If your competitors are getting search traffic from Google, they’ve probably already done keyword research. This means you can piggyback off their hard work by reverse engineering the low-competition topics they rank for.
Here’s how to do that:
Enter a competitor’s domain into Site Explorer
Go to the Top pages report
Filter for traffic from low-difficulty keywords, say under KD 20
Filter for pages with 500+ estimated monthly search visits
You’ll now see pages with at least 500 monthly visits from keywords with low KD scores.
Pages with the most traffic from low-difficulty keywords
The traffic column shows the page’s estimated traffic from keywords with low KD scores.
If you see a topic you may want to target, hit the caret next to the URL and compare the URL’s total estimated traffic with the amount of traffic it gets from low-KD terms (the number in the traffic column).
If these two numbers are relatively close, it’s a low-competition topic.
Low-competition topics have similar total and low-difficulty traffic
If the numbers are vastly different, as is the case for our free backlink checker, it isn’t. The page just gets some long-tail traffic from low-competition terms.
High-competition topics have vastly different total and low-difficulty traffic
3. Find and expand on unique keyword ideas
Keyword modifiers are add-ons to base keywords. Common examples include “best,” “near me,” and the current year.
For this use case, we’re looking for modifiers that do two things:
Make sense combined with popular keywords in our niche
Alter the search results
For example, if we search for “best credit cards” and “best credit cards 2022” (“2022” is the modifier), the search results are nearly identical. This is because both searchers want up-to-date recommendations. In fact, the top result for both queries is the same.
Top result for "best credit cards"
Top result for "best credit cards 2022"
But if we search for “best credit cards” and “best whatsapp number list credit cards for bad credit” (“for bad credit” is the modifier), the results are completely different. This is what we want.
The best place to look for relevant modifiers is a competitor’s Top pages report in Site Explorer.
For example, if we do this for ketoasap.com, we see keywords like “low carb mcdonalds” and “low carb at red robin.”
Keyword rankings related to low-carb options at fast-food restaurants for the target site
Given that people are likely also searching for low-carb options at other fast-food restaurants, we can infer a base keyword and a modifier here:
Base keyword: “low carb”
Modifier: the fast-food restaurant itself
Knowing this, we can use Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to find more similar keywords. All we need to do is enter our base keyword, go to the Matching terms report, then add other popular modifiers to the “Include” filter (using the “Any word” option).
Filtering for "low carb" keywords that mention fast-food restaurants
If we hit “Apply,” we end up with dozens of low-competition topics to create content about.