Five Low-Difficulty Keyword Plays With Real Traffic

Low difficulty plus real search volume is the best deal in SEO. Here are five concrete plays for finding such keywords — each one a pattern you can reuse, not a one-off trick.

(Figures and case details in this article are as reported in the source material and have not been independently verified.)

1. The overlooked giant: “white background”

Semrush reports “white background” at 2.2 million in global monthly volume with 60% competition — described as somewhat difficult but not extreme. Ahrefs puts the difficulty at just 17: roughly 19 quality backlinking sites could be enough to crack Google’s top 10. The related keywords and real user questions around the term also reveal genuine demand — material you can use to design site features that serve the visitors who arrive. A huge, plain-looking keyword that the difficulty scores say is reachable.

2. Holiday keywords plus the year

“mothers day” itself is brutal: 4.6 million global searches, 88% competition, ahrefs difficulty 59 — about 123 quality backlinks to reach the top 10. The trick is the calendar. Every year spawns fresh year-suffixed variants. “mothers day 2023” needed only about 24 quality backlinks while still carrying 2.3 million in global volume. And since that year’s Mother’s Day had already passed, the smart move was to prepare “mothers day 2024” ahead of time — competitive but manageable at roughly 33 backlinks, and other sites were visibly doing the same. Generalize it: there are many holidays in a year, and each one can be analyzed and prepared the same way.

3. Image niches: “cute wallpapers”

Wallpaper and image keywords are another hunting ground. “cute wallpapers” is the example, but the method matters more than the instance: take the same difficulty-versus-volume analysis from the first two plays and keep digging into adjacent terms like “cool wallpapers”. Image search demand is enormous and the same filters apply.

4. Daily-fresh keywords: “wordle today”

Some keywords are searched every single day, with different content each day — so you can generate one page per day and even prepare future dates in advance. “wordle today” is the textbook case: the reported example page at word.tips/wordle was said to pull around 8 million in traffic. Find a daily ritual with a daily-changing answer, and the content calendar writes itself.

5. The combo factory: “xx near me”

Don’t target “near me” itself — target the “xx near me” pattern. The xx can be McDonald’s or KFC, but also post offices, banks, scenic spots, amusement parks; the keyword lists show users searching locations for all kinds of things, reportedly over five million variants. You don’t need all of them: take the top 10,000 popular demands, collect 10,000 popular locations worldwide, and 10,000 x 10,000 gives you 100 million pages. Even if only one in a thousand pages brings one visit a day, that’s 100,000 daily visits. The engineering looks heavy, but the math says it’s worth trying.

The pattern behind all five

Every play is the same idea in different clothes: find where difficulty is low and volume is real — an overlooked giant, a year suffix, an image niche, a daily ritual, or a programmatic combination — then build specifically for it.

Series: Overseas Website Building