Most people start keyword research by entering a few broad seed keywords into a popular keyword tool, then checking keyword ideas.
There’s nothing wrong with this process because it makes sense to tackle popular keywords. But it does leave some of the less obvious keywords on the table.
In this guide, you’ll learn five advanced keyword research tips for finding untapped keywords.
1. Find newly published pages with traffic
If you want to find keywords that you can potentially rank for quickly, look for newly published pages that already get traffic from Google. You can do this in Ahrefs’ Content Explorer.
Enter a broad topic
Switch the search mode to “In title”
Filter for pages published once within the last 90 days
Filter for pages with an estimated 500+ monthly search visits
Filter for pages on sites with a DR less than or equal yours
Exclude results from homepages and subdomains
For example, let’s say we’re in the fitness niche. If we search for “protein” and filter the results, we end up with 10 pages, including this one about the top 20 highest protein nuts and seeds.
Recently published page with traffic
If we hit the “Details” caret and check the page’s traffic, we see it started attracting organic traffic just a few days after publishing. Since then, it’s been consistently getting around 1.1K monthly search visits.
Recently published page's traffic over time
If we switch to the “Organic keywords” tab, we see that it’s getting most of this traffic from keyword rankings in the U.S.
Recently published page's keyword rankings
Most of these keywords also have reasonably low Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores.
Most of the keywords the page is ranking for are low difficulty
Given that this site has no more authority than our hypothetical fitness website (because we filtered by DR), chances are we can also rank for this keyword fairly quickly.
Here’s another page that ranked quickly:
Another newly published page that ranked quickly
This time, it’s about blueberry Kodiak cake muffins.
If we hit the “Details” caret again, we see that it was attracting an estimated 963 monthly search visits just two months after publishing. And it’s getting even more traffic now.
Traffic to the recently published page over time
This time, it gets most of its search traffic from the keyword “kodiak cake muffins,” which has a KD score of just 12.
Keyword rankings for the newly published page—with most being low difficulty
This could be another good keyword to target for some quick organic traffic.
Keep in mind that this method can unearth pages with short traffic spikes. This can happen when a page jumps in and out of the top 10 for a high-volume keyword or ranks in the “Top Stories” SERP feature.
You should always further investigate where a page gets its traffic from before committing to creating content. You can do this in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
2. Find competitors’ low-competition topics
If your competitors are getting search traffic whatsapp number list from Google, they’ve probably already done keyword research. This means you can piggyback off their hard work by reverse engineering the low-competition topics they rank for.
Here’s how to do that:
Enter a competitor’s domain into Site Explorer
Go to the Top pages report
Filter for traffic from low-difficulty keywords, say under KD 20
Filter for pages with 500+ estimated monthly search visits
You’ll now see pages with at least 500 monthly visits from keywords with low KD scores.
Pages with the most traffic from low-difficulty keywords
The traffic column shows the page’s estimated traffic from keywords with low KD scores.
If you see a topic you may want to target, hit the caret next to the URL and compare the URL’s total estimated traffic with the amount of traffic it gets from low-KD terms (the number in the traffic column).
If these two numbers are relatively close, it’s a low-competition topic.