High Search Volume, Low Competition Keywords

Find high search volume, low competition keywords around any seed term. Set a minimum search volume and a maximum difficulty, and see only the keywords that qualify.

Keyword

Location

Minimum Search Volume:

Maximum Keyword Difficulty:

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About High Volume, Low Competition Keywords

What makes a keyword low competition?

A keyword is low competition when the pages already ranking for it are weak enough to displace. It is a statement about the incumbents rather than about the phrase, which is why two similar-looking terms can sit at opposite ends of the scale.

Difficulty is scored from 0 to 100 using the strength of those pages, chiefly the size and quality of the link profiles behind them. Under 20 generally means a competent page has a genuine chance without a link building campaign behind it.

Paired with a volume floor, that becomes the useful question: not "what could I rank for", which is a long and mostly worthless list, but "what could I rank for that anybody actually searches".

The trap in this kind of list

Most keywords are low difficulty for an unhappy reason. Nobody competes for them because there is nothing to win - the demand is tiny, the intent is idle, or the search is answered on the results page without a click.

So treat a low score as an invitation to look rather than as a verdict. The keywords worth having are the ones that are cheap to reach and still lead somewhere, and only the second half of that is visible in the numbers.

The quickest sanity check is cost per click. If advertisers are paying for a term, somebody has established that the visit is worth money; if nobody bids on it at all, be honest about what ranking would earn you.

Choosing the two thresholds

The defaults - at least 100 monthly searches, difficulty of 20 or less - are deliberately conservative, and they are a starting point rather than a recommendation.

Raise the volume floor when the list is long and full of terms nobody searches.
Lower it when a narrow or specialist seed returns almost nothing.
Raise the difficulty ceiling if your site already has authority behind it.
Lower it towards 10 for a new site with few links, where 20 may still be optimistic.
Move one at a time, so you can see which lever changed the answer.

An empty result is information rather than a fault. It means the gap you described does not exist around that seed, and the seed is usually the thing to change.

Do low competition keywords still work in 2026?

They remain the most reliable route for a site without authority, because the alternative - competing for the terms everybody wants - is decided largely by links and age, and neither can be acquired quickly.

What has changed is the ceiling. AI summaries take the simplest informational searches, which is precisely where a lot of low difficulty terms live, so the easiest keywords to rank for are also the ones most likely to be answered without a visit.

That pushes the value towards specific, practical terms: comparisons, decisions, tasks with an outcome. Those are harder to summarise away and are usually the ones carrying a cost per click.

Turning the list into pages

Group before you write. A dozen low competition keywords are often one page seen from twelve angles, and publishing twelve thin pages to catch them all splits the signal and helps none of them.

Let the keyword decide the page rather than the other way round. A comparison term needs a comparison; a how-to needs instructions. Matching that is most of what makes an easy keyword actually easy.

Start where you already have something. A page that half-covers a qualifying term is closer to ranking than a new one, and improving it is faster than writing from scratch.

What this tool checks

The tool takes a seed keyword and asks our index for related keywords, keeping only those meeting the minimum search volume and maximum difficulty you set. Results are ordered by search volume, so the biggest opportunity that passed both thresholds is first.

The thresholds are applied when the list is built rather than to a list already fetched, which is what makes the tool useful. Ordered by volume alone, the top of an unfiltered list is almost entirely keywords far too competitive to be worth your time.

Figures come from our index rather than a live search, so they describe the picture held for those keywords and that location rather than results as they stand this second.

Where to go next

Once a keyword looks promising, price it properly. Score it on its own with the keyword difficulty checker, see the full set of figures in the keyword statistics tool, and check what searchers actually want from it with the keyword search intent tool.

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