The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
As SEOs, we’re primed to go big on our content strategy — to do thorough keyword and competitor research, create high-quality content, do link-building outreach, and drive ad and social media traffic to our pages to get our keywords ranking as soon as possible. Because of the time, effort, and resources that go into ranking for a keyword, we think that unless thousands of people are searching for them, it’s not worth targeting at all.
But that’s where I think many SEOs are missing opportunities to bring in targeted — and revenue-generating — traffic.
If you’re in a niche where there are either too many competing products or a small addressable market — like B2B fintech or martech — targeting high search volume keywords from the get-go is an exercise in futility.
For new companies or smaller businesses with low authority sites in competitive niches, it takes months (or maybe even years) to rank for a keyword like “project management” or “online payment”. For niches with small addressable markets, there aren’t even any high search volume keywords to target.
If you’re chasing after high search volume keywords, you’re either creating content that will never be seen by your ideal audience as it stays buried in Google’s page seven, or forcing a content strategy that doesn’t address your buyer persona’s search intent. Either way, it’s SEO’s version of a black hole in space.
And when you look at it like this, you may indeed think, “Why even bother with SEO then? It’s not worth it.”
But from my perspective, SEO is worth it — with the RIGHT approach.
For cases like these — competitive niche, small