Keyword Research for Low Volume Keywords

[brooksmanley]

Hey friends,

I'm looking for a little keyword research direction here, specifically for keywords and phrases with low search volume. I'm just going to give a recent example:

I just finished a piece of content on customer experience. I began the process with some keyword research. Based on Moz's keyword explorer, "customer experience" has a monthly volume of 2.9k-4.3k. Sweet. So I move onto related queries and longer tail phrases to narrow my content approach. But just about any relevant phrase shows either a volume of 0-10 or 11-50 and very similar difficulty metrics, making it tough to choose a direction.

So "what is customer experience" shows a monthly volume of 0-10. SEM Rush reports ~350 searches a month. I understand SEM Rush uses broader match, but I guess what I'm asking is: how do I perform keyword research with such minuscule volumes and such little data to differentiate?

I've looked at Russ Jones' answer to a similar question here on how Keyword Explorer works: https://moz.com/community/q/what-is-a-good-keyword-volume-score ... but I still don't have a ton of clarity.

Any advice would be awesome!

[brooksmanley]

Very helpful, I've never explored the lexical similarity within keyword suggestions.

Also – very much enjoyed your recent Whiteboard Friday on profiting as an agency.

Thanks Russ!

[rjonesx. 0]

Hey, thanks for the great question!

This is a great time to use the "Group by Lexical Similarity" feature in Keyword Explorer. You will find that most long tail keywords have multiple variants and that writing content on that topic will allow you to rank for all of them! For example, we might show 11-50 searches for the keyword "used fishing rods for kids" but also show another 11-50 for "used fishing rods for children" and yet another 11-50 for "used fishing rod for kid". As you can imagine, the same piece of content would rank for all.

Good luck!