The SEO Strategy to BREAK into Competitive Niches
These websites have had massive growth
in SEO traffic in some of the world's most competitive online niches. The best part? They all use the exact same SEO strategy. The strategy goes something like this: find low
competition keywords with business potential, rank for these topics which will build both your
website's authority and bankroll, use that authority and bankroll to progressively go after more
competitive keywords, and rinse and repeat until your site is so authoritative that
it can rank for basically anything. And then all you have to do is kick back,
look up into the sky and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Now, while this may sound like pure bliss,
the biggest obstacle is at the beginning: finding low competition keywords
with high business potential.
But the solution to this problem is in this box. Now, we have four items here: we have a notebook,
a bag of seeds, cool, a classic game of connect four, and this toy rabbit. All of these items play a significant role
in the process I'm about to share with you. And while they hold little utility on their own,
when you combine them together, like you'd do with ingredients for a recipe, the end result
is a golden keyword research strategy that can help you find low and sometimes even
no competition with business potential. And I'll prove to you this works as we head
on over to the wheel of impossible niches. This wheel contains some of the most
competitive online niches on the planet. It's got everything from gambling to insurance
to web hosting, and the list goes on.
Let's give this a spin and whatever niche it
lands on is the niche that we're going to use to find low competition topics with business potential. And there you have it, folks. Credit cards and personal finance it is. Back to the box. Now, the first item I want to talk
to you about is this notebook. This book right here is special. It holds the secrets to everything
that happens at Ahrefs. It shows our product roadmap, the technical
details that make our crawler the most active in all of SEO land, and it even holds the secrets
of what gives us an edge over our competitors.
This book is laser-focused on
our product and business. And if you want to experience the goodness
of this golden keyword research strategy, then your keyword selection strategy should
be no different – laser-focused around your product and business. Now, let's put the notebook to the side and
talk about this strange one right here. A bag of seeds. So it looks like this bag is full of
pumpkin and sunflower seeds.
Both are edible. Both are delicious. But both are pretty ordinary. Now, if you dig into this bag,
you're going to find this. These are hemp seeds. Not everyone has tried them. They don't look as appetizing, they don't taste
as appetizing, but they're more nutrient dense, they contain omega 6 fatty acid, and provide
tons of other health benefits that pumpkin and sunflower seeds unfortunately
don't provide. Hemp seeds are unique and for
some, are the key to a healthy diet. And in the same way, using unique seeds
in your keyword research will be the key to penetrate SERPs in competitive niches. These are what will help you find low
competition topics with business potential. For example, if I gave you five seconds to
think about seed keywords for our credit card and personal finance niche, chances are,
you and I will come back with the same two seed keywords. We'd search them in a keyword research tool
like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, go to a Keyword ideas report, and set some keyword difficulty
filters, only to realize that most keywords are branded queries where our site
probably wouldn't be able to rank.
And even if we did rank, we wouldn't be able
to extract any value from these "login"-type queries because you can't help people
login to their credit card account. The reason why there are barely any good low
competition keywords here is because your competitors all did keyword research
with the exact same seed keywords. They went after the low competition keywords and
those are now mid- to high- competition keywords. Now, if you do this exact same process but
use unique seed keywords instead, then you end up with very different results. And the fastest way to find unique
seeds is to use ChatGPT. So I'll type: "give me 20 words or
phrases related to credit cards." And in a second or two, you have a whole
bunch of potentially unique seeds. Ask for more… and there you have it. Now, if you clean up some of these seeds,
take them to a keyword research tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, then go to a Keyword
ideas report and set the exact same filters as we did before, we actually have some good content
ideas, like "650 credit score," "cash advances at capital one," "cash advance apps that don't use
plaid," "how much of a home loan you can get with a 650 credit score," and there's actually so
many good topics here if you take 15 minutes to sift through the results.
Now, whether these keywords have "high"
business potential or not depends on what you do as a business. But in my opinion, these topics seem pretty
versatile for affiliates, credit card companies, mortgage companies and even general info sites. Alright, so you have these low competition
keywords with business potential thanks to unique seeds and your trusty notebook ensures
that you align these topics with your business and product. But stopping here would be a huge mistake
because you'd be missing out on what this can do for you. While this might look like a classic game for
children, Connect Four is a game all about identifying and playing off of patterns.
And once you identify that pattern… Beating the competition is quite easy. Crushed! So, looking back at our keyword ideas report
of low competition credit card keywords, what pattern do you see here? That's right! We have some very low competition
keywords related to specific credit scores. More specifically, these
keywords end in a 0 or a 5. And if we look at the top-ranking pages for one
of these keywords, you'll see that the pages are about whether that credit
score is good or bad. So, let's start a new search in Ahrefs' Keywords
Explorer with just the seeds, "credit score" and "credit scores." Then let's go back to the Matching Terms report.
Now, to find specific credit score keywords with
a 0 or 5 at the end, we can use the Include filter. And all I'll do is add "*0 , *5." And what the asterisk will
do is act as a wild card. So let's hit the Any word tab and apply the filter. Finally, I'll set a keyword difficulty score with a low
maximum number and hit the Show result button. And now we have over 1,500 low competition
keywords with a cumulative search volume of around 200,000 searches in just the US
alone in one of the most competitive niches in the online and offline world.
But we're not done yet. In fact, we've only begun our work here because
it would be a shame not to put Sam to work. Not me – this one. Meet Sam. She loves organic carrots from the grocery store. And she loves long walks in the woods. But there's nothing she enjoys more than
to burrow into a hole to see where it leads. We need to let our curiosity lead us down
these rabbit holes because your competitors that have experienced the sweet, sweet nectar
of low hanging keyword research driven fruit have probably gone all in and found a whole
bunch of low competition keywords that are driving business value for them. So, all you have to do to uncover these untapped
topics is find who those competitors are and follow the rabbit hole. Here's how it's done. First, you're going to need a list
of low competition topics. I made a list of a hundred or so keywords
based on the exact reports I showed you before.
Next, you'll want to paste that list of keywords into
Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer and run a new search. Then, I'll go to the Traffic Share by Domains
report which is going to show us the websites that get the most search traffic based on
these low competition keywords – meaning, websites that have already done this
research and executed on their rankings. Now, because there's going to be a mix of
high and low authority sites, we'll need to export the list and take it into a tool like Ahrefs'
Batch Analysis which will show us the SEO metrics for up to 200 sites at a time.
The last thing I'm going to do is sort the
data in ascending order by Domain Rating, which is a score that represents a website's authority. And now all you need to do is this. Look at the DR column along with the Traffic column. If you notice a low authority website that gets a
decent amount of search traffic like these ones, then fixate your eyes to the domain name. If the domain name looks like a relevant niche
site to yours, then it's time to follow the rabbit hole. For example, "cain mortgage team"
obviously looks like a site about mortgages. Click it – and yes, it is. Mortgages are another insanely competitive niche. And if your site happens to be about personal
finance, then this looks like a rabbit hole worth following.
So, I'll take that mortgage site's domain and
paste it into Ahrefs' Site Explorer, then go to the Top Pages report to see the pages
that send them the most search traffic. And I'm pretty sure that we've just uncovered
some more low competition topics like "how much house can i afford with a 60k salary"
or "protected interest rates in 5 years." Sift through all the topics and add
any worthy ones to your keyword list.
And when you're done, go back to Batch
Analysis, choose your next competitor and do the exact same thing. And if you run out of competitors, go back
a step and play a game of connect four. Look for patterns in your
competitor's keyword rankings. For example, this topic of "how much house
can I afford" also has a specific number there. So let's go back to Keywords Explorer and
search for "how much house can I afford." Hit the Matching terms report and let's set
those same filters that we did in the beginning. And we now have even more low competition
topics that are built around a pattern. Now, follow those rabbit holes and in the end,
you end up with a golden keyword research strategy that can help kickstart your growth
in even the most competitive niches. Then you need to go and create content that's
actually going to rank in Google for these keywords. And this will again, build your bankroll and help
you earn backlinks to your content building your site's authority.
Then rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And when that day comes where you
get to enjoy the fruits of your labor, remember the guy on the grass..
