These websites have had massive growth in SEO traffic in some of the world's most
competitive online niches.
The best part?
They all use the exact same SEO strategy.
The strategy goes something like this: find low competition keywords with business potential,
rank for these topics which will build both your website's authority and bankroll, use that authority
and bankroll to progressively go after more competitive keywords, and rinse and repeat
until your site is so authoritative that it can rank for basically anything.
And then all you have to do is kick back, look up into the sky and enjoy the fruits
of your labor.
Now, while this may sound like pure bliss, the biggest obstacle is at the beginning:
finding low competition keywords with high business potential.
But the solution to this problem is in this box.
Now, we have four items here: we have a notebook, a bag of seeds, cool, a classic game of connect four,
and this toy rabbit.
All of these items play a significant role in the process I'm about to share with you.
And while they hold little utility on their own, when you combine them together, like you'd
do with ingredients for a recipe, the end result is a golden keyword research strategy that can
help you find low and sometimes even no competition with business potential.
And I'll prove to you this works as we head on over to the wheel of impossible niches.
This wheel contains some of the most competitive online niches on the planet.
It's got everything from gambling to insurance to web hosting, and the list goes on.
Let's give this a spin and whatever niche it lands on is the niche that we're going to use
to find low competition topics with business potential.
And there you have it, folks.
Credit cards and personal finance it is.
Back to the box.
Now, the first item I want to talk to you about is this notebook.
This book right here is special.
It holds the secrets to everything that happens at Ahrefs.
It shows our product roadmap, the technical details that make our crawler the most active
in all of SEO land, and it even holds the secrets of what gives us an edge over our competitors.
This book is laser-focused on our product and business.
And if you want to experience the goodness of this golden keyword research strategy,
then your keyword selection strategy should be no different – laser-focused around your
product and business.
Now, let's put the notebook to the side and talk about this strange one right here.
A bag of seeds.
So it looks like this bag is full of pumpkin and sunflower seeds.
Both are edible.
Both are delicious.
But both are pretty ordinary.
Now, if you dig into this bag, you're going to find this.
These are hemp seeds.
Not everyone has tried them.
They don't look as appetizing, they don't taste as appetizing, but they're more nutrient dense,
they contain omega 6 fatty acid, and provide tons of other health benefits that pumpkin
and sunflower seeds unfortunately don't provide.
Hemp seeds are unique and for some, are the key to a healthy diet.
And in the same way, using unique seeds in your keyword research will be the key to
penetrate SERPs in competitive niches.
These are what will help you find low competition topics with business potential.
For example, if I gave you five seconds to think about seed keywords for our credit card
and personal finance niche, chances are, you and I will come back with the same
two seed keywords.
We'd search them in a keyword research tool like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, go to a Keyword
ideas report, and set some keyword difficulty filters, only to realize that most keywords are
branded queries where our site probably wouldn't be able to rank.
And even if we did rank, we wouldn't be able to extract any value from these "login"-type
queries because you can't help people login to their credit card account.
The reason why there are barely any good low competition keywords here is because your
competitors all did keyword research with the exact same seed keywords.
They went after the low competition keywords and those are now mid- to high- competition keywords.
Now, if you do this exact same process but use unique seed keywords instead, then you
end up with very different results.
And the fastest way to find unique seeds is to use ChatGPT.
So I'll type: "give me 20 words or phrases related to credit cards."
And in a second or two, you have a whole bunch of potentially unique seeds.
Ask for more… and there you have it.
Now, if you clean up some of these seeds, take them to a keyword research tool like
Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, then go to a Keyword ideas report and set the exact same filters as we
did before, we actually have some good content ideas, like "650 credit score," "cash advances at
capital one," "cash advance apps that don't use plaid," "how much of a home loan you can get
with a 650 credit score," and there's actually so many good topics here if you take 15 minutes
to sift through the results.
Now, whether these keywords have "high" business potential or not depends on what
you do as a business.
But in my opinion, these topics seem pretty versatile for affiliates, credit card companies,
mortgage companies and even general info sites.
Alright, so you have these low competition keywords with business potential thanks to
unique seeds and your trusty notebook ensures that you align these topics with your business
and product.
But stopping here would be a huge mistake because you'd be missing out on what this
can do for you.
While this might look like a classic game for children, Connect Four is a game all about
identifying and playing off of patterns.
And once you identify that pattern…
Beating the competition is quite easy.
Crushed!
So, looking back at our keyword ideas report of low competition credit card keywords, what
pattern do you see here?
That's right!
We have some very low competition keywords related to specific credit scores.
More specifically, these keywords end in a 0 or a 5.
And if we look at the top-ranking pages for one of these keywords, you'll see that the pages are
about whether that credit score is good or bad.
So, let's start a new search in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer with just the seeds, "credit score"
and "credit scores."
Then let's go back to the Matching Terms report.
Now, to find specific credit score keywords with a 0 or 5 at the end, we can use the Include filter.
And all I'll do is add "*0 , *5."
And what the asterisk will do is act as a wild card.
So let's hit the Any word tab and apply the filter.
Finally, I'll set a keyword difficulty score with a low maximum number and hit the Show result button.
And now we have over 1,500 low competition keywords with a cumulative search volume of
around 200,000 searches in just the US alone in one of the most competitive niches
in the online and offline world.
But we're not done yet.
In fact, we've only begun our work here because it would be a shame not to put Sam to work.
Not me – this one.
Meet Sam.
She loves organic carrots from the grocery store.
And she loves long walks in the woods.
But there's nothing she enjoys more than to burrow into a hole to see where it leads.
We need to let our curiosity lead us down these rabbit holes because your competitors
that have experienced the sweet, sweet nectar of low hanging keyword research driven fruit
have probably gone all in and found a whole bunch of low competition keywords that are
driving business value for them.
So, all you have to do to uncover these untapped topics is find who those competitors are and
follow the rabbit hole.
Here's how it's done.
First, you're going to need a list of low competition topics.
I made a list of a hundred or so keywords based on the exact reports I showed you before.
Next, you'll want to paste that list of keywords into Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer and run a new search.
Then, I'll go to the Traffic Share by Domains report which is going to show us the websites
that get the most search traffic based on these low competition keywords – meaning,
websites that have already done this research and executed on their rankings.
Now, because there's going to be a mix of high and low authority sites, we'll need to
export the list and take it into a tool like Ahrefs' Batch Analysis which will show us the SEO
metrics for up to 200 sites at a time.
The last thing I'm going to do is sort the data in ascending order by Domain Rating,
which is a score that represents a website's authority.
And now all you need to do is this.
Look at the DR column along with the Traffic column.
If you notice a low authority website that gets a decent amount of search traffic like these ones,
then fixate your eyes to the domain name.
If the domain name looks like a relevant niche site to yours, then it's time to follow the rabbit hole.
For example, "cain mortgage team" obviously looks like a site about mortgages.
Click it – and yes, it is.
Mortgages are another insanely competitive niche.
And if your site happens to be about personal finance, then this looks like a rabbit hole
worth following.
So, I'll take that mortgage site's domain and paste it into Ahrefs' Site Explorer, then go to
the Top Pages report to see the pages that send them the most search traffic.
And I'm pretty sure that we've just uncovered some more low competition topics like "how
much house can i afford with a 60k salary" or "protected interest rates in 5 years."
Sift through all the topics and add any worthy ones to your keyword list.
And when you're done, go back to Batch Analysis, choose your next competitor
and do the exact same thing.
And if you run out of competitors, go back a step and play a game of connect four.
Look for patterns in your competitor's keyword rankings.
For example, this topic of "how much house can I afford" also has a specific number there.
So let's go back to Keywords Explorer and search for "how much house can I afford."
Hit the Matching terms report and let's set those same filters that we did in the beginning.
And we now have even more low competition topics that are built around a pattern.
Now, follow those rabbit holes and in the end, you end up with a golden keyword research
strategy that can help kickstart your growth in even the most competitive niches.
Then you need to go and create content that's actually going to rank in Google for these keywords.
And this will again, build your bankroll and help you earn backlinks to your content building your
site's authority.
Then rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.
And when that day comes where you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor,
remember the guy on the grass.