How to find low competition keywords that people actually search for

"Low competition" is not a badge a tool prints next to a keyword. It is a fact about the search results: who is in the top 10 and how hard they are to displace. Here is how to find such keywords — with demand, not just with a green number.

Why keyword difficulty scores mislead

Most tools compute difficulty from backlinks of the ranking pages. That misses three things founders run into every week: the query is a brand name (12,000 searches for someone else's product), the top is held by store giants with hundreds of thousands of ratings, or the volume is a Google Ads group — five wordings that share one number while real clicks go to a single one. A keyword can be "difficulty 15" and still be unwinnable.

The method: demand × weak top

  1. Collect every wording people type around your product: suggestions, related queries, and the keywords your competitors rank for. Hundreds of candidates, not ten.
  2. Keep the ones with real clicks. Volume alone lies; clickstream data shows which wording people actually use. Two word orders can both show 1,600 while people click 665 vs 16.
  3. Look at the top 10 for each candidate. Forums, Reddit threads, small sites with no authority, apps with a few hundred ratings — that is a weak top. Wikipedia, Apple docs, apps with 500,000 ratings — that is a year of work.
  4. Flag brands and navigational queries. If the #1 domain equals the query, people want that site, not yours.
  5. Use the keyword gap. Keywords where two or more competitors rank and you don't have proven demand — and often a weaker top than the head terms.
Example. For a video-translation app, "dubbing" looked big (9,900 searches) but belonged to brands with a difficulty of 70+. "Translate YouTube video" had fewer searches, real clicks, and a top 10 of small sites and forums. That keyword went into the title and the website — 22,900 users later, with no ads. The full case →

Long tail, keyword gap, niche keywords — which is which

TermWhat it means in practiceHow the report shows it
Long tail keywords3–5-word queries with small volume each but exact intentThe "queries for exactly this kind of product" list, with real clicks
Keyword gapKeywords competitors rank for and you don'tThe gap table: keyword, searches, how many competitors rank
Niche keywordsQueries specific to a segment (a role, a situation, a platform)Your own phrases checked: demand or "people search differently — this way"
Low competition keywordsDemand + a top 10 you can enterDifficulty per keyword with the top-10 composition, plus the "opportunities" list

Do it once, for your product

The Riwords report runs this method for your app or website in about 20 minutes: competitors, hundreds of candidate keywords with real clicks, difficulty with the top-10 composition, the gap, and a short list of opportunities with the action for each — title, page or article. $49, one-time.

Questions people ask

How do I find low competition keywords for free?

Start with the free competitor analysis on riwords.com: it shows your competitors and the keywords they put in titles. Then, for the phrases you care about, check who sits in Google's top 10 — if it is forums and small sites, the keyword is winnable. The paid report does this for hundreds of keywords with real clicks.

What is a good keyword difficulty for a new website or app?

Numbers differ by tool; what matters is the top 10. If it contains Reddit, small sites or apps with few ratings, a new product can enter in months. If it is Wikipedia, big media or apps with hundreds of thousands of ratings, plan for a year or pick another keyword.

How to find long tail keywords with search volume?

Expand from your seed phrases (suggestions, related queries, competitor keyword lists), then filter by real clicks rather than volume. Long-tail phrases often show tiny volume but exact intent — the report keeps them in a separate list.

What is a keyword gap?

Keywords your competitors rank for and you don't. Because competitors already get traffic from them, the demand is proven; the report lists the gap with search volume and how many competitors rank for each.

Can you check whether my keyword has any demand?

Yes — you list the phrases you plan to rank for and the report checks them literally. In one case 'meditation for founders' had 0 searches while 'stop overthinking' had 1,600; the report shows what people type instead.

Free competitor analysis — find my competitors' keywords