• If you don't have the budget or you're not ready to hire an SEO agency, don't fret! There are many SEO techniques you can start implementing to boost your site's visibility and drive more traffic.
• The keywords you use on your website and in your content are vital - they need to be relevant, have high search volume and low competition to give your small business a chance to compete. 
• In this article, we break down how to find high volume, low competition keywords and the top tools that can help you do so.

Running a company is constant work with a never-ending to-do list such as getting in touch with suppliers, taking care of customers, liaising with the accountant and so on.

But you know that your site is vital, and increasing its audience is essential to expand your business. If you don’t feel ready to work with an SEO agency or expert, you can start small and make your site profitable. With visitors.

In this article, I am going to focus on the content aspect of website management. To start with, I’d like to use a case study that I achieved with a very small website, of less than 30 pages, in the space of a year.

What Is a Profitable Keyword?

A keyword can be defined as 'profitable' when it drives targeted users to your site, and the users you're looking for are the ones willing to convert. What conversion means depends on your business goals. Some examples could be:

• a product direct sale (e-commerce);
• a newsletter subscriber (e-commerce or high ticket sale);
• a new lead via the contact form (b2b);
• the views of a number of pages (news online).

All of these can be considered conversions that make your business grow.

There is also a misconception you need to consider.

In the past you were looking to rank for a very specific keyword - e.g.: "buy red dresses online" or "send flowers online". Nowadays, Google recognizes the topic of a page even if the terms you search don't appear in the text.

This happens because whilst analyzing a page, the algorithm can find out the topic of the content.

What Is a Low Competition Keyword?

A low competition keyword is a term you can afford to compete for. In keyword research, businesses are after keywords with high volume searches per month.

This means that if a term is searched hundreds of thousands of times per month, there's a very high chance many others are trying to rank in the top 10 Google listing. And this makes the work harder.

Most of the times, the higher you rank the more users land on your site, and the more they are willing to convert (if you are a good fit for them).

But you don't have to rank for any keyword. You want a user to land on your site if they’re interested in your content or products, and so support your financial growth.

Traffic for the sake of traffic is something you shouldn't be after. These visits will not be a good asset for your business.

How to Find High Volume Low Competition Keywords 

To answer this question you should start with the knowledge of your business. As I said earlier you shouldn't rank for any keyword but you should go after keywords that:

• represent part of your business
• represent a topic
• help your visitors to get involved with your business
• make your visitors engage with your content
• create trust towards your brand
• are likely to rank in the top positions
• have low competition

In order to find low competition keywords with high traffic you need to look out for:

1. Your customers' language 
2. Your own website data 
3. Direct competitors 
4. Your website internal search

1. Your Customers' Language

Your first asset for finding keyword ideas are your customers. You should analyze every touchpoint you have for an initial list.
This means engaging with the sales team who engage with potential clients/clients and therefore learn their language, frequent questions and the terms they use to describe a certain product or service. This may not be the "right" language or the correct way to call your service, but it’s how your customers define them.
Use all your resources: salespeople in the shops, phone calls, customers reviews, customers support email, online forums, email messages, etc.

2. Your Own Website Data

Google Analytics doesn't provide keywords data anymore but another keyword tool can, it's called Google Search Console.

First of all, you need to set up it for your own site, wait a few days - 2 to 3 - to make the tool collect the data. Then you go on "Search Analytics" (or "Performances" with the new version of the tool) and analyze the keywords you rank for and their current position.

The default data shows you a long list of keywords, the first filter you should add is your own country (e.g.: Australia) and then analysing each page ranking for some keywords.
A broad list of words doesn't help much if it’s not related to a specific page of your site. You can follow this guide to learn more about Google Search Console.

3. Direct Competitors

This is not commonly utilized. Use your direct competitors to learn more relevant keywords. Businesses you are competing with are a goldmine for collecting keywords ideas. You should analyze your direct competitors' websites and find out what they're ranking for.

Since you are after the same customers, their efforts to improve their website can be very helpful to you as well, as they’ve already done part of the job! I'll explain this in more detail later.

4. Your Website Internal Search

You should implement your site's internal search in Google Analytics, this is a no-brainer. Here you can find the words your current users are looking for on your website.
This means that customers may be struggling to find what they are looking for such as a product, or they may just be lazy. From analyzing this you can (create and) clearly show the relevant page to your users?

What Are the Best Keyword Research Tools?

Some of the most popular keyword research tools you can use are:

1. Google Keyword Planner
2. Google Correlate 
3. Ahrefs 
4. SEMrush

1. Google Keyword Planner (free)

Once you’ve defined who your direct competitors are looking at their pages and find the ones you're competing with.
I'm referring to pages and not websites (which includes hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousand keywords). Analyze the specific page your customers are after on their website so that you can compete with them. 

Let's use this Direct2Florist page as an example,

Go to Keyword Planner:

1. Insert a page you're competing within Google Keyword Planner
2. Choose the relevant country-level parameters
3. Scroll down the keywords list and note the most relevant related to your business

2. Google Correlate (free)

Google Correlate is a tool that can find keyword search patterns related to the current real-world search trends. With this tool, you can find terms related to your seed keywords which you wouldn't find with other tools.

1. Go to Google Trends
2. Define the relevant country
3. Insert your seed keyword
4. Analyze the results

3. Ahrefs: competitors' popular pages (paid / $7 for one week)

Ahrefs is an analysis tool for SEO. It analyzes backlinks, keywords and trends. With this tool, you can see which keywords your competitors rank for and their most popular pages.

1. Insert your competitor's domain in the Site Explorer bar
2. Click on Top Pages
3. Analyze their keywords to determine which good content you need to create for your website.

Ahrefs: competitors page analysis (paid / $7 for one week)

1. Insert your competitor's page in the Site Explorer form and click on Organic keywords.
2. Filter the results so that you can find:

• Low competition keywords (0 to 2)
• Second-page results for that given page

4. SEMrush (paid)

SEMrush is a rival of Ahrefs, it gives you which keywords your competitors are ranking for, their traffic trend over the last few years and their paid activity. Many features are very similar to Ahrefs but below I'm going to show you a different approach.

What we want is to find some quick win keywords. The terms we are looking for are the ones with a good amount of monthly searches and a low number of search results. With this kind of keyword, it will be easier to make your page rank for these easy win keywords.

1. Insert your competitor domain name in SEMrush
2. Click on Keywords
3. Filter the results

You will not find a good fit every time, but when the keyword appears, you'll recognize it.

Tips to Create Valuable New Content Based on Your Keywords

Now that you now have compiled target keywords, what is the next step?

Analyze the current results!

First, you have to determine if you can compete with your search competitors. Search competitors are the ones shown in the search results of Google. You have to be mindful of what kind of results Google shows.

If your site is a content, magazine or corporate site and the results listed in the top 10 are e-commerce products, then forget it. What you have to look for is a search result which includes the kind of results you can provide. There’s no point trying to compete for a keyword whose content is entirely different from the current results.

What are the top results? Once you’ve ascertained if you can compete for a specific keyword you need to analyse the current results in terms of the type of content, what the page talks about, the structure of the pages, photos and videos, ease of reading and formatting.

Look at the top 5 pages to establish why Google considers them the best but also scan the second results page as you may find some hidden gems or potential new growing competitors.

Once your keywords are defined, you need to write your content. A great tool is Answerthepublic.com. It shows questions and topics related to your keyword.

Now you can write your content.

For each keyword, you can now list different sets of keywords which you can use to comprise each paragraph of your content. Through utilising this strategic method you will be able to rank for a larger set of terms related to the main keyword, or your topic.