How to Find High Search Volume Low Competition Keywords (For Free)

Looking for a quick, free and easy way to find high search volume low competition keywords? We’ll cover this topic step-by-step in detail in this HOW TO guide. Check out the video for a visual tutorial or skip below to the text if you prefer to read about it.

If you need help accessing Keyword Planner please see our post that covers how to access Google Keyword Planner if you are in expert mode or how to gain access to Keyword Planner if you are in a new account or smart campaigns mode.

As always, if you need any help with keyword research or other digital marketing services for your business please reach out to us for help.

Video Transcript (Edited For Readability): How to Find High Search Volume Low Competition Keywords for Free

Introduction

Hey everyone. I wanted to do a quick video for everyone. One of the questions we get asked a lot here at Macaw Digital Marketing is how to find high search volume, low competition keywords. So we just wanted to make a quick video to show you how to go about doing it.

This is another video centered around a low/no-cost theme. You may have noticed most of our videos and our tutorials are for smaller businesses and using low cost, if not free tools. For example, we just did the article focusing on doing keyword research for free.

So keeping with that theme, we’re going to keep using a free tool. And I think the Google Keyword Planner is a great tool to start with for a free tool.

If you have a Google Ads account you should be all set to jump in easily. If not, you can sign up for a Google Ads account for free to get access. So we’ll jump right into Google ads and we’ll get you guys set up. So, again, the goal of this tutorial is to find high search volume, low competition keywords.

How to Get To The Keyword Planner Tool

So just in case you are a complete beginner, which is fine, we’ll start from the very beginning.

To get to keyword planner, you go into your Google ads account. Go into tools and settings. And then over on the planning section, we’ll click on Keyword Planner.

Step-By-Step Tutorial: How to Find High Volume, Low Competition Keywords in Google Keyword Planner

For purposes of this example, I was trying to find a keyword or a topic or keywords around email marketing sequences.

Add Relevant Keywords to Get Started

So you can see the the first thing you’d want to do is add the key words that you think are going to be the topics that people are searching for related to your topic. And you can use both high level or longer-tail keywords to start. For our example we include some terms using “how to use”, “what is”, etc. keywords.

You might want to put a combination of those different types of keywords. So you could put in things like email marketing, email marketing automation, because obviously you want to find something around marketing automation and email marketing.

So you could include those two big, high-level ones. And then you also could include more in-depth (longer-tail) ones there, too. So if you put longer tail keywords in there, Google will actually spit back more of the longer tail keywords as well, which is helpful.

Our example topic is email marketing automation. But your search will be whatever you are interested in. So for whatever topic that you’re looking for, put some relevant keywords in there. And again, you have 10 keywords that you can put in at a time. So try to add as many as you can.

And then also when you click for the results Google will allow you to broaden your search and give you some suggestions there. Those are not always on point. though so be careful if you’re including those. But say you only have one or two keywords. It might be a good way to expand the search that you’re looking for.

Analyzing the Results in Keyword Planner

So when you hit the search button in keyword planner, you can scroll down and see the results that you’re going to find for the keywords that you provided.

And you can see here a pretty good amount of keywords. The keywords we provided to the keyword planner return around the two thousand keyword results.

As a very, very quick overview of the Keyword Planner platform if you guys have not used it ever before. If you’ve never used it before, you have the keywords on the left side. You can filter the keywords by relevance or you can filter them by other factors as well, including the average monthly searches and the competition level.

Also, so you know over on the right hand side is more about the cost per click (CPC) that you might expect to pay if you’re actually using these in ad campaigns. This is sometimes a good indication of keywords that have a high value. Or, in other words, keywords that are valuable in terms of generating sales/conversions.

If you’re looking for keywords or topics that you want to eventually use in Google ads campaigns, then you can pay attention to the high and low CPC values as well. This is especially true if you have a budget and you’re not looking to to spend a larger amount of money. So those are kind of the other factors that we have to use to decide on which keywords to use within keyword planner.

Back to the topic or the goal that we have in mind for this, which is how to find high search volume, low competition keywords. You can do that one of two ways. First, you can do it right in Keyword Planner. Second, you can export the results and filter them out on a worksheet. We discuss both now.

Finding High Search Volume Low Competition Keywords in the Keywords Planner Tool

First, you can work right within the platform itself and you can filter by the competition level and the average monthly searches.

If you’re doing it inside Keyword Planner you want to go in here and look for ones where the competition level is lower or medium. For for purposes of this excercise, we’re going to be looking for low competition.

Although you can do this right inside Keyword Planner, this is not the most effective way to accomplish it.

If you’re looking for high competition keywords, you’re probably going to pull up a lot of keywords, especially for this topic.

But when you sort the competition going from low to high its a bit trickier. You can see some of the results don’t have any competition next to them so you can’t tell what the competition level actually is. That’s because of the other lower search volume/usage, most likely. In other words, there isn’t enough data.

So if you really want to do this within the keyword planner platform, you could scroll down the sorted list. We’d want to get to keywords on the list that at least have low competition (vs. having no value) at this point. And you can see kind of where those start. Once you get to the low competition keywords you can go through those and find ones with higher search volumes.

Higher search volume will be dependent on your particular use. If its for a high-level keyword, then you want a high volume. This is generalized, I know, but it will really depend on the topic you are researching. If you are looking for niche keywords that is going to be different from a topic like email marketing automation.

You can scroll through this list all the way down and see if there’s anything that kind of sticks out in terms of high volume. And you can see that this is is becoming a little bit of a tedious process. You can keep doing this and you keep doing it over and over takes a bit of time.

So what I would recommend to you is not doing it in Keyword Planner. There is an easier way to do it, which we’ll go over now.

Finding High Search Volume Low Competition Keywords in the Keywords Planner Tool

Again, if you’ve never used the Keyword planner in Google Ads before be aware that you have the option to download the results. So you can download it as a Google sheet or as a CSV. I prefer to open it up in Excel. So we’ll download it as a CSV.

When you open the CSV file you will actually also have more details. You can actually see the searches per month over the last year. This is more data versus what you saw in the actual platform itself.

So what I would always recommend doing is taking it and filtering out the data in Excel. In turn, the first step is adding the filters to the worksheet. Then you essentially click on the competition column, and filter it to show only keywords with “Low” competition.

And then you are left with only the keywords that have a low competition. Once you have this list you can actually go to the search volume column and sort it by high volume to low volume (Z to A).

So at this point you’ll see a list of low competition terms sorted by monthly search volume.

Essentially, within the sorted CSV file you can see all the keywords that have low competition according to the Google ads platform. And then you can sort to see the ones with high monthly search volumes.

Using Your Worksheet to Spot Trends In the High Search Volume Low Competition Keywords

Another cool thing to note is if you really wanted to get into the trends of it. You can see what’s trending up, what’s trending down using the 12 month search volume data. You could actually create graphs out of the past 12 month data as well. You’ll see if the the search was high or low at one point and if it’s going down or if it’s trending up.

This could be helpful information as well, especially if you’re looking for a topic that is more in demand at this very minute. But within this worksheet you can try to find keywords that you think makes sense for your purposes. So depending on what your purpose is, if you’re looking for high level keywords, you know, things like this might make sense. If you’re looking for more longer tailored keywords, you can look for those as well within the results.

Conclusion

In summary, this is a fairly easy way to find high search volume low competition keywords for free using free tools.

But this is a pretty good representation of the low competition, high volume keywords related to the keywords you provided.

As a next step I would recommend checking out the the earlier posts that I did on how to do keyword research for free. Using the techniques we talked about in that article you can take a lot of these higher level keywords you found from this tutorial. If you’re looking for more long-tailed keywords you can use these and pop them into the other free tools that we talked about to to try to get more long-tail keywords out of it.

So essentially, by using this method you will find a good number of low competition, high volume keywords that are higher level keywords for pages, categories, etc. You might also find some longer tail keywords that you could create content around. If you don’t find longer tail keywords using this exercise then you can search for them using our other tutorial.

So if you want to create a page around these high level keywords, there might be things in here that you could you could pull out to use. And then if you wanted to find topics that are related to the high level keywords you could use the process we detailed in our article on doing keyword research for free.