Is it limiting to target low volume keywords for niche sites?

[Xee]

I run a Chicago Bears forum and my long-term goal to make it the most popular Bears forum on the internet (I know, huge goal). Because of that, I've been focusing on optimizing it for the keywords 'chicago bears forum'. However, being new to SEO, I only checked now and saw the search volume for those keywords is barely 2,000.

My question is, and this is probably an an obvious one, should I be switching my focus to more popular keywords such as 'chicago bears news' if I want to increase traffic to my forum?

[Xee]

If you mean do we have reporters contacting players/coaches/etc, no. However, when you search 'chicago bears news' only the first 4 are legitimate sources of information (newspapers and official Bears website). Everything that follows is just sites which aggregate all the newest articles by the top 4 sites. Since we report the newest developments as well via our forums, twitter account, and tumblr page, I don't see anything dishonest about saying that we are a source of information for Bears fans.

[EGOL]

Is your forum a genuine source of news or is that simply BS?

[mediabase]

Low search volume means there are not enough searches on that keyword for Google to serve search traffic for your ads. You may sometimes see a few impressions but most of the time a keyword with that label is inactive for search.

In Google trends, the term Search Volume Index is used. (http://www.google.com/trends?q=c...) look at chart.

[Xee]

Hmm. I  think I may have misunderstood the results. What exactly does "search volume" mean?

[mediabase]

Hello Xee, First of all I would like to tell you about the report that I had analyzed for you for which the keywords are 'chicago bears forum' & 'chicago bears news'. As I had checked the competition on both the keywords that is mentioned below.

Keywords                          Competition                  GlobalSearches                LocalSearches

chicago bears forum          low                                1900                                      1600

chicago bears news           low                                 9900                                      8100

The above report shows that both the keywords are having the low competition. Global searches means that are searches all over the world & local searches means that they are include only chicago city.

I think you should continue with the 'chicago bears forum' keyword only because it has low global & local search volume that helps you to increase the traffic to your forum.

[JamesNorquay]

Hi,

I think you answer your own question, some times people fall short and only limit forum traffic to forum keywords.

You need to be smart and have sections on your forum like:

• News section

• Blog section.

So rather than just targeting the forum traffic you can target multiple sections in your forum article section, have guest posts from other Bears fans and do soo many more things in this area.

Also make sure you use exact match search for your keyword research.

Kind Regards.

James.