I'm launching a business in 2010 based around activities for at-risk youths in inner city areas-I've spent a long time doing keyword analysis and have come to a problem-all the keywords that are relevant for the site and the business are barely, if at all, searched... I'm not trying to sell a product to the traffic, but obviously encourage youths to attend so for example one of the long tailed phrases I was looking at was "places to play basketball london", the problem is as stated, these terms are barely searched. Do I build a whole site on keywords that are relevant to what I'm trying to do but not searched frequently or go another route and if so what would it be? Thanks in advance for any replies
In this case I would ask if SEO was really the choice to make. Considering your starting a business within this area I am guessing you have researched and found that its worth your time to do so. Just because people don't search in the search engines for things that you think are relevant to your site perhaps you should go at it from a different angle such as joining forums for teenagers in London who want to play basketball for example and forwarding them to your site through forums and social networking sites. If this doesn't sound to great then perhaps look at doing some more keyword research perhaps its just the words your focusing on.
Nice advice willyboy (nice username!), thanks very much. Forums is definitely an area I will be focusing on, as well as a lot of social media marketing.. Yeah the whole keyword research thing is pretty massive-I've literally dwindled down a list of like 500 keywords down to the ones which have the most searches and are most relevant to the site, done a full KOI analysis based on David Viney's recommendations in "Get to the top on Google" and still haven't got a lot to work with... I think I'll just focus on the relevant keywords and see it as any traffic I do get through the search engines as a bonus
Another marketing idea for your site could be to target youth centers. You could maybe put up a forum on your site for the people you are trying to reach then get the information to the youth center about your site and forum where users can help each other (kinda like here).
Search engine ranking is no doubt important to get traffic but if you know how to drive traffic with social media sites, You can ignore Search engines.