Low Search Volume Keywords

Low search volume keywords, no matter which niche you are in, have at least 2 great advantages in SEO.

• They have usually less competition so they are easy to rank for.
• You can target them with very precise content so you can usually rank much faster.

Before giving you some tips on how to do this, let’s see what the expression ‘low search volume keywords‘ means actually.

What are low search volume keywords?

When talking about search volume, in SEO we generally refer to the average monthly search of a specific keyword. This data you can find in Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

Basically there are two approaches to say whether a specific keyword has a low search volume or not:

• Subjective approach: Compare search volumes in your niche. If you have a topic keyword with 135,000 monthly searches (e.g. “make money online“), another keyword with even a few thousand searches might be considered low search volume.
• Objective approach: Generally speaking, every keyword that has less than a hundred searches per month can be considered low search volume.

How to use low search volume keywords for maximum SEO benefits

There is a great, Academic-Award winner movie that illustrates this principle, ‘A Beautiful Mind‘. The movie itself is actually based on a true story. In this clip John Nash (Russel Crowe) “discovers” a new principle that ultimately resulted him in a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences:

Long story short:

If we all go for the blond [i.e. the prettiest girl], we block each other.

So it is with keywords. There are only a few extremely lucrative keywords, almost everyone in your niche aiming for them, yet only one single first position in the SERP. If you aim only for the most difficult keywords, in reality you have little chance, because so many more websites are aiming for the same single position. This is especially true in case of a new website.

Nevertheless if you aim for lower search volume keywords, just because there is less competition, it is much easier to rank. Then, because you rank for some easier keywords in that topic and provide excellent content, Google will find your site more and more relevant.

Than you can work with harder keywords, already having the leverage coming from the low volume ones. This is what is called ‘Site Authority’ in SEO, but remains theory most of the time because only a few people actually understands how to build authority with relatively low budget.

For those of you who are skilled in SEO, please note that Site Authority is not the same that Moz’s famous Domain Authority. The latter is calculated based mostly on links pointing to your site, but in my experience you do have the chance to build site authority and get relatively high and fast results even without quality links. But you do have to prove Google that your website in general is worth showing in the search results.

What to do with low search volume keywords?

Please note that this technique is extremely effective if you have a new website, or you find it troublesome to rank in search engines for any keyword. For sites with already some authority, use this technique to further boost your weight or open towards new subtopics.

1. Find some very low volume keywords related to your topic. Usually these should be below 100 monthly searches. Start with 10-15 keywords.
2. Publish one article for each of these keywords, providing exactly what visitors are looking for when typing those keywords.
3. Once you have 10-15 articles online, give Google a few weeks. Than go ahead and analyze your Google Webmaster Tools data and see what areas of your website perform the best. You will see some keywords having better results than others, and also rank for keywords that you’ve never even thought of.
4. Continue building your content to that direction where you seem to perform best.

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