How to Find Low-Competition Keywords Your Competitors Haven't Blogged About Yet

Why Low-Competition Keywords Matter More Than High-Volume Ones

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.

Step 1: Start With Your Own Google Search Console Data

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.

• Positions 5–10: One good content update can push these to the top three.
• Positions 11–20: You rank on page 2. A new, dedicated post targeting this exact query often moves faster than updating an existing one.

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.

Step 2: Pull Your Competitors' Blog Sitemaps

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:

1. Topics they've covered that you haven't — these are confirmed demand signals. If a competitor published something, it's because they believed the topic had enough search traffic to justify it.
2. Topics they haven't covered at all — product care guides, comparison posts, "what to avoid" articles, local use-case content. These are the real gaps.

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.

Step 3: Run a Keyword Gap Report With a Freemium Tool

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:

• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free): Connect your own domain to get full keyword data for your site. For competitor analysis, use the limited free searches in the Site Explorer to pull their top pages and ranking keywords.
• Semrush free tier: Gives you 10 keyword gap reports per day. Enter your domain against two competitors, filter to "Unique to competitors," and sort by keyword difficulty ascending. This surfaces topics they rank for that you don't, sorted easiest first.
• LowFruits ($25/mo or pay-as-you-go): Built specifically to surface low-competition keywords with weak SERPs. It crawls results and flags queries where the top 10 contains lots of forums, thin pages, or low-authority domains. Those are exactly the conditions where a fresh ecommerce blog post can break through.
• Keywords Everywhere (browser extension, ~$1.25 per 10,000 credits): Shows search volume and competition data inline as you browse Google. Pair this with manual searches and the "People Also Ask" section for a near-free research loop.

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.

Step 4: Mine "People Also Ask" and Autocomplete for Hidden Queries

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.

Step 5: Qualify Each Keyword by Checking the Actual SERP

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 top results come from small or mid-size sites with low domain authority, not from major publications or established category leaders.
• Multiple results are forum threads (Reddit, Quora), thin product pages, or outdated posts (2020 or earlier with no updates).
• The content format is a blog post, not a tool, calculator, or structured database. If Google wants a blog post, write a blog post. If it wants a tool, build one or skip it for now.
• No AI Overview fills the entire answer. If an AI Overview gives a complete, satisfying answer to the query, the click-through rate on organic results drops sharply. Focus on queries where the overview is absent or incomplete. Our piece on queries that still earn clicks despite zero-click pressure goes deeper on this.

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.

Step 6: Score and Prioritize Your Gap List

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:

• Search volume: Even 50–200 monthly searches is fine for a specific long-tail query. You're not chasing head terms.
• SERP quality: Did your manual check in Step 5 show weak results? Score this highly.
• Business relevance: Does this topic connect to something you sell or an audience you want? Ranking for something totally disconnected from your products helps traffic but not revenue.

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.

Step 7: Write for the Gap, Not Just the Keyword

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:

• Answer the exact query in the first paragraph. Readers and AI systems both scan the opening. If the answer isn't visible fast, they leave. This also increases your odds of being cited in AI answers — something we cover in detail in our article on getting cited by AI search engines.
• Include specifics competitors skipped. Measurements, product names, time frames, prices. Specificity is what makes a post citable and trustworthy.
• Match format to intent. If the SERP is full of listicles, write a list. If it's full of how-to guides, write a guide. Mismatched format is one of the most common reasons good content underperforms.
• Update it. A post that ranked in 2025 and gets a content refresh in late 2026 often jumps back up or holds position. Stale dates are one reason thin competitor content is vulnerable in the first place.

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.

Building Low-Competition Keyword Research Into a Repeatable System

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.