What are LHF Keywords in SEO – Low Hanging Fruits

Introduction:

If you are an SEO professional or a business owner aiming to rank higher (we are talking positions 4-15) in SERPs with a small budget and a tight deadline, then you are at the right place.

Today, we will dissect Google ranking opportunities for positions 0 and 1 using low-hanging fruit – lhf keywords that can help you with:

• Changing positions from 11-30 to 4-10 in no time
• Rank higher in search results using your own Google search console data
• How not to use head terms to compete with websites with authority above 45
• How to get maximum organic traffic as a new/low DA website

Without wasting any further time, let’s find out how to rank your website on Google Page 1 using low-hanging fruit – lhf keywords. 

You will also get an overview of lhf keywords and their types and learn how to find them using your own data from Google Search Console or various free or paid SEO tools, such as Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz. 

What are LHF or low-hanging fruit keywords?

LHF, or low-hanging fruit keywords, are low-competition terms with a decent search volume, making them relatively easy to rank for and increasing the chances of conversions. With a few tweaks and optimizations, these keywords can move from positions 11-30 (pages 2 to 3) to positions 4-10 (page 1), making it easier to achieve maximum organic traffic. 

Keywords: Higer intent + decent search volume (above 500) = Greater conversions (CTR)

For Example, if a digital marketing agency for startups targets keywords like “affordable digital marketing solutions for new businesses” instead of just “digital marketing”, they can rank faster and attract more relevant leads.

Why Target LHF Keywords? (And how Google actually ranks your website)

Google ranks pages based on user intent. After the Google Panda update, we all know what it takes for a website to gain trust and authority in Google’s eyes. Follow E-E-A-T guidelines and provide value to your users. 

Google ranks content based on specific user intents, including informational, transactional, or navigational. Match your website as closely as possible with the intents users are searching for. 

It may seem easy to say, but in practice, it takes a lot of strategic and technical factors for a website to rank (for a specific topic, query, or keyword).

There are over 50 billion web pages on Google, competing for position one ranking.

But what keeps them from getting on the top?

1- Small budget 

2- Low DA (Domain Authority). 

That’s why you need to find low-hanging fruit opportunities on your website to rank for your niche keywords, which we will refer to as “LHF’ or low-hanging fruit keywords. 

Types of LHF

There are six different types of LHF keywords, but our primary focus in this blog will be on the two major types:

1- Long tail keywords: These are longer but high-intent keywords. For example, a person searching for “affordable SEO services in LA” has higher, more focused intent than one searching for “SEO services” only. 

2- Question-focused keywords: These are question-based keywords (containing 5W,1H framework) that users mostly type on the search bar. These are also high-intent keywords with a higher potential for conversions. For example, “ How to make a pudding using 5 ingredients only” or “How to rank higher on Google with a small budget”. 

3- Local keywords: These keywords target users searching for local information about a business, service, or person. For example, “Pizza points near me”. 

4- Seasonal keywords: These keywords are only for the specific time of the year like Holidays, Christmas, Black Friday, or presidential elections etc. For example: “Christmas ideas for 2025”, “How to write black friday email.”

5- Informational keywords: These keywords are intended to find specific information. For example, “how to climb a mountain,” “how to tie laces” etc.

6-Transactional keywords: 

These are buttom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) keywords with the direct intent to purchase, such as “Buy iPhone 16 pro max.”

In this blog, our primary focus will be on “Long-tail LHF keywords” and “Question-focused LHF keywords” and how to optimize our content to rank higher with simple and quick tweaks.

How to utilize LHF keywords as a new website or already established website (but with low domain authority)

As I discussed above, you can use your own Google Search Console data to find low-hanging fruit keywords. However, if you have a new website with no data to identify LHF keywords, it might be a problem, right? But no! You can still rank as a new website with a small budget and low domain authority (DA). But how? By finding LHF keywords through competitor analysis and identifying content gaps. 

Finding LHF keywords as a Low domain website

First of all, if you are a website with a low Domain Authority (22 or below), then before creating a keyword strategy or using a keyword planner, keep the following guidelines in mind:

• Do not try to compete with the website with DA 45 or above.
• Do not try to rank for Head Terms with exceptionally high keyword difficulty (we are talking 80 -100).
• Try to compete for keywords with good search volume but low KD (Keyword difficulty) aka LHF keywords.
• Find content gaps in competitor websites ranking for your intended keyword term (you wish to rank for).
• Find content pieces from your competitor’s website that have high intent, good search volume, and high ranking but relatively low DA (fewer backlinks directed to that piece). This is your opportunity to use that gap to provide greater value and rank higher for that term.

Below is an example of a low-hanging keyword opportunity via the content gap, fewer backlinks, and small word length, but great potential.

Finding LHF keywords using Semrush

If you don’t have your own data and are building your SEO and content strategy, Semrush is a great tool. For example, if you have a website selling “Kids fashion accessories” and want to write blogs that help your website rank higher on Google, start your keyword research by finding long-tailed low-hanging fruits with greater search volume but lower competition (keyword difficulty) to achieve positions between 4-10 on page 1.

Here’s how you can find your LHF keywords using Semrush;

Step 1- Click “Keyword Magic Tool”

Step 2- Enter a keyword that you get from your content gao research. Here we have found “How to tie a tie”.

Step 3- Set the keyword difficulty (KD) filter to the “Possible”

Step 4- Here, you get your long-tailed LHF keyword in a list

Use this to make an Excel sheet and strategically insert it into your content (detail below) to get the opportunity to get position 1. 

Finding LHF keywords as an already established website

Search Console metrics

Search console is a free Google tool that gives detailed insights into important website metrics.

As an established website with content that already ranks, our goal is to find pages that are currently positioned lower in search results, like on pages 2, 3, or 4. We can use different strategies within the Search Console to identify these opportunities for improvement. 

1- Finding the LHF/low-hanging keywords using the Google search console

It simpler than you think. 

First, you set up your website search console. If you haven’t established it already, here’s a guide on how you can. 

Ok, so now if you have set your search console, it’s time to get to work.

• Open your dashboard and then click the “Performace” tab.
• You have the graph in front of you showing the metrics: Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Average Position. Each metric describes specific performance related to your website, providing a detailed view into your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). If you want to understand more about each metric, get your hands on this guide. 

• First, choose the “Performance” option. Then, set the time period to 12 months and pick between 10 to 20 positions. This will show you how well you did over the year.
• Now we get to the main part: select the pages and set the filter to “Impressions” in descending order. This will bring the URLs with the most impressions to the top, giving you an overview of the search volume. 

• Now click on the content page with the most impressions.
• Select the URL with the most impressions, go to the “Queries” tab, and voila! Here are your keyword opportunities to reach the top page. 

• Look at this content page and see if you’ve included these keywords. If you haven’t, great job—you’ve identified some easy opportunities to improve your content!
• Include dedicated sections in your content inserting these keywords. This will help your page rank higher on search engines, ideally placing it between positions 4 and 10.

Long-tailed question-based keywords – low-hanging fruits

• Create a section with frequently asked questions (FAQs) that includes lhf keywords (Question-based queries that we discussed earlier). This will help your content show up at the top of search results (position 0).
• You can use SEOScout to find these keywords. This tool can find question-based keywords that could help your page rank at the top of search results, specifically in the featured snippets section.

Inserting these high-intent keywords into your content page covers the content gap and helps you surpass the positions of the previously ranked content pieces for the same keywords or topic.

Cleaning and Merging URLs

You may think this part is irrelevant to our topic, but trust me, it’s not. Cleaning your website is just as important as adding valuable information. 

• To clean your website, remove all irrelevant URLs (those that have received 0 impressions in the last 12 months).
• Secondly, merge the URLs that have relatively the same information. For instance, if a blog is divided into three parts but only part 1 drives traffic, merge the three parts to make a single piece of content.
• After merging, don’t forget to redirect Parts 2 and 3 links to Part 1 via 301 redirect. 
• Delete thin content (content with little and no value to give readers) from your website.

If you find it hard to do, don’t worry. Several tools can help you clean up your website. Gather all the data from your website into a single Excel sheet using tools like Google Analytics, Ryte, or Screaming Frog (which can gather up to 500 URLs), and then it’s easy to evaluate and remove URLs you no longer need. 

Content optimization Integrating LHF into your content 

Optimizing Meta tags

Once you find your LHF keywords, it’s time to add them to your content and position them correctly. Add your keyword to the meta title (60 characters) and meta description (150-169 characters). 

Several tools, such as Ryte, Higher Visibility, and Mangools can help you maintain the length of these tags.

Increasing relevance with user intent

In your header tags, add lhf keywords or insert questions that users are searching for. This will help your content match the user intent, which will ultimately boost its quality score over time.

It will help your content align best with user intent, thus increasing its overall QDF (Quality deserves freshness) score. 

Keep content Fresh – Revise or extend

Users value transparency. Content that includes a “Last updated” date is viewed as more trustworthy, and users tend to rely on such resources when citing them 

• Evaluate your website content and keep it aligned with industry trends and standards. If you published a report last year on “Best SEO practices, ” revise it if the best practices changed during the year.
• If you wrote the blog on “How to understand TikTok algorithm to get on FYP,” then keep checking on recent trends and extend the blog based on algorithm updates. 
• Remember, updated and fresh content increases your chances of gaining user trust. 

Learn more about SEO copywriting.

Smooth user interface and Fast loading time

The performance of your website also depends upon the user experience. Keep your user experience smooth to increase scroll depth and session durations. 

You can check your loading time using this tool: Webpagetest.org. 

I know you’ve been thinking – how it’s relevant to LHF keywords?

Well, yes, it’s relevant because Google scans your website based on its infrastructure.

The easier and smoother you make it for Google to scan and identify your content or structure, the more likely it is that your website will be ranked higher.

Here’s how you can improve your user experience and speed up your loading times;

• Anything larger than 20 megabytes is lethal for your website’s speed. Keep graphics compressed (2 megabytes in size but around 500 KB).

To compress images, you can use Tiny Png, Cloud Convert, or a WordPress plugin EWWW image optimizer. 

• Add image attributes like alt text (containing your LHF keyword).
• Remove browser cache.

Internal Linking

To improve how Google sees your website, include links to other relevant content (from your website), like blog posts or articles, when you optimize a specific piece of content for SEO. This will strengthen your content and give readers more information and depth by directing them to related resources.

It will strengthen your content and give detailed and in-depth information to the reader byu attaching relevant resources. 

Partnerships/collaborations – Link Building

Link building is another essential element of SEO. To gain authority and increase the DA score of your website, get as many backlinks as possible from trustworthy websites. A website that gets authority links from other authoritative websites (with a DA of more than 50) can achieve higher DA itself.

But how can you get these backlinks organically?

• Collaborate with a website with a good authority score – you scratch my back, I will scratch yours – give and take value to build strong partnerships.
• Create guest posts for websites – in your niche or related to your area of expertise. After writing your posts, reach out to those websites via email to let them know you have content that could benefit their audience. If they think it’s useful, they might publish it, and that’s how you can get backlinks from their site.
• Another strategy is broken link building where you look for links on websites that no longer work, meaning they lead to a “404 Page Not Found” error. You can find these broken links by using specific Google search operators, like typing “site:example.com 404” into the search bar. There’s also a Chrome extension that can help you identify these links. Once you find them, you can reach out to the website owner to suggest replacing the broken link with your own content. This way, you help them fix their website while also gaining potential backlinks to your own site.

Added Value section

Finding queries users are searching for

There are a lot of platforms like Answer the Public, Answer Socrates, Reddit, Quora, and Google itself, where you can find hundreds of queries that people are searching on Google and questions your potential clients might be asking, waiting for answers that could solve their pain points.

• Find those questions and use your platform/website to give answers, add featured snippets, give direct answers, and optimize your content for voice seach. 
• Use a human-like tone. 
• Write simple paragraphs that give the most relevant answers to the questions asked. 

Riding the back of authoritative websites

Social forums are great places to find questions from users, customers, or potential clients. This can be your low-hanging fruit opportunity. By answering these questions, you can help others and include a link to your website to increase visibility.

You can also incorporate links to your website by participating in these social forums (based on your niche). For example, if you provide services, you can list your offerings on Yelp or discuss your services on platforms like Reddit and Quora. This approach helps users discover your link while searching for answers to their questions. 

Conclusion

Businesses strive to achieve instant success. However, the reality lies in a strong SEO foundation. You may win traffic using paid tactics, but what happens when you stop spending money to drive conversions? Your traffic will decline, and so will your sales. 

With SEO, you build long-term success and brand authority. Millions of people search daily, giving your website opportunities to attract visitors through the LHF strategies I have shared. Integrating low-hanging fruit keywords helps you establish fast growth and ensures consistent traffic without competing with industry giants.

Looking forward to seeing you on Google Page 1. 

Contact us if you are looking for a partner to help you establish your SEO strategy with an LHF strategy. We will help you rank faster.