AgentHow to find low competition keywords: a step-by-step method for 2026
How to find low competition keywords: collect long, specific search phrases from free sources like Google's autocomplete, People also ask, Search Console and Keyword Planner, then judge each one by opening the actual Google results instead of trusting a difficulty score. If page one is full of forum threads, old posts and small sites that only half answer the question, a fresh and better page has a real shot. Do this for phrases that look tiny or brand new in the tools too, because that's where competition is lowest and demand is still growing.
In one line
A low competition keyword is a search where the pages on Google's first page are weak enough that a new, better page can take a spot.
It's about who ranks, not how many people search. Twenty searches a month with forum threads on page one beats two thousand searches with five big brands, at least for a new site.
What are low competition keywords?
Low competition keywords are searches you can realistically rank for soon. They tend to be long and specific, like "how to fix a leaking shower valve" instead of "plumbing," and the person typing them usually knows exactly what they want.
Two numbers in the tools trip people up here. Google Keyword Planner has a column called "competition," but Google defines it as the number of advertisers that showed on a keyword. That's ad competition. It says nothing about the regular results.
The other is keyword difficulty, a 0 to 100 score SEO tools estimate. Ahrefs builds its score from how many other websites link to the top 10 pages. Useful, but it's an average, and averages hide the one weak page you could replace.
How to find low competition keywords in six steps
You can do all six steps for free. Paid SEO tools make steps 2, 3 and 5 faster, but they don't replace step 5.
Step 1: Pick seed topics for low competition keyword research
Write down 5 to 10 topics in your buyers' words, not your industry's: services, problems, prices, comparisons. A roofer might start with "roof leak," "roof replacement cost" and "metal roof vs shingles."
Step 2: Long tail keyword research with autocomplete and People also ask
Long tail keyword research means turning each seed into the longer phrases people really type. Google gives you most of them for free:
- Autocomplete. Type a seed into Google slowly and note every suggestion. Then add "how," "why," "cost," "vs," "near" or a letter after it. Google's help page says these predictions reflect real searches and change with location and trending interest.
- People also ask. Open each question in the box. New ones appear every time you do.
- Related searches at the bottom of the page, and forums, where people describe a problem before they know the right words.
Write everything down, even phrases that look too small to matter. Small is often the point.
Step 3: Get rough volumes from Google Keyword Planner
Keyword Planner is free, but you need a Google Ads account with billing details filled in to use "Get ideas." Paste your phrases in for average monthly searches and a month-by-month trend. Two warnings. Google has said since 2016 that lower-spending advertisers may see ranges like 100 to 1K instead of a number. And the default average covers 12 months, so a phrase that took off last month looks small. Sort by the trend, not the total.
Step 4: Find low competition keywords you already show up for in Search Console
If your site is a few months old, open the Performance report in Google Search Console and sort queries by impressions. Look for searches where your average position sits between about 8 and 30. Google already thinks you're relevant, so a page built for that exact question can move up. Its tables show at most 1,000 rows and may leave out very rare queries, so treat the list as a sample.
Step 5: Check the results page for every keyword
Search each phrase in a private window and look at the top 10. This is the step that actually tells you whether a keyword is low competition. The next section covers what to look for.
Step 6: Score and shortlist low competition keywords
Give each phrase three quick scores: relevance (0 to 3, would this searcher become a customer?), weakness of page one (0 to 3) and trend (0 to 2, rising, flat or falling). Keep the ones with a 2 or more on both relevance and weakness. Volume only breaks ties. Then group phrases that bring up the same results, because they belong on one page.
Keyword difficulty: read the results page, not just the score
Even Ahrefs, which sells a keyword difficulty score, says in its own guide that the way to make the right bets is to study the search results closely. A score blends ten pages into one number. You're looking for the one or two weak spots it smooths over.
What low hanging fruit keywords look like on page one
Good signs: go for it
- Reddit, Quora or forum threads in the top five
- Posts that are two or more years old, with dated tools or screenshots
- Small sites and personal blogs ranking
- Pages that answer a slightly different question than the search
- Thin lists with no real example or numbers
Bad signs: skip it for now
- Big brands or SEO tool companies in all of the top five
- Every result recent, long and thorough
- Product or shop pages when you planned an article (wrong intent)
- Ads and a map pack pushing the regular results far down
- A topic you can't speak to with real detail
Low hanging fruit keywords usually show three or more good signs at once. One forum thread at position 9 doesn't count.
How competitive can your keywords be? It depends on your site's age
A brand new site and a five-year-old site shouldn't chase the same phrases. Find your row for what to aim at and how long your first list should be.
| Your site | Aim at | First target list | Watch out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand new, no rankings yet | Phrases with 0 to about 50 searches a month, questions, and brand new terms in your field. Leave the big head terms alone for now | About 20 phrases, grouped into 8 to 12 pages. Publish the strongest first, then one or two a week | No Search Console history yet, so the results page is your only competition check |
| A few months old, some impressions | Long tail phrases up to a few hundred searches a month, plus every query where Search Console shows you on page two or three | 30 to 50 phrases, grouped into 12 to 20 pages, starting with the ones you already get impressions for | Compare the last 28 days with the period before to catch new queries early |
| Established, ranks for its main topics | Mid-size phrases you can win on page strength, and rising searches nobody has written for yet | 50 to 100 phrases, sorted by what they're worth to the business and re-checked monthly | Make sure a new page won't compete with one you already have for the same search |
A worked example: four keyword research phrases, checked
Here is the method applied to four phrases about keyword research itself. Volumes are Google Keyword Planner's US numbers for September 2026 unless a month is named. The results pages were read on November 11, 2026.
- "how to find low competition keywords": 140 a month (260 in July). Page one held lowfruits.io, websitelearners.com, proranktracker.com, ahrefs.com and an Australian agency, plus forum threads and many posts from 2021 to 2024. Target it with a fresh, worked example.
- "keyword gap analysis": 110 a month. Mid-size agency guides (thehoth.com, zenmedia.com, flyingvgroup.com, omnius.so) with Ahrefs as the only big name. Target it.
- "keyword cannibalization": 390 a month. The biggest number here, but page one was clearscope.io, semrush.com, oncrawl.com, yoast.com and ahrefs.com, all SEO tool companies. Skip it for a young site.
- "openseo": 4,400 in September and 5,400 in October. It was 10 a month through February 2026, then 1,900 in July. Small review sites and a Reddit thread ranked above the product's own website. Target it fast: an emerging keyword with weak results.
Notice that the biggest number on the list was the worst target, and the one that barely existed a year ago was among the best.
Why zero volume keywords and emerging keywords are worth targeting
Zero volume keywords are phrases the tools show as 0 or "no data." That rarely means nobody searches them. It usually means too few people to report, or searches so new the monthly averages haven't caught up.
Google said in 2017 that 15 percent of the searches it sees every day are new. Keyword tools are built from past months, so they're always a step behind. Meanwhile, almost nobody has written a page for the exact phrase, and what does rank is often a forum thread. The first good page gets there before the crowd and is already in place if the search grows. That's the whole case for emerging keywords.
Two cautions. Some zero-volume phrases stay at zero, so mix them with phrases that have measured demand. And don't make one page per tiny variation: five ways of asking the same question get one page.
Local long tail keywords: small numbers, ready buyers
Local long tail keywords are the clearest case. "Roof leak repair" plus a mid-size town might show 0 in Keyword Planner, yet the person typing it needs a roofer this week. The results are often thin: directories, a couple of contractor pages, sometimes a page about a different town. One solid page per real service and town you serve tends to beat them. That is the idea behind rank and rent sites. Our guide to location pages SEO covers how to build those without copying the same page twenty times, and the programmatic SEO guide covers pages at scale. For map results, the page helps less than a Google Business Profile does.
How to spot emerging keywords before the tools do
- Keyword Planner's month-by-month columns: look for a jump in the last two or three months.
- New autocomplete suggestions for your seeds that weren't there last month.
- Search Console queries that appear for the first time when you compare the last 28 days with the period before.
- Product launches, new rules and new tools in your field. People search a new name before any tool counts it.
How an AI agent can run the low competition keyword loop
An AI agent can do the slow parts of finding low competition keywords: pulling volumes, opening dozens of results pages, scoring each phrase and handing you a short list. What it can't do is know search volumes from memory. Without real data, it guesses.
So it needs a data connection, usually through MCP, an open standard for plugging an AI assistant into another app's data and tools. Options this fall include:
- Keyword Planner through a Google Ads connector. See our guide to Google Ads MCP.
- Search Console through its own connector, for the queries you already show up for. See Google Search Console MCP.
- An SEO data tool with an MCP server. Ahrefs lists MCP access from its Lite plan, $129 a month. Semrush lists MCP access from its Starter plan, $199 a month billed monthly. DataForSEO is pay as you go with a $50 minimum top-up. OpenSEO starts at $10 a month; see what OpenSEO is.
Then paste it a brief like this one, with the scoring rules from Step 6 built in:
Prompt: the low competition keyword loopYou're doing keyword research for [site], which is [age] old and sells [what] in [towns or country].
1. Expand these seeds into long tail phrases and questions: [seeds].
2. Pull monthly volume and the 12-month trend for each, in batches. Name the source of every number. Never estimate a volume.
3. Read the top 10 results for each phrase and tag each one: forum, old post (2+ years), small site, big brand, wrong intent.
4. Score each phrase: relevance 0 to 3 (would this searcher buy?), page-one weakness 0 to 3, trend 0 to 2 (rising, flat or falling).
5. Keep phrases scoring 2 or more on both relevance and weakness. Volume only breaks ties.
6. Group phrases that share most of their results into one page.
7. Give me 10 to 20 picks with a one-line reason each, plus every rejected phrase and why.
Ask me before any batch of paid lookups.
Run the trend part again once a month to catch searches that are just starting to climb. And open three of its results pages yourself each round. That's the quickest way to learn whether its tags match what you'd see.
Low competition keyword research with agents from different platforms
The loop splits well across agents from different companies, as long as each one can see what the others found. In an AgentMsgr group chat every agent reads the same thread, so the handoff is a pair of @mentions:
- "@Grok Bot, pull volumes and 12-month trends for these 40 phrases, with a source for every number."
- "@Hermes Agent, open page one for the top 15 and tag each result."
The second agent works from the first one's list without you copying anything across, and it can question a weak pick before the shortlist reaches you. Paid lookups wait for you: the agent asks in the chat, and you tap Approve or Decline. Adding an agent takes one pasted message in its own app; connecting an AI agent walks through it.
Sources: Google Ads Help, Use Keyword Planner and About Keyword Planner forecasts; Google, Using Google Ads Keyword Planner (March 2023); Search Engine Roundtable, Keyword Planner limited data for lower spenders (August 15, 2016); Search Console Help, Performance report and About the data; Google Search Help, How autocomplete works; Google, Our latest quality improvements for Search (April 25, 2017); Ahrefs, Keyword difficulty (updated December 15, 2025) and pricing; Semrush pricing; DataForSEO pricing; OpenSEO pricing, all read November 11, 2026. Search volumes from Google Keyword Planner (US, English, monthly figures through October 2026); results pages read through an SEO data tool the same day. AgentMsgr isn't affiliated with Google, Ahrefs, Semrush, DataForSEO, OpenSEO, SpaceXSI (formerly xAI), Nous Research or any site named in the example.
Still deciding which keywords to chase?
Are keywords with zero searches worth a whole page?
Sometimes. Give a zero-volume phrase its own page when it's a different buying situation from your other pages and the people searching it could become customers. If it's just another way of asking something a page already answers, add it as a heading or an FAQ there instead.
How many low competition keywords should one page target?
One search intent per page. That usually means one main phrase plus the close variants that bring up the same Google results. If two phrases show completely different results, they need different pages.
What keyword difficulty score is low enough for a new site?
There's no safe cutoff. Ahrefs says a score of 0 to 5 means the top pages barely have any backlinks, but even its own guide tells you to study the results page before you decide. A low score with five big brands on page one is still a hard keyword.
Let one agent pull the numbers while another reads page one
In an AgentMsgr group chat, the agent checking results pages sees every volume the research agent pulled, and no paid lookup runs until you approve it.