One of my viewers reached out and asked me to walk through exactly how I find keywords using Ahrefs for affiliate marketing. Not a surface-level overview. A real tutorial showing every click. So that is what this post covers: three specific methods I use to find low-competition keywords that a new website can actually rank for, using Ahrefs as the primary tool and ChatGPT as a time-saver along the way.
The vacation niche is the example throughout this post because it is easy to picture yourself as a consumer. You have been that person planning a trip, searching for hotels near a stadium or wondering how long the drive is from one city to another. That lived experience is exactly how good keyword research works. You put yourself in your customer’s shoes and start writing down what they would actually type into Google.
What You’ll Walk Out With
- A clear understanding of the three Ahrefs metrics that matter most for new sites: KD, volume, and DR
- Method 1 for generating seed keywords from scratch and filtering by difficulty
- How to use modifier words like “for” and “under” to surface keywords your competitors missed
- Method 2 for legally stealing keywords from small competitor websites using Ahrefs Site Explorer
- How to follow the competitor rabbit hole and uncover thousands of keywords from a single starting point
- Method 3 using Google glossaries and ChatGPT to generate bulk seed lists you can paste directly into Ahrefs
- A starting point for figuring out what niche fits your skills and your situation at finder.platformproof.com
The Three Ahrefs Metrics That Matter for a New Website
Before any of the three methods make sense, you need to understand what you are looking at inside Ahrefs. The interface surfaces a lot of data and it can feel like too much at once. In practice, you only need to pay close attention to three columns when you are starting out.
The first is KD, or keyword difficulty. This is a number on a scale from 0 to 100. The closer a keyword’s KD is to 100, the harder it is for a new website to rank for it. A keyword with a KD of 90 is essentially locked behind years of authority building. For a brand new site, you want to target keywords at KD 10 or below. Once your site has some history and backlinks, you can push that ceiling to 20 or even 30, but start conservative.
The second metric is volume. Ahrefs shows you how many times a keyword is searched per month in the United States. This number tells you whether there is real demand. A keyword with KD 5 and 200 monthly searches is winnable but small. A keyword with KD 5 and 12,000 monthly searches is a real opportunity. Both matter. The point is to find keywords where difficulty is low and demand is real enough to be worth writing about.
The third metric is DR, or domain rating. This one applies to websites, not individual keywords. It runs on the same 0-to-100 scale. YouTube has a DR around 95. Target.com sits at 91. You do not want to compete with those. What you are hunting for are websites with a DR between 0 and 25. A small site with low DR that is already ranking tells you that Google considers the topic rankable for sites at your level. That is the signal you want.
Method 1: Brainstorm Seed Keywords and Filter by Difficulty
The first method starts before you even open Ahrefs. Grab a piece of paper or open a notes app and write down 10 to 20 words or phrases your target audience actually uses. You are not trying to be clever here. You are trying to think like the person on the other end of the search bar.
For the vacation niche, Alston started with three simple seed words: vacation, travel, and safety. He typed all three into Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and clicked over to Matching Terms. What came back was enormous. Those three words generated 7.2 million keyword combinations that have been searched a combined 48 million times per month in the United States alone. That is not a narrow niche. That is a wide open field.
But a wide open field with KD scores all over the map is not useful on its own. The next move is to set the KD filter. For a new website, Alston filters between 0 and 10. Click Apply, then Show Results. This strips out everything that is too competitive and leaves you with keywords a new site can realistically target. After applying that filter, results like “travel backpack for women” emerge. That keyword has a KD of 5 and pulls 12,000 monthly searches. That is exactly the kind of target you want.
Adding Modifier Words to Surface Deeper Keywords
Once you have your filtered list, there is a second layer you can add to find even more specific keywords. This is where modifier words come in. Rather than looking at every result, you tell Ahrefs to only return keywords that contain a specific word. Two of the most useful modifiers are “for” and “under.”
When Alston added the word “for” as a required word in the filter, the results shifted immediately. Instead of broad terms, Ahrefs returned things like “travel backpack for women,” “crossbody bags for travel,” and “best travel backpack for women.” These are buyer-intent phrases. Someone typing “crossbody bags for travel” is not doing casual research. They are close to a purchasing decision. Affiliate marketers want to be in front of that person.
Adding the word “under” brings in a different but equally valuable set of results. Keywords like “travel trailers under five thousand dollars” show up. Not every result in that batch will match your niche, but the process shows you how much keyword depth exists just by swapping one modifier word. You can cycle through dozens of modifiers: “best,” “cheap,” “near me,” “for beginners,” “for seniors,” and on and on. Each one opens a new slice of the same audience.
The key technical note: when you add multiple modifier words in Ahrefs, make sure you set the match type to “any word” rather than “all words.” If you leave it on “all words,” Ahrefs will only return keywords that contain every single modifier you listed, which is almost nothing. Switch it to “any word” and you get results for any keyword containing at least one of your modifiers.
Method 2: Steal Your Competitors’ Keywords Legally
Method 2 is Alston’s personal favorite and it is easy to see why. Instead of generating ideas from scratch, you find small websites that are already ranking for keywords you want to target and then use Ahrefs to pull every keyword they rank for. You are not copying their content. You are identifying what the market has already rewarded and building your own content around those same topics.
The process starts inside the Ahrefs SERP overview for a keyword you already identified. Click on a keyword from your filtered list, then scroll down to the SERP Overview section. This shows you the top 10 pages Google currently ranks for that keyword. For each result, Ahrefs displays the URL, the word count of that page, and the DR of the website hosting it.
You are scanning that DR column for any number between 0 and 25. When Alston looked at the SERP for “travel backpack for women,” he spotted travelingchick.com. That site has a DR of 14. A DR 14 website ranking in Google’s top 10 is a green light. If a DR 14 site can hold a spot there, a new site with consistent effort can compete for the same territory.
How to Use Ahrefs Site Explorer to Mine a Small Competitor
Once you find a small competitor site, you have two separate things you can investigate inside Ahrefs. The first is the specific page that is ranking. The second is the entire website. These are two different searches and they give you different information.
To investigate a single page, copy just the URL of the ranking page (not the full domain) and paste it into Ahrefs Site Explorer. Click into the organic keywords report for that URL. You will see all the keywords that specific page is ranking for. For the travelingchick.com page about travel backpacks, the results included “best travel backpack for women” and “women’s travel backpack” among others. That one page alone is a source of multiple keyword ideas.
To investigate the entire site, copy the root domain (travelingchick.com without any path) and paste it into Site Explorer. This gives you every keyword that entire website ranks for across all of its pages. Travelingchick.com ranks for roughly 3,900 keywords. Scrolling through that list, Alston spotted terms like “nude beaches in the US” and “Six Day Ireland itinerary” that he would not have found by thinking about the niche from scratch. The word “itinerary” alone was a keyword idea that came entirely from a competitor’s keyword list.
Following the Rabbit Hole to Unlock Unlimited Keywords
The real value of Method 2 is what happens after you mine that first competitor. You do not stop at travelingchick.com. You take one of the new keywords you found and run it through Ahrefs again. You find the SERP for that keyword, you look for another small site in the top 10, and you mine that site’s full keyword list. Then you do it again with a keyword from the second site.
Here is how that played out in practice. The word “itinerary” produced 131,000 keyword variations inside Ahrefs with a total search volume of 1.3 million monthly searches. Filtering to KD 20 or below returned keywords like “Portugal 10-day itinerary,” “Alaska cruise itinerary,” and dozens of specific destination itinerary terms. Each of those is a blog post topic. Each blog post topic can carry affiliate links for hotels, luggage, gear, and travel insurance.
From “best travel accessories for women,” Alston found happyhappyevertraveler.com, singlewomentraveling.com, and epictravelplans.com. He had never heard of any of those sites before that search session. Epictravelplans.com ranks for 18,000 keywords. Scrolling through that list surfaced the phrase “romantic getaways.” Running “romantic getaways” through Keyword Explorer returned 14,000 keyword variations with 381,000 monthly searches. Setting KD to 10 or below brought up “romantic getaways in Colorado” (KD 10, roughly 3,000 monthly searches) and “romantic getaways in Washington state.” Both are completely workable for a new site.
From the romantic getaways SERP, planreadygo.com showed up as another small site. And from there the process starts again. This is the rabbit hole. Each small competitor you find is a new map to hundreds of keywords you did not know existed. The limit is not the tool. The limit is the time you want to put in.
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Method 3: Google Glossaries and ChatGPT as Seed Lists
Method 3 is the most straightforward of the three and it is especially useful when you are entering a niche you know almost nothing about. The idea is to get a bulk list of relevant terms without having to invent them from scratch.
Step one is to go to Google and search for something like “vacation glossary” or “travel vocabulary word list.” Google will surface pages that list out dozens or even hundreds of terms people commonly use in that space. These are not keyword research tools. They are reference pages that collect the natural language of a niche. Copy the full list of terms from one of those pages.
Step two is to paste that list into Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. Make sure you separate each term with a comma before pasting. Ahrefs will process the bulk input and return matching terms for every word on the list at once. When Alston pasted in five vacation-related terms from a glossary page, Ahrefs returned over five million keyword variations with a combined 48 million monthly searches. That is a full content calendar’s worth of ideas from a single paste.
ChatGPT fits into this method as a way to generate your initial list even faster. You can type a prompt like “give me 30 keywords people use when they are researching travel” and get a usable list in seconds. You are not asking ChatGPT to do the research for you. You are asking it to brainstorm words you can then verify with real search data inside Ahrefs. The data still comes from Ahrefs. ChatGPT just speeds up the brainstorming step.
One example from the video: Alston used ChatGPT to generate travel niche keywords and it returned terms like “travel insurance,” “visa requirements,” “best time to visit,” and “New York City vacations.” He took “New York City vacations” into Ahrefs and it returned 129 keywords with a total search volume of 1.3 million. That single ChatGPT suggestion became a seed that opened an entire city-based content strategy.
Thinking Like Your Customer: The Real Starting Point
Every method in this post works better when you actually think through what your reader is experiencing. Alston used his own life as an example. The Chicago Bears were scheduled to play the Kansas City Chiefs in Kansas City. He had never been to Kansas City. If he were making that trip, here is what he would search for: How long does it take to drive from Chicago to Kansas City? What are the best places to eat in Kansas City? What hotels are close to the stadium? How far is the hotel from the arena?
Every one of those questions is a keyword. Every keyword is a blog post. Every blog post can carry affiliate links to hotels on Booking.com, restaurants via OpenTable, or trip planning tools. The person searching those questions is a warm buyer with a specific destination and a departure date in mind. They are not browsing. They are planning. That intent is what makes travel affiliate marketing worth the time investment.
The same logic applies to any niche. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who wants to solve the problem your niche addresses. Write down every question they would ask at every stage of the process. Run those questions through Ahrefs. Filter by KD. Look for small competitor sites in the SERPs. Mine those sites. Follow the rabbit hole. You will not run out of keywords.
Honest Drawbacks
Ahrefs is not free. The standard plan runs over a hundred dollars per month depending on your tier and billing cycle. That is a real cost for someone just getting started. Alston acknowledges this directly in the video. You can do keyword research for free using tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest’s free tier. The trade-off is speed and depth. Free tools are slower, show less data, and often require more manual digging to find the same low-competition keywords that Ahrefs surfaces in a few clicks.
If you are not ready to pay for Ahrefs yet, start with the free tools and save Ahrefs for a later stage when you have some content published and want to accelerate your keyword finding. Alston’s point is not that Ahrefs is the only path. His point is that paid tools save time, and time is worth something when you are building a business in the hours around a full-time job or family commitments.
A second honest drawback: keyword research does not guarantee rankings. Finding a keyword with KD 5 means it is possible to rank, not that you will rank. You still need to write a thorough article that actually answers the question better than the current top results. The keyword research narrows the field and removes the competition from the picture. You still have to do the work of producing content that deserves to rank.
A Simple Decision Framework for Getting Started
If you are trying to decide whether to start with Method 1, 2, or 3, here is a simple way to think about it based on where you are right now.
Use Method 1 if you already have a niche in mind and can list 10 to 20 words your target audience uses. Type those words into Ahrefs, set KD to 10 or below, and start writing. This is the fastest path from zero to a first keyword list.
Use Method 2 if you want to build a larger content calendar and go deeper than your initial seed list. Find one or two small competitor sites with DR under 25, mine their full keyword list in Site Explorer, and use what you find to keep extending your topic list. This method scales the longest because every competitor site you find opens up another batch of competitors.
Use Method 3 if you are entering a niche cold and do not have enough background knowledge to brainstorm seed words on your own. A glossary search or a ChatGPT prompt will get you a working list in under five minutes. Paste it into Ahrefs and let the data show you where the opportunities actually are.
In reality, you will cycle through all three over time. Method 1 gets you started. Method 2 keeps you going. Method 3 fills the gaps when you feel stuck.
Find Your X
Keyword research only produces results when you apply it to a niche that fits your situation. If you are still trying to figure out which direction to go, the Platform Proof Finder can help you match your existing skills, your available time, and your income target to a realistic online business model. Seven questions, one concrete recommendation. Start at finder.platformproof.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
What KD should a brand new website target?
For a brand new website with no backlinks and little to no domain history, targeting keywords with a KD of 10 or below is the safest starting point. Once you have published consistently for a few months and started to earn some backlinks naturally, you can push the ceiling to KD 20. Alston uses KD 10 as his default filter for new sites in this video.
What is a good volume for a keyword when you are just starting?
There is no single right answer, but anything above 1,000 monthly searches in the US with a KD of 10 or below is a reasonable target for a new site. Keywords with 5,000 to 15,000 monthly searches at low KD, like “travel backpack for women” at 12,000 per month, are particularly attractive because they are winnable and worth pursuing once you rank.
What is DR and why does it matter when looking at competitors?
DR stands for domain rating. It is Ahrefs’ estimate of how authoritative a website is based on the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to it. The scale runs from 0 to 100. When you find a website with a DR between 0 and 25 ranking in Google’s top 10, it tells you Google is willing to rank lower-authority sites for that keyword. That is a signal that a new site with good content can break into those results.
Is it legal to research your competitors’ keywords using Ahrefs?
Yes, completely. Ahrefs aggregates publicly visible search ranking data. Knowing which keywords a website ranks for is not proprietary information. This is standard practice in SEO and affiliate marketing. You are not copying their content. You are identifying which topics the market has rewarded and then creating your own original content on those same topics.
Can I do this research without paying for Ahrefs?
You can, but it is slower. Free tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, or the free tier of Keywords Everywhere give you some keyword data but with less depth and fewer filters. You will not be able to mine a competitor’s full keyword list for free the way you can in Ahrefs Site Explorer. If cost is a barrier, start with free tools to identify a niche, then consider Ahrefs once you have published your first five to ten articles and want to scale faster.
How many seed keywords should I start with?
Alston recommends 10 to 15 seed words as a starting point before you sit down at Ahrefs. You want enough variety to surface a wide range of keyword combinations, but you do not need 100 words on your list before you can begin. Three words, vacation, travel, and safety, returned 7.2 million keyword combinations in this video. Start with a manageable list and expand using the competitor research method as you go.
What should I do after I find a low-competition keyword?
Click on the keyword inside Ahrefs to see the SERP overview. Look at the top 10 results and read through two or three of the ranking pages to understand what the current content covers. Then write a more thorough, more specific, or more clearly organized article on the same topic. Match the search intent, answer every question someone typing that keyword would have, and include affiliate links to relevant products or services where they genuinely add value.
Does ChatGPT give accurate keyword volume data?
No. ChatGPT does not have access to live search volume data. What it is useful for is generating a list of words and phrases your target audience might use. Once you have that list, you take it into Ahrefs to see actual volume and difficulty numbers. The workflow is: ChatGPT for brainstorming, Ahrefs for validation. Never treat ChatGPT output as a substitute for real search data.
Read Next
Keyword research works best when you have already chosen a niche with real demand and a clear path to monetization. If you are still deciding where to focus, the next post walks through how to use ChatGPT to identify a profitable niche in minutes.
Find A $10K+ Niche With ChatGPT In Minutes
Sources
- Ahrefs Keyword Explorer: keyword difficulty, volume, and SERP overview data shown in the video
- Ahrefs Site Explorer: competitor domain and URL-level keyword analysis demonstrated in the video
- ChatGPT: used in the video as a brainstorming tool to generate travel niche seed keyword lists
- Google search: “vacation glossary” and “vacation vocabulary word list” used as bulk seed sources
- travelingchick.com, epictravelplans.com, planreadygo.com: example competitor sites analyzed in the video
Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.