the start of the description with the keyword in the description as well as in the Title of the video. I would then use a service which will write a second article, spin it and submit it with my link to the video and also my site to networks, directories, bookmarks, web 2.0 etc and also perform second tier linking as well.

I'm willing to bet, by months end not only would I have my video ranking in place of the original video on the first page of Google, I will also have my website sitting on the first page, in essence taking two spots on the first page.

All of this simply because people see these authority sites as the bogeyman and run screaming.

[dumindu89]

Originally Posted by rjweng

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

This is the procedure currently I am using. It is the easiest way to find the keywords with low competition IMO.

[UMS]

Originally Posted by Davidhudson

Through Google adwords you can find easily low competition with high volume keywords.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool does NOT allow you to find low competition keywords. It does not give you any information as to the competition to rank your site for a particular keyword.

The Adwords competition value is useful if you are creating an Adsense site as you want the Adwords competition to be medium or higher to ensure that you will have a good number of targeted adsense ads on your site. However, that's about it.

This is a very common mistake people make.

[Ettienne]

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

[kenneth1982]

Originally Posted by UMS

Google Adwords Keyword Tool does NOT allow you to find low competition keywords. It does not give you any information as to the competition to rank your site for a particular keyword.

The Adwords competition value is useful if you are creating an Adsense site as you want the Adwords competition to be medium or higher to ensure that you will have a good number of targeted adsense ads on your site. However, that's about it.

This is a very common mistake people make.

I only use Google Keywords Tool to check competition keywords.

[Somali]

Originally Posted by bloggerd

Thanks guys some helpfull information here,just getting into seo myself so this is handy

You are always welcome! It is our pleasure to help.. And we are here to help everyone become successful.

[danlew]

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.