Am I Doomed with Low Volume Keywords?

[TBiz]

I've been pursuing an internet startup for over a year now.  We've figured a lot of things out along the way and even managed to start making some modest revenue ~$3,000/month.

We're just now starting to dig into SEO and I'm realizing that most of our keywords aren't very high volume.  The best have 1,000 local searches per month (exact match) with most being a couple hundred local searches.

I'm worried that I've picked a market that's too small, but I don't have the SEO experience to know if this is normal or not.  Most of my keywords are rated 'highly competitive' and also are stacked with CPC ads upon Google search.

I'd love to know what others' experience with keyword volume is and if I'm just overreacting on limited knowledge.

Thanks!

[DougRoberts]

There's a few things I'd do.

First of all, recognise that many of these keywords are going to be seen as synonyms as far as google is concerned  and even if not exactly synonyms, they'll be regarded as heaviy related. Optimising pages for a number of these keywords/phrases really will help the way your entire site is perceived.

While exact match numbers seem to be pretty low, I wouldn't mid putting a bed down on some good long-tail traffic out there.

I would:

Take a look at what my competition are doing. I'd do a search for each of my target keywords and grab the top 10 ranking sites and take a look at them in Open Site Explorer. Take a note of the number of links to the domain and then have a look at the anchor text. (Select links to all pages on this domain).

This will show you how strongly these site are optimising their link building and what target phrases they are using. Get a list of all these terms and check out the traffic and the difficulty.

You can see that the stronger ranking sites will have lots of keywords in their anchor text. Can you also do this when building links?

Also take a look at the top pages report. This will show you how they are building optimised pages and the titles can reveal the kind of keywords they're targeting.

Think also about your audience and what their needs might be. How can you make you offerings more specific to them. "Copywriting for students" or "copywriting for medical students" etc for example. Or how about "lastminute copywriting" or "fast copywriting"..

Having an offering that talks directly to each audience and highlights the particular problems/needs in that niche can help with your conversions.

Think also about how you can stand out from the crowd. What is it about your service in particular that makes you different, makes you unique. Why should people come to you and not the next guy. There's no benefit sticking with the herd here.

[TBiz]

AWC, Thanks for the response, however, I feel I've answered your questions in my last reply.

[AWCthreads]

Are your keywords not high volume because they are not necessarily optimum keywords for your site or are they long tail keywords that are more specific and therefore do not generate as much traffic as short tail keywords?

I don't mind generating less traffic if I'm getting good conversion rates.

Also, are you missing out on traffic because you've not optimized for local search?

If there's only 1,000 searches a month because your keywords suck, then you need to do better keyword research.

However, if your keywords are longer tail relevant keywords, then stick with them, just generate more of them.

[TBiz]

Bail & Doug,

I really appreciate your responses and getting this discussion going.

Ok, obviously I need to be more specific if we're going to get to the root of this.  My site is kibin.com and we're an online proofreading and editing service attempting to disrupt the crummy ones that have been around for far too long, lack any innovation, refuse to produce any great content, or have a social presence.  Granted, we haven't done much of that yet, but we're getting there.

We've chosen to start focusing mostly on students and essays.  You can see that at kibin.com/essay-editing.  Therefore, my keyword choices tend to be things like 'essay editing', 'essay editing service', 'paper editing', 'essay correction'.  I'm slightly torn as to whether I should start including things like 'MBA essay editing' or not yet.  I feel it's more unique and deserves a dedicated page.  The same goes for 'law school personal statements' etc.  But I feel that's a slightly different story (but perhaps still pertinent to this conversation).

I've also started noticing some people finding our site via keywords such as 'proofreading rates' and we're slowly starting to optimize our page kibin.com/proofreading-rates for that.

In the future we plan to expand in to other categories such as 'English editing' or 'ESL editing', etc. or 'resume editing'.  However, these are still quite low-volume search terms.  But again, we're focused on tackling one segment of this market for now, finding a general formula that works, and then applying that formula to the next segment.  So, essay editing is my main keyword focus.

Doug, I think there is definitely some validity to your comment regarding non-search traffic.  We haven't done a lot yet with grass roots type of promotion on college campuses yet and that's something we plan to start doing in the next week.  One of my advisors, who has previously experienced a lot of success in our space, is a strong believer that on-campus efforts are a waste.  For that reason, I've been a bit gun-shy about doing any of that.

I would love to hear both of your thoughts on this now that I've gotten much more specific.  My gut tells me that, yes... focus on conversion and don't worry how big your search volume is.  Let our customers fall in love with the product and service and make it easy, and incentivize them, to share and invite their friends.  But the other side of me looks at these keywords and thinks "really??? only a few hundred monthly searches? can I really grab a large amount of that traffic?".

Thanks again!

[DougRoberts]

Without knowing more about your business, what your offering are and the keywords that don't seem to have much traffic, it's hard to be specific.

First, have you chosen the right keywords?

One common problem when looking for keywords is to look for terms that describe your product/service and ignore those words/phases that your prospects may be using. What are the needs/goals of your prospects? Can you find keywords that can target those needs?

For instance - Perhaps there are potential customers out there that don't know what the solution is to their problem - they won't be using the same keywords as someone who know what solution they need and is just looking for a provider.

Also remember that while setting your sights on a highly competitive keyword can be a great long term goal - you really need to find those low-hanging fruit. Can you find less competitive keywords that you can target. Even if they have much less traffic - a large slice of small pie is still going to be worth more than crumbs (or less) of a large pie.

There's nothing to stop you building content targeted around lots of these less competitive keywords - just make sure that the content provides value to the visitor and helps move them towards the goals of your site.

Don't forget non-search traffic. If you can promote your business in the right places (where do your customers hang-out?) you can position your business as an authority in your niche. Maybe you'll get some direct referrals and more brand related search traffic.

Hope this helps!

[BailHotline]

Hi TBiz,

From experience I can tell you that low volume keywords are not necessarily  the end of the world. Targeting high volume keywords doesn't mean your webpage is guaranteed conversions, RSS subscribers, or long term customers. A lot of people tend to think high traffic is synonymous with success on the web, and I'll be the first to tell you it's not.

If you feel confident that your webpage content strongly reflects your keywords and phrases don't change it, instead focus more on conversion rate optimization(CRO) and user experience (UX). nine times out of ten your conversion goals well be higher than targeting keywords that are less relevant to the user, just to see a spike in traffic.

Hope that helps, feel free to ask more questions if you need additional advice.