What monthly search volume do you personally require before going ahead?

[wickedsubmit]

Out of interest. How many searches a month would a keyword need for you to bother with it?

[wickedsubmit]

I usually pick keyword which have 2000-4000 monthly searches and less competition keyword so it became easy for me to out rank my competitor within a month or two..

Originally Posted by precious007

Firstly if you're using Google's Keyword tool, all the numbers are overly estimated.

For that reason alone, you'll never want to pick a keyword with 100 exact searches a month, nor 1000 because those keyword don't receive ANY traffic in most of the cases. Any keyword with a search volume of 3000 - 10.000 is great to start off with.

Make sure that every time you select a keyword, you select the exact match option.

Secondly, every single keyword has a number of competitors that you'll need to outrank, so it's not only the number of search per month that matter but the number of competitors and it better not be a very high number.

[Hamida Harland]

I wouldn't focus too much on search volume - personally I look more at the competition and whether or not the keyword is a 'buyer' keyword.

Keyword tool numbers aren't very accurate at the best of times anyway. For instance I am targetting one particular keyword that according to Google's keyword tool only gets 46 exact match searches per month (my own stats tell me it gets alot more). I rank no.1 for this keyword and because it's an EXTREMELY targetted buyer keyword it makes me just over $1000 a month.

[areaman]

I'm curious, what would you say is your minimum and maximum number of competitors?

[excuzemee]

Originally Posted by areaman

I'm curious, what would you say is your minimum and maximum number of competitors?

I would have asked what's a "buyer' keyword! haha!

Min/max of competitors means how much work you have to do to rank for that set of keywords.

If you are submitting manually, you need to find out how many backlinks the top three have. if it's doable for you manually then go for it.

A set of keywords can have many competitors too but not all are an "exact" match in which case it will be easier to rank for. If all the sites have exact keyword matches AND a ton of backlinks that will take you months and months... maybe longtail it or subnniche it.

number of competitors don't matter if they aren't an exact match. did you search with ("") quotes around your keywords?

[Mailin]

I've noticed that ever since Google changed their external keyword tool over to the new version, keyword searches per month have been grossly overestimated, like precious2007 said. For example, a keyword that had 30 searches per month now has 1,500. Doesn't seem like it could have grown that much in one month's time, but I digress.

For me, I used to go for 2k-4k searches/month on exact with the old keyword tool. Now I go for anywhere from 7k-20k, depending on how many closely-related exact phrases I can find. (For example, "Buy Shoes" and "Buy Purple Shoes", "Buy Purple Nike Shoes", etc. all might have 5k+ each per month.)

[Kaizen Ninja]

It depends actually, after considering the good conversion quality and the number of sites competing in your chosen keyword, even if a keyword has a total monthly search of 30K but you see that there are less (let's say 1500 sites) and poor sites targeting this keyword.. then it's a good KW which is unlikely and the opposite of a KW with 3000 monthly search and with more than (let's say 1 million) million and good SEO optimized sites.

[RichardF]

For me it depends on what I'm doing, and of course the competition. Some keywords with low search volume can be taken over with minimal effort. Sure, each keyword might not send you much traffic, but if you do it in bulk it quickly adds up. It depends a lot on the niche though, some niches naturally have a lot more long tail keywords than others.

I can only speak for myself, but I rather go for tons of long tails that can be overtaken with minimal effort, than slowly optimize for just one shorter tail. Even if a keyword only gets 10 searches per day, and you get 4 clicks by ranking #1, it adds up if you have 100 like that.

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Every situation is completely different. I've been doing this for way too long to have a "pat" number of searches that are my minimum threshold. It all depends on how much revenue I generate per click through/action.

If a conversion a particular offer ultimately generates $290 in revenue and 1-in-50 clicks converts, is ranking #1 for 500 actual searches per month enough? Conversely, if a conversion on another offer generates $32 in revenue and 1-in-300 actually converts, is even 15,000 actual searches enough? Theoretically, the former pays a lot more money than the latter, despite the search volume numbers.

Don't look for a "magic number". Instead, work on ALL the numbers.

[ryanwsi]

Hi, just a quick tip, use Market Samurai, get at least 30 search volume per day so that's about 1000-1500 per month and these are long tail keywords. Depending on your niche. It's actually up to you. If you find a keyword that has no competition and has great search volume then grab it. Right?