Keyword research is where you find what your target customers are searching for in Google, then analyze and compare those terms to prioritize the best opportunities.

You can learn how to do that in our beginner’s guide to keyword research. But as most startups have little to no “authority” and brand equity, we recommend initially targeting low-competition keywords that you can rank for without many backlinks or high website authority.

So, for example, pet insurance startups will likely have a hard time ranking for a keyword like “pet insurance” because the #1 SERP (search engine result page) is dominated by pages with lots of backlinks.

Our Keyword Difficulty (KD) score suggests that you’ll need backlinks from about 932 websites to rank in the top 10:

KD score of 92 for keyword "pet insurance"

But within that broad topic, you can find low-competition keywords like “french bulldog pet insurance.”

KD score of 9 for keyword "french bulldog pet insurance"

You can find low-competition keywords at scale using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Just enter a topic there, go to the Matching terms report, and set your KD to max 20.

Dividing the workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on their strengths. The improvements are similar on desktop and mobile. Most of the focus in 2021 was on mobile results.

As a result, for a “seed” keyword like “pet insurance,” you’ll get 426 potential low-competition keyword ideas you can create content for.

Matching terms report results for keyword "pet insurance"

Note that these are your potential keyword ideas because you need to consider a few more factors before finally selecting a keyword—e.g., search intent, competitors’ brand equity, and traffic potential. We explain how to assess those factors in our guide to finding low-competition keywords and in this video.

Beyond this, you can also take inspiration from your competitors’ low-competition keywords.

Here’s how to find those in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:

Enter a competitor’s domain

Hit search

Go to the Organic Keywords 2.0 report

Add a KD filter set to max 20

For example, if you run a design software startup and compete with Invision, you can see all the low-competition keywords it ranks for: