***What is a decent exact match search number for a keyword?***

[mince001]

500 exact match searches?
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
3500
3500+

ADDITIONAL QUESTION:
For an offline business owner(for eg. plumber)- how many searches do you think they would be happy with for 1 keyword?

[John Williamson]

There really isn't a preset 'decent' amount of searches for any keyword phrase. It is totally relative and dependent upon the niche and keyword phrase itself.

[mince001]

Originally Posted by John Williamson

There really isn't a preset 'decent' amount of searches for any keyword phrase. It is totally relative and dependent upon the niche and keyword phrase itself.

I definitely agree with it. I have some keywords for my sites that get 4000+ exact match searches and some that have only 1000 but are " buy ...." type of keywords, which convert really well.

What would you estimate is a good search number for a keyword like "(city name) plubmer for eg?

[JSProjects]

That's really hard to say. As you say, if the keyword is a buyer keyword then a smaller amount of traffic can perform better than a more widely searched, though less buyer focused, keyword.

Not sure if you're going to find a solid answer. :/

[retsek]

It really depends on the niche.

For example I found a keyword that was only 880 searches. Too little for my time, but I did research and found another 60 keywords that were closely related to the first keyword, but all under 1,000 searches and with no competition.

So what I did what to build an authority site targeting all 60 keywords with 35 articles. The result ? an easy 1,200 per month in Adsense. Now i'm looking at Clickbank products for it.

[John F Kennedy]

I'm sorry but this question is impossible to answer, there are so many varying factors that would differ immensely dependent on what your niche was.

In your example you mention a plumber. In my experience, as has already been mentioned, target keywords that our geographic - i.e Plumbers in Seattle or Seattle Plumbers. You're likely to see much less competition for such keywords but but these 'long tail keywords are extremely targeted.

[blast204]

From what I can understand it is not the "exact" search number you should be mainly focusing on. It is the strength of the top three websites for that term, for example you might find an "exact" term for 4000 but if the three top websites for that term have proper on/off page seo with a tonne of backlinks it would not be worth the investment.

[Deltia]

An exact amount is hard to give as its all relative to how click/buy happy and targeted the searchers are likely to be and what you are selling. If you get 100 highly targeted visitors converting at 50% for a product that will get you over 500$ each then that's better than 20000 visitors who click your adsense ads at 10% for $0.50 a click. but obviously each of these would get you decent money

[John Williamson]

For some of the local businesses that are my clients ("offline"), in certain niches/industries their primary keyword phrase may only have 100 or so monthly searches tops, but for them to be on page 1 and get just a few visitors and potential leads is huge simply because their leads are so valuable.

[Andrew S]

Im starting to do nothing less than xx,xxx

[LiamP]

While there is no 'one-size-fits-all' answer to your question, you can factor in another couple of numbers to get a better idea of how good it is.

Firstly look at your competition and work out if you can get the number one slot. Number 1 in Google gets around 50x more traffic than Number 10(50% vs 1%).

So number 1 for a 500 search term (250 visitors) is 5 times more traffic than number 10 on a 5000 search term (50 visitors).
Percentage of traffic distribution on Google

Next you need to estimate your conversion. Will you convert at 1% or 10% or better? Be conservative. Optimism is dangerous here.

Next how much will you get per conversion? e.g. 10c Adsense or $20 clickbank sale or $80 lead?

So for example you might say.
1000 searches per month
Confident I can get to Number 3 (15% of traffic) or better.
So 150 clicks per month to my site.
Assume say a 4% conversion.
6 conversions a month.
Say $5 a conversion.
$30 a month.
A dollar a day.

Then decide if it is worth your time.

Actual results will of course vary wildly but going through a process like this will make you think a little harder as to how good an opportunity really is.

[redrabbitt67]

It seems it's getting harder and harder to find high-volume keywords with low competition, so I'm going more to the approach like the post from "retsek" and building larger authority sites with more articles targeting more keywords with lower search volume.

It takes more work, but that's just the way it is now. I'd rather make money with a larger number of keywords with low volume than just depending on a few keywords with high volume.