6 Reasons to Target Keywords With Low Search Volumes

One thing you’ll always hear about those teaching keyword chasing techniques is to find those with high search volumes and low competition. This is absolutely correct.

But often times you’ve encounter keywords with low search volumes. Many times they’ll sound great, but because they don’t get a lot of traffic, you’re going to be a crossroads thinking about whether or not to add that to your site.

In fact, among the many problems newbies to online business encounter, one I’m going to add to the list is that they ignore keywords with low searches. They seek to find those massive ones and while there are many, there are also MANY on the opposite end and if you ignore them, you’re making a HUGE mistake.

I’m about to explain 5 reasons why you absolutely SHOULD be targeting keyword with low search volumes, especially if you have a website that’s aiming to get traffic via natural sources (SEO). 

Now it’s important to understand that before I explain the 5 reasons, I need to give you a base on which to understand why they’re so important and here it is:

The basis of successful SEO involves writing about what you love while targeting a specific niche audience interested in your beloved topic, chasing keywords with low competition, writing high quality content for your site AND (this is the new addition) adding A LOT of content on the said subject. 

To date, my site has over 300 articles. This is a lot of content and unfortunately most people never even reach the 50 article mark, mostly because they run out of ideas or lose interest and/or get frustrated before that point is reached. The more content you have (including the other things I just mentioned), the better your site will rank, get more visitors and overall provide you with a successful online business. 

So that’s the basis of SEO. Now we can get to the important part:

5 reasons why you should target keywords with low search volumes:

1) Keywords with low search volumes generally have VERY low competition.

If you have a new website, you have 0 authority and one of the ways to raise is it to chase keywords with the low keyword competition. Once you start ranking for those terms, you’re going to quickly build up your site and can start chasing higher targeted keywords.

I’ve made the mistake of always chasing the “forbidden fruit” when it comes to keywords, always looking for the ones with 1,000’s or more searches and my mistake was neglecting not just the low hanging fruit, but even the fruit that was on the ground! If I hadn’t made that mistake early, I would have had much faster success online.

2) Chasing keywords which aren’t very often typed still adds to your content base.

People always and I mean ALWAYS encounter content creation problems and really a lot of it is their own fault because they make the mistake of overlooking the fruit that’s on the ground! 

Remember those 300 articles I wrote?

Well a lot of them chased keywords which didn’t get a lot of visitors, but what they do was add to my content base. The more content you have on your site, the more authority you have and with that, you can rank higher for current/old and new keyword terms you’ll be chasing. even those with higher competition. In other words, chasing something is better than not writing about anything!

Let’s put this into numbers:

Sam has a site on online marketing. Over a course of 6 months, he writes 40 articles. All of those articles chase keywords with a high search volume and most, actually let’s say ALL of them are low competition.

After 6 months, regardless of the keywords he targeted and even though they had low competition, Sam still gets a small number of visitors daily, maybe 20-30/day. He is also becoming frustrated because it’s tough to keep finding those golden keywords. 

Why is Sam in spite of chasing the big dogs getting such low traffic? Well because with only 40 articles, his authority is very low, thus he won’t land very high on those terms he’s targeting until his site’s authority rises.

Then we have John. John writes a 100 articles and at least 50 of them chase keywords with low search volumes, while the others chase highly typed keywords. After 6 months, John gets well over a 100 visitors to his site and this is because his authority is more than twice that of Sam’s.

And because John didn’t disregard all those fruits on the ground, he had content ideas coming to him. In fact it was content creation overload! And instead of being picky, he went for what made sense. Now he reaps the rewards while Sam is on the verge of quitting. This is a lesson which took me a long time to recognize but it works.

Note: Authority of your site has to do with more than just content quantity. There are other authority blog factors, but quantity is an important one.

3) Even the lesser searched keywords get searched and overtime add up.

One query might be rarely typed, but multiply that by several terms and you have exponential potential. Obviously we want to have as many visitors as possible, but if you’re running out of ideas, look for those fruits on the ground! These will add up to being profitable keywords for you in the long run.

4) Don’t forget your keyword may also rank for other variations of it!

Say you targeted a KW with few searches. It may get little visitors, but at least you got the first page easily, even the first spot! Guess what may also happen? You will also see variations of that KW start to rank and all those variations also lead to extra traffic. 

So let’s say I chased a keyword with less than 10 searches a month (I actually do this more often than you may think!) and it ranked on the first page and by doing so it ranked for other search terms where the words might have been mixed around. In total, what started with a less than 10 search keyword led me to get 50-100 visitors a month. I’ve had this happen and I’m about to give you a case study!

5) Some keywords which have low searches don’t always end that way!

Think of products which get released into the market. In the beginning, they have no popularity and no searches, but overtime they grow and does the search volume. By writing about something early on when it has low competition, you can ride the wave of popularity as it rises and as a result get all of the bonuses! 

Proof: I once found a program called Work at Home EDU which when it came out had less than 10 searches monthly. I wrote about it anyway and in about 2-3 months, it not only ranked on the first page, but also rose up to 1,000’s of searches monthly:

Notice the yellow flag on the picture and the QSR next to it. It’s a representation of competition and when the product first came out, it was all green with a QSR of less than 10 (less is better). Now it’s high and very tough to reach. I found it at the RIGHT time and now look at the results:

You can do a Google search for Work at Home EDU, but I just did it through Jaaxy and here is the #1 spot:

And this is just 1 of many cases. It works. So don’t ignore it! And this goes for all niches. 

6) New and updated tip (LSI):

Low search volume keywords also have LSI keywords which you may not know about that Google will rank you for and if you consider that, than you may get way more traffic for a term you though had small traffic numbers because it’ll rank for it’s related terms as well.

My final thoughts:

People overestimate and just flat out ignore keywords with low search volumes. Don’t make that mistake, not when you’re doing SEO. Most importantly:

If it makes sense to write about, do it. Don’t just chase every little (and big) keyword you find. Look for ones that improve your site’s quality.