How to Choose Low Competition Keywords

October 14, 2009 By Jackie Lee 59 Comments

The key to this strategy is choosing keywords with high search volume and low competition. This is often times called the “low hanging fruit”. These are keywords that will rank easily in Google because there are not a million other sites competing for them.

How do I find out how competitive my keyword is?

There are a million different ways to identify competition. Just about everyone has their own way of doing things. You can spend tons and tons of time trying to identify how competitive a word is going to be, but you DON’T have to. I use a really down and dirty way to identify competition. Here’s how it works.

You grab a firefox add on ~ there are a few but I use SEO for Firefox. (yes the others work the same way and you can use any one you like)

Once you install it you will see a small icon in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. You will need to click this icon to turn on the program

**BIG TIP:** do not run this program all the time. Only use it when you are doing keyord research ~ it gets google agitated if you run it all the time and they will think you are a robot and cut off your ability to search google (for a couple hours).

Once you have installed the add on you want to go to Google and put your keyword in the search box. (turn on SEO for firefox). Then when you click you will get a listing of information beneath each result on the page.

There will be a lot of information given, but you only need to look at the page rank ~ which is the first number after the PR.

What I’m looking for when I do this is a PR number below 30 for the first page. So I would go through all 10 listings and add up the page rank for each site listed. If the number is less than 30 I call it good. For this keyword the PR of the first page is 10 ~ so yes, I thought this was a good keyword to create a lens on.

Questions that have come up

1. What if Amazon is the top listing?

I don’t worry about it. The page is getting to the top based on the authority of the entire site, not the page itself. It can be outranked with good backlinks.

2. Why don’t you do …. (fill in the blank) to see if it’s competitive.

Because I could spend all day checking different measures of competition, and in the end it gets me nowhere. I like to have a good idea (which this method gives me) and then put my lens up. There’s no need to waste a ton of time looking at a million different measures. If you’re digging into Amazon you’ll find many products are not very competitive at all.

3. My PR number is just a question mark!

Go into your SEO for firefox settings (which can be found under tools at the top of your browser page) and choose to have it show the pr number automatically.

That’s one of the methods I use for measuring competition. I also use Micro Niche Finder, it makes it really easy because all of these steps can be found on one screen. If you have any more questions about they hows feel free to ask them in the comment section and I’ll be glad to answer.