How I Find Niche SEO Keywords That I Can Easily Rank For

Most websites chase the same broad keywords—and get lost in the noise.

It’s because they target generic terms while competing with industry giants that have been dominating for years.

But niche keywords? They’re the shortcut to faster rankings and higher conversions.

Carve out your own space by targeting the exact searches your ideal audience is making.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through my framework for finding niche SEO keywords that are ultra-relevant, low-competition, and easy to rank for.

5 Steps for Finding Niche SEO Keywords

1. Define Your Niche Target Audience

To connect with the right people using the right keywords, you first need to nail down your ideal customer and the pain points that drive them to search.

Here’s what I do:

a. Identify Pain Points

I ask myself, What problem does my product or service solve? Then, I write down the exact words customers might use to describe their challenges.

For example, if your customers have trouble finding eco-friendly home cleaning products, they might search for phrases like natural cleaning products under $20 or affordable reusable kitchen towels.

b. Refine User Intent

Intent reveals the purpose behind a search, helping you attract more relevant traffic.

Broad keywords—like running shoes—aren’t as effective as intent-focused ones like best running shoes for beginners with flat feet.

There are four main search intents:

1. Navigational: Users are searching for a specific website or page. Examples:

↳ Nike website

↳ Facebook login

↳ Amazon homepage

2. Informational: Users are looking for knowledge or answers. Examples:

↳ What is SEO?

↳ What is a soccer midfielder?

↳ How to bake sourdough bread?

↳ Tips for saving money on groceries

3. Commercial: Users are exploring options for products or services. Examples:

↳ Top smartphones under $500

↳ Best laptops for gaming

↳ Luxury hotels in Paris

4. Transactional: Users are ready to make a purchase. Examples:

↳ Order AirPods Pro

↳ Cheap flights to New York

↳ Buy organic skincare products

Now, if I’m creating a site focused on commercial intent, I’ll focus on keywords like best laptops for gaming. But to make it more niche-specific, I’ll go with variations like:

→ Top gaming laptops for beginners under $1500

→ Best laptops for gaming with long battery life

→ Affordable gaming laptops for casual gamers

→ Best budget laptops for gaming under $1000

→ Best compact gaming laptops for travel

→ Best lightweight laptops for gaming

By targeting these users who are already considering their options and are closer to making a purchase, I can bring in the right audience that’s more likely to convert.

Pro Tip: I always create personas (demographics, interests, behaviors) for my specific niche. This helps tailor my keyword list to my audience’s exact language.

2. Look for Common Questions in Your Niche

Next, I focus on finding long-tail questions people are asking. Answering these helps build trust and authority while attracting genuinely interested and engaged visitors.

Suppose, I’m creating a blog about soccer but I’m not sure if it’s a good area to explore.

First of all, I’ll take a look at some of the informational phrases and questions in the soccer niche.

You can find these questions using different free and paid tools, like:

→ Google’s Search Features: Autocomplete, PAA, and Related Searches

→ Question-Based Forums: Quora, Reddit, or niche community forums

→ Keyword Research Tools: SEMrush, Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner

→ Analyze Competitor Blogs: Blogs in your niche to see which topics perform well

I, personally, prefer using Google’s Autocomplete and Related Searches along with platforms like Quora and Reddit at this point in my research.

You can later expand your keyword list with specific tools.

So, let’s Google soccer and see what it autocompletes:

Hmmm, these would be good keywords for a website focused on reporting soccer scores and game schedules. But not what I’m looking for.

So, let’s see what we find in the People also ask section:

Now, we’re getting somewhere.

You can see people are searching for common things like what is soccer? and why is soccer called soccer?

While these are very broad questions, you can use them to start narrowing down on topics to cover on your blog.

Here’s a neat trick I use to uncover even more questions in the People also ask section: I click on one question and the list expands, giving me three, four new questions.

You can keep doing that and find some really good starters, like I found these:

Besides the People also ask section, you can explore platforms like Reddit, Quora, and specialized forums. You’ll find unfiltered questions that people in your niche are asking.

For example, if you’re a mattress brand catering to college students, you might see repeated questions like What is the best budget-friendly mattress for dorm rooms?

You can also explore social media platforms like Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube. Take a look at the comments and hashtags to find the questions or issues people are talking about.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to check out voice search queries. People often phrase things differently when speaking, like, “What’s the best vegan mascara under $20?” With smart speakers becoming so popular, voice-friendly keywords are more important than ever.

3. Check Out the Competition

By now, I have three things:

1. The niche I’m focusing on
2. Some common queries
3. My target audience

Next, I need to see the type of competitor websites that are out there.

To do that, I’ll Google one of the questions I identified in the above section, like How many positions are in soccer?

Then, I’ll review the type of results I get.

I also like to check if smaller affiliate or informational sites rank in the top five for key phrases when exploring a niche. If they are, it’s a great sign that the niche isn’t too competitive, giving me a real shot at creating a website that can stand out and compete.

But when I searched How many positions are in soccer? and saw results dominated by big players like soccer.com and other sports league sites, it felt like a red flag.

It was a sign that the niche might be too competitive, making it tough for a new site to break through and rank.

If the top results had been smaller informational or niche websites, it would’ve been a promising area to explore. But with big players like olympics.com dominating the space, starting a niche site about explaining soccer might not be the best move right now.

However, for the sake of this case study, I’ll continue with the soccer example below.

How to really know if a keyword is easy to rank for?

When analyzing the SERPs, look for these ranking gaps that give you an advantage:

☑ Missing Exact-Match Keywords in Titles → If top-ranking pages don’t have the exact phrase in their titles, Google might favor your article if it does.

☑ Short Content (Under 1000 Words) → If competitors’ articles are thin, writing a detailed 1500-2000 word post gives you an edge.

☑ Outdated Content → If top results were published 2+ years ago, updating the topic can help you rank faster.

☑ Poor Readability → If top results are hard to read (dense paragraphs, jargon-heavy), making your article clearer and well-structured improves ranking chances.

☑ Slow-Loading Pages → Run competitor pages through PageSpeed Insights. If they’re slow, Google may prioritize your fast-loading page.

☑ Non-Optimized URLs → If URLs don’t include the exact keyword, your well-optimized page might rank better.

This helps you validate ranking difficulty based on real weaknesses rather than just looking at keyword difficulty scores.

At the same time, it is important to have a clear idea of which keywords not to target.

“Kill a Keyword” Checklist: When to Drop a Keyword

Avoid keywords that have one or more of these red flags:

☒ All top-ranking results are big brands (Amazon, Wikipedia, Forbes, etc.).

☒ Every top-ranking page has 1000+ backlinks (too competitive).

☒ No smaller blogs or niche websites in the top 10 results.

☒ Google ranks mostly product pages (bad for blog content).

☒ Keyword has low search volume + weak commercial intent.

This saves you from wasting time on impossible-to-rank keywords before investing in content.

4. Use Keyword Research Tools

Now, suppose I’ve found a few niche websites ranking well for soccer-related keywords, my next step is to evaluate how big the soccer niche actually is.

You can do this manually, but that would literally take forever, so I prefer using the Keyword Magic Tool in Semrush.

Search for a broad term like soccer and explore the list of related keywords and their search volumes.

To narrow things down, I filter the results by Questions.

As you can see, it instantly brought the number of total keywords down from over two million to around 123K—showing there’s plenty of opportunity. And I can even filter it down further by setting the KD% to 50 or less.

Just click the KD% dropdown, type your desired range in the Custom range field and click Apply.

Now, you’ll see very limited keyword results.

In my case, it was just a little over five thousand, but their total search volume was still substantial.

So, at this stage, I focus on the potential traffic. You can’t expect your website to capture all the potential traffic, but if you work with some rough assumptions—like snagging just 10% of it—you could still end up with around 120K monthly searches. Not bad for a start!

Also, when you look at the list of key phrases, you’ll see plenty of long-tail phrases and their variations, like:

→ is soccer in the olympics​

→ what is offsides in soccer

→ how long is a soccer game

→ how many players on a soccer team​

The best part? These phrases all have a keyword difficulty under 50 and get thousands of searches. If I rank in the top three spots for even a few of them, it will bring in some solid traffic to the site.

Pro Tip: Use a mix of free (Google Trends, AnswerThePublic) and premium (Ahrefs, Semrush) tools for a well-rounded view. Free tools give you broad insights, while paid tools show the crucial metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and competitive data.

5. Analyze the Competitor Domains

Now, the top 5 results for my search terms were not from blogs or informational websites, but I dug deeper and found a few relevant sites to expand on my soccer example.

Here are a few domains that we’re going to analyze in SEMrush’s Domain Overview option to see if they have meaningful traffic or not:

1. ytpsports.com
2. rookieroad.com
3. soccermaniak.com

Go to the Domain Overview tool and enter your first competitor domain. Here’s what I got for ytsports.com:

It has an authority score of 13, with 9.5K in organic search traffic. It only launched in 2024, so it’s still pretty new, but it’s already showing some potential. With 45 referring domains linking back to it, the site is off to a solid start. While it’s early days, the steady growth in traffic and backlinks hints that this niche could have room to grow.

This shows me the niche has potential, but to get a clearer picture, I’ll compare it with other sites ranking for similar keywords.

So, next, I’ll check rookieroad.com.

It has an authority score of 32 and sees about 972 monthly visitors. This further confirms what I’m seeing—soccer is a promising niche with plenty of room for multiple sites to do well.

Lastly, I checked soccermaniak.com and found the following results:

All of this confirms that the soccer niche has a lot of potential. While there’s definitely competition, it’s clear there’s room to carve out a space with the right strategy.

So, looking at these numbers, what do they tell me about this niche?

Based on the three sites I’ve analyzed, it’s clear that if I want to succeed here, I’ll need a domain authority over 50 and a strong backlinking strategy. Most of these sites were built in the last couple of years and took some time to gain traction.

This tells me that if I dive into the soccer niche, I shouldn’t expect immediate results. The organic traffic trends show that success in this area requires patience and consistent effort over time.

In this case, I’d need to invest a lot of time and resources to compete with these established sites. Even though there’s plenty of search traffic, it could take one to two years—or more—to really compete. For me, that’s a bit too much to take on, but if you’re up for the challenge, it could be a great opportunity for you!

When evaluating a niche, it’s important to ask yourself a few key questions:

→ How strong are the competitors?

→ How defensible are their positions?

→ How big is the overall search opportunity?

If I had found that these sites only had a few hundred referring domains, I might’ve jumped at the chance to create a soccer website.

After reviewing their authority scores, backlink profiles, and how long it took them to gain traction, I’ve decided to pass on this niche. Hopefully, this example helps you see how to quickly evaluate whether a niche is worth pursuing!

Find the Right Niche SEO Keywords to Rank For

Overall, by focusing on specific, intent-driven keywords, you can attract targeted traffic, compete in less crowded spaces and ultimately maximize your ROI.

Trying to rank in a competitive industry as a small, local business? Check out the guides below:

↳ How to Get Local Keyword Search Volumes by City

↳ How I Do Local Keyword Research For Small Businesses

↳ 10 Practical Keyword Research Tips For Small Businesses

↳ How I Do International Keyword Research That Drives Traffic

Frequently Asked Questions