How to Find Low-Competition Keywords

Mine Your Own Customers for Keyword Candidates

Keyword tools are useful, but they're guessing at intent from search volume. Your customers aren't guessing — they're telling you exactly how they think about their problem, for free, every day. Go back through customer emails, DMs, reviews, and notes from sales calls and pull out the actual phrases people use. Real customers rarely talk like a keyword tool. They say things like "why does my invoice keep bouncing" instead of "invoice management software." Those specific, oddly-phrased questions are usually far less competitive than the polished industry term, and they're closer to a real buying moment.

Autocomplete and "People also ask" work the same way from the Google side — they show you how people phrase things when nobody's coaching them. Type the start of a question your customers ask and see what Google finishes it with.

Modifiers do a lot of the heavy lifting here too. Adding a city, a specific use case, or an industry-specific term to a broader keyword can cut competition dramatically without cutting relevance. "Accounting software" is a brutal keyword. "Accounting software for food trucks in Austin" has a fraction of the competition and attracts people who are far closer to actually buying. If you want a more structured way to turn this kind of raw customer language into a workable keyword list, we've covered that process in more depth in our guide to keyword research for non-SEO experts.

Score Each Keyword Before You Commit

Once you've got a list of candidates, don't just default to whichever one has the highest search volume — score them instead. A simple 1-5 scale across three factors works well for most small businesses:

1. Competition level — based on what you saw on the SERP. Weak or thin results score high; entrenched brands score low.
2. Relevance — how directly the keyword connects to what you actually sell or do.
3. Intent match — whether the person searching that phrase is close to a buying decision, or just browsing for information.

Add up the three scores and rank your list from there. This does two useful things: it stops you from chasing volume for its own sake, and it forces you to be honest about relevance instead of writing about anything remotely related to your industry.

If your main goal is customers rather than pageviews, weight intent match heavily. A keyword with lower volume but clear buyer intent — someone searching for a specific solution, comparing options, or ready to book — will usually outperform a broad informational term that brings in readers who were never going to buy anything. We go into how to spot and prioritize these in our post on ranking for buyer-intent keywords.

Turn the List Into a Publishing Habit

A scored keyword list sitting in a spreadsheet does nothing. The value only shows up once the content is written, published, and indexed — and low-competition windows don't stay open forever. Someone else can spot the same gap and fill it first.

The fix is treating this as a habit, not a one-off project. Most small businesses do fine batching keyword research monthly: spend an hour reviewing customer language, checking SERPs, and scoring new candidates, then work down the list in order of score until the next batch.

This is the exact workflow AI Builders folds into its content engine. It researches keywords, plans an outline, drafts the article, and runs its own editor pass, then publishes on whatever schedule you set — weekly, twice a week, or daily — as real commits to your own site. You still set that schedule and decide the cadence, and you can run it in draft-only mode to read every post before it goes live. Anything the editor pass isn't confident about gets held for review instead of published automatically. The research step doesn't disappear into a black box — it becomes a consistent, low-effort input into content that actually goes out the door on time.

Stop waiting on content that never gets written. Get AI Assistant, pick your schedule, and let the content engine research, write, edit and publish for you.