Whats the minimum keyword searches you go for?

I am doing a little keyword experiment to get better at picking keywords. Because anything I rank for gets no traffic and anything with high searches is far too competitive for me so I waste a lot of time and get nothing. Ideally now I want to go for words that get at least 400 odd searches however I am finding it hard to come by anything with low competition. I have came across a tonne of keywords that get less than 100 searches a month that appear to have super low competition, are these worth targeting or will they likely bring me practically no traffic?

 

Hi @broombroom ,

One thing I started doing the last couple of years and that has really worked well for me is going after long tail keyword. Less than 100 is ok but you should try and up it to say 200 searches a month.

Many webmasters are not going after this golden nugget keywords and the chances are you will rank for them easily. Get 5 of these long tail nuggets and you have yourself 1000 searches a month with little competition. Human search is evolving and people are no longer searching for one word broad generic keywords, long tail is the way to go.

To summarise, go after at least 5 long tail keywords with around 200 searches a month on each page you plan to create, trust me you won't regret it.

 

No right answer to your question, because it depends on a lot of factors. Are you targeting a general geography area? What industry are you targeting? Is this a micro niche? Etc.

For example, targeting keywords with less than 100 searches in a global business would be stupid and a waste of time, but for a local business it may be worth while.

 

Hi thanks for the input. Yes I would love to be able to identify these sorts of keywords and constantly rank well for them. I would literally write all day everyday. So I have included these sorts of keywords for my experiment. The problem is though although Google says these words get 200 searches per month but that doesn't mean we are guaranteed to get that many visits could be more could be much much less as most common in my case. What is your experience with this issue? Having said that we could combine many similar phrases in the same post.

 

Hi thanks for your reply. Well my site is a kind of review info blog where I write about the things that I am interested in and review the products that I recommend or whatever. So really a mashup of micro niches. I was originally just blatantly reviewing every product I came across in my niche and writing whatever I thought was useful for the niche - this generated highly targeted but very very very low traffic. I did no keyword research at all or checked monthly searches or competition but I recently checked that out and all the things I am ranking well for get practically no searches. The more popular items I don't rank for get more traffic but the competition is obviously harder.

So now I am hoping to gain the same targeted traffic but just more of it. I am now researching good low comp keywords with few hundred plus searches a month and documenting my results to hopefully find a pattern to make this process easier in the future.

 

Nusaint is right. Target long tail keywords. What I do is I target long tail keywords in the blog. It's easier to write for these keywords and they are really used by people. For the main pages of the website though, I use main keywords (short tail).

 

Thanks so when going for the long tail keywords does it matter how many searches it has? Say you found one that gets 50 searches a month would you still go for it?

 

I wouldn't go for less than 100 searches a month. If you can incorporate those key phrases on your articles with long tail keywords getting higher searches, that might work. But make sure the keywords are related.