How do I find out what low-volume keywords are best to target?

[ULCRobotics]

Since many of our products and services are purpose-built for a niche community, I find that many of the keywords I am researching are all low-volume. Data on the Keyword Difficulty Tool show '0' under Bing Search Volume (exact match). I know what my competitors are targeting based on their title tags and web content, but I'm not sure if they did their keyword research homework, so I don't want to assume.

Is there any other way to determine which keywords I should be targeting?

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There - all superb answers so far - thanks guys! Can you give an example of any of your keywords? I have seen some long tail keywords be ultra high competitive, and others not. I have also seen some "long tail" with very low search volume but are only short 2-3 word phrases. There are transactional and information long tails. A little more specifics would help with some suggestions

[Raydon]

over time, try to use them in blog posts titles without getting junky and spammy. If you have ever tried to go through Yext local SEO providers and google for the local listing brand + add business search, you will notice that Yext has done a nice job of having a landing page for these and I would suspect these are not very high volume keywords at all.

Do use ubersuggest and keyword planner a lot and also never underestimate the instant search choices when typed into google search bar or chrome. This is about the best and cheapest way to go on these research affairs. Also, checkout yahoo answers and twitter for those phrases, you can get a good idea of what people ask, even if you have a bunch of 0s and 10s coming from google numbers. this will be a nice real world confirmation especially if you see your competitors using it.

one last way, do exact match searches for those keyphrases and see what is the competition like, who is ranking for them and how well those pages are built, or if they have lots of comments, shares, or other social signals.

tedious i know, but hey, this is the core SEO, tedious research and analysis for a solid base, and then move on this base to create the content and code that should fare well over time and various devices.

[EGOL]

This really isn't a direct answer, but it is how I approach the problem.

The difficulty with long-tail keywords is that there are SO MANY OF THEM.   It is impossible to target all of them.

Building specific landing pages for each of them would be really time consuming if done properly with content and would make a very spammy site if done quickly.

So, what I do is draw upon my knowledge of the products or topics that I am targeting and write the following types of content.

1. The questions that people most frequently ask.

2. The things that they don't ask but need to know to be succesful

3. The things that would surprise them - like misconceptions, extremes  and WTFs.

If you have a lot of #1 content on your site it will pull in a lot of these long tail keywords.  These pages should be substantive in length and detailed in information.  That will put a lot of diverse words on the page that will match many long tail queries.  These will pull in traffic.

Content in the #2 and #3 category, if written with substantive length and detail, will also pull in a lot of long tail... but in addition, these are the types of pages that people will link to, share and recommend.  They are the astonishment topics that people enjoy and share.  In general, these are some of the most successful pages on my websites.  My site is mostly factual and serious topics... but I get tons of traffic on these types of topics through links on reddit, stumbleupon, cracked, FB, etc.