Find low competition keywords ecommerce blog teams can actually rank for. A practical 7-step workflow using free and freemium tools to surface gaps fast.
Most Shopify founders approach low competition keywords ecommerce blog research the same way: they type a product-adjacent phrase into a tool, see a number like 22,000 monthly searches, and try to rank for it. Then they watch competitors with 10x the domain authority sweep every spot on page one.
The smarter play is to skip those crowded terms entirely. A 40-search-per-month keyword with no real competition in the top 10 can outperform a 10,000-search keyword where your page sits on page three. Ranking at position #3 for a smaller query drives actual clicks. Ranking at position #30 for a big one drives nothing.
Finding low competition keywords for your ecommerce blog is about spotting the informational gaps your competitors have left open and filling them before anyone else does. This workflow shows you exactly how, using tools that are free or close to it.
Before you look at a single competitor, check what Google is already trying to send you. Search Console holds a list of queries you're ranking for but not fully capturing, and it's free.
Open the Performance > Search Results report. Filter by position: set the minimum to 5 and the maximum to 20. What you're looking at now are queries where Google already thinks your site is relevant enough to show, but not confident enough to put you on the first page or top of it.
Export the list, sort by impressions, and look for queries that have 200+ impressions but fewer than 10 clicks. Those are your near-miss keywords. Many will be informational long-tail phrases, the exact type that ecommerce blogs can own with a single well-structured post.
One honest limitation: Search Console shows your own data only. It doesn't show you what competitors rank for, and it anonymizes some low-volume queries. Think of it as your starting point, not your whole strategy.
This step costs nothing and takes about 10 minutes. Most ecommerce stores and content sites publish a sitemap at domain.com/sitemap.xml. Many generate separate blog sitemaps at domain.com/sitemap_posts.xml or domain.com/blog-sitemap.xml.
Pick two or three direct competitors: stores that sell similar products to yours and show up when you search your core topics in incognito mode. Pull their sitemaps and filter the URLs to those containing /blog/, /learn/, or /articles/. What you now have is the complete list of topics they've blogged about.
Paste those URLs into a spreadsheet. Scan the slugs and titles. You're looking for two things:
Cross-reference their topic list against yours. Any theme that appears on their sitemap but not yours is a candidate. Any theme that appears on neither sitemap is the most valuable kind — you'd be first.
Sitemaps tell you what competitors wrote. A keyword gap tool tells you what they're actually ranking for. There's a difference. A post can exist without ranking, and some pages rank for dozens of queries beyond what the title suggests.
Here are the most practical options depending on your budget:
Whichever tool you use, filter for keyword difficulty under 20–25 as a starting filter. Use it as a starting filter, then look more closely at what you find.
Google's own interface gives you a free, constantly updated feed of real questions people are typing. You just have to know where to look.
People Also Ask (PAA): Search any seed topic in incognito mode and expand the PAA box. Each question you click spawns three to four more. Spend five minutes clicking through and you can collect 20–30 question-based queries that represent real informational gaps. Add any that look like solid blog posts to your spreadsheet.
Autocomplete: Type your seed keyword and add a letter or modifier — "how to clean [product] a," "how to clean [product] b," and so on. Or try modifiers like "without," "for beginners," "vs," or "at home." These variations add specificity, and specificity is what makes SERPs less competitive.
Related searches: Scroll to the bottom of any search result page. The eight related searches are Google's direct signal of what it considers adjacent queries, and many of these are uncontested by the time a store finds them.
These sources work especially well for ecommerce blog content because the questions tend to be practical and product-adjacent ("how long does X last," "can I use X with Y," "what's the difference between X and Z"), which is the informational content that sits one click above a product page in the buyer journey.
This is the step most guides describe but don't explain clearly. A keyword difficulty score is a model. The SERP is reality. Open an incognito window and search the exact query before you add it to your publishing queue.
Look for these signals that a SERP is winnable:
The best signal of all: the top result is a Reddit thread or a product page stuffed with bullet points. That gap is waiting for a proper blog post to step in.
By now you likely have 40–80 candidate keywords. You can't publish all of them at once, so score them before committing. A simple scoring matrix across three factors works well:
Assign each a simple 1–3 score on each factor. The topics that score 3/3/3 go into your publishing queue first. Topics scoring 3/3/1 (great SERP, decent volume, low relevance) get deprioritized, because chasing vanity traffic wastes your content budget.
When you're publishing at volume with an automated system, having a ranked list like this is what separates a topic cluster strategy from a random blog. You want the posts to build on each other, not scatter in every direction.
Finding the keyword is half the job. Finding the keyword is half the job. The other half is making your post better than what's currently ranking, because even a low-competition SERP will eventually get more competitive if your content is thin.
A few things that distinguish posts that hold rankings from posts that slip:
If you're using AI to draft posts at scale, the quality gate is the human editing pass. An AI draft that goes live unedited is indistinguishable from the thin content you're trying to outrank. Our guide on the editing pass that keeps AI content ranking walks through what that review should actually cover.
The workflow above produces your first queue of topics. The real advantage comes from running it every four to six weeks, because what counts as "low competition" shifts as your domain grows and as competitors publish more.
Set a recurring calendar block. Ninety minutes a month is enough for a focused run. The output each time is a prioritized list of 10–15 winnable topics added to your publishing schedule. Over 12 months, that's 120–180 targeted posts, each one filling a gap that a competitor left open.
This compounds. Every post you publish makes your domain slightly more authoritative in your niche, which means you become competitive for slightly harder keywords over time. The brands that dominate their categories in search didn't find one great keyword. They built systems that found hundreds of modest ones and published consistently enough for them to add up.
A keyword difficulty (KD) below 20–25 in Ahrefs or Semrush is a useful starting filter, but it's not the full picture. Always open the actual SERP in incognito mode. If the top results are forum threads, thin product pages, or posts from 2020, the keyword is winnable even if the score is slightly higher.
Yes. Google Search Console (free) shows queries you're close to ranking for. Google's People Also Ask and Autocomplete (free) surface long-tail variations. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free for your own domain) and Semrush's free tier (10 reports/day) give competitor data. Pair these and you can build a solid keyword list before spending anything.
A keyword gap is a query where competitors rank but you don't, meaning demand is already proven. A low-competition keyword is any query where the top results are weak, regardless of whether competitors have content on it. The best opportunities are both: gaps where the existing competition is thin or outdated.
Most ecommerce blogs benefit from 10–20 new posts per month targeting one primary low-competition keyword each. Volume matters less than consistency. Publishing 12 posts per month for 12 months outperforms a burst of 50 posts followed by nothing, because search engines reward freshness and topical depth over time.
Prioritize by a combination of both, weighted toward SERP quality. A 100-search keyword where you can reach position 1 generates more traffic than a 2,000-search keyword where you land at position 15. For ecommerce blogs, also factor in business relevance, because traffic that doesn't connect to your products rarely converts.
The playbook
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