Every keyword tool has a difficulty score and none of them can see the thing that actually decides whether you can rank: what is on page one right now, and whether a site your size appears anywhere in it.
That is a manual check and it takes ninety seconds. Everything below feeds into it.
The two failure modes
Chasing difficulty scores. A tool saying KD 12 tells you about backlink counts. It cannot tell you that page one is filled with Reddit threads and a Wikipedia entry, which no amount of content will displace.
Finding easy keywords nobody wants. The easiest keyword in your niche is usually easy because it has no commercial value. A page ranking first for something no buyer types earns nothing.
Low competition is only useful when paired with genuine intent. Both halves, every time. Our explainer on search intent covers how to read that second half properly.
The manual difficulty check
Before any of the eight methods, learn the check they all end in. Search the keyword and look at page one for four things.
Site size. Are there any sites roughly your size, or is it all household names? One or two peers on page one means the door is open.
Page type. Are these dedicated pages targeting this exact query, or is it big sites ranking incidentally with a paragraph inside a broader article? Incidental ranking is a soft target.
Content quality. Open the third and fourth results. If they are thin, outdated or clearly written by someone who has not done the thing, that is your opening.
Forums and user content. Reddit and Quora on page one is a strong buy signal. It means Google could not find a good page and settled for a discussion.
Method 1. Start with the questions your customers ask
Support tickets, sales calls, live chat logs. These are queries in the words your buyers use, which is usually not the words your industry uses.
Why this beats tools: every competitor with a subscription sees the same tool output. Nobody else has your inbox. Ten minutes in your support queue produces keywords no tool would surface for months.
Method 2. Mine the SERP features
Type your seed keyword and read the People Also Ask box, then click one to expand it and watch it multiply. Do the same with the autocomplete dropdown and the related searches at the bottom.
These are free, current and derived from real query data. They are also longer and more specific than anything you would invent, which is exactly the shape of a low competition keyword.
Method 3. Filter by difficulty, then ignore the score
Use a tool to generate volume, not to make the decision. Pull everything under KD 30 for your seed terms, export it, and then run the manual check on the top twenty by relevance.
Set a volume floor of about 50 a month, not 500. Most of the value in this exercise sits between 50 and 500 searches, where the terms are specific enough that the intent is unambiguous.
Method 4. Look for the terms with no dedicated page
The strongest signal available: a query where nothing on page one is actually about that query. Big sites ranking with a passing mention, and no page built to answer it.
How to spot it fast: if none of the top five titles contain the keyword or a close variant, there is no dedicated competition. Build the dedicated page.
Method 5. Take the keywords your competitors rank for accidentally
Run a competitor's domain through a keyword tool and filter for positions 5 to 20. These are terms they rank for without trying, usually from a paragraph inside an article about something else.
Those are the openings. They have proven relevance to your category, proven demand, and no committed page defending them.
Method 6. Add the modifier that narrows intent
Take a head term you cannot win and add the qualifier that describes your actual buyer. The full method for building those out is in our guide to creating long tail keywords.
- Audience: for accountants, for small business, for beginners
- Constraint: free, under 50 dollars, without a subscription
- Situation: after a Google update, for a new domain, with no backlinks
- Comparison: versus, alternative to, instead of
Each modifier cuts volume and cuts competition faster. The result is a smaller query with a much higher chance of ranking and, usually, a much clearer purchase intent.
Method 7. Watch what is new
Products launched this year, features released this quarter, terminology that appeared six months ago. Competition on these is low because nobody has had time to build the page yet.
The window is short. Publishing within weeks of a term appearing gets you a position that is hard to take back once you hold it.
Method 8. Mine your own Search Console
Filter for queries where you have impressions and an average position between 8 and 20. You are already relevant to these in Google's view and no new keyword research is required.
This is the highest-return list in this entire article and it is free, specific to you, and already sitting in an account you have. Half of it usually needs a title change rather than a new page.
Scoring what you find
| Signal | Good | Bad |
|---|---|---|
| Sites your size on page one | Two or more | None |
| Dedicated pages for the query | Fewer than three | All ten |
| Forums ranking | Present | Absent |
| Search intent | Clear and commercial | Vague or purely curious |
| Volume | 50 to 500 for a start | Under 20 |
| Your relevance | Same topic as your product | Adjacent at best |
Four or more in the good column means write it this week.
Doing this repeatedly
The methods above are a morning's work for one batch. The reason most sites stop doing it is that it has to happen every month to keep a calendar full, and it is repetitive rather than difficult.
Distribb runs the pull and the filter continuously against live search data, so the shortlist is generated rather than assembled by hand, and the winning terms go straight into a brief and a published article.
Honest limitation: it cannot do the manual SERP check for you, and it cannot know that a query is worthless to your particular business. Software finds the terms. Whether your buyer types them is a judgement about your customers that no tool has the information to make.
See how the keyword research and content platform handles the repeatable half.
Related reading
For the tools themselves compared, see our roundup of keyword research tools. For the small business version of this process, read keyword research for small business, and for grouping what you find into a site structure, see our guide to topic clusters.
For the half of this that can genuinely be put on a schedule, see keyword research automation tools, which covers what to automate and what to keep doing by hand.
FAQ
What counts as a low competition keyword? One where at least two sites of roughly your authority rank on page one, and where fewer than three results are pages built specifically for that query. Difficulty scores are an input to that judgement, not a substitute for it.
Is low volume the same as low competition? No, and assuming so is expensive. Plenty of low volume terms are fiercely contested because they convert, and some high volume terms are wide open because nobody has bothered.
How many should I target at once? Pick five to ten per month and cover each one properly. Twenty half-covered pages lose to five thorough ones, and the pattern of thin coverage drags the whole domain.
Do long tail keywords still work in 2026? Yes, with one change. AI overviews absorb some purely informational long tail traffic, so weight your picks toward queries with a commercial or comparative angle where the reader still needs to reach a page.