Anyone who has experience with super small SEO volume but high CPC & CTR niches?

[Bulldozer]

Does anybody here have experience with niches that have less than 3,000 monthly searches but generate high income because of high CPC and CTR rates?

In other words: is traffic king or is it true that quality beats quantity?

I would appreciate answers from people with real experience with such niches, please.

What is a realistic income from a Top 10 ranked site of this kind, etc.

[StoneWilson]

Lots of people running micro niche websites, and most of them are targeted longtail keywords so they often have really niceh convertion rate. As to how much can earn, well, it depends on what kind of niche they choose, for example, niches like credit card, insurance and fitness products often can make lots of money.

[Bulldozer]

Originally Posted by StoneWilson

Lots of people running micro niche websites, and most of them are targeted longtail keywords so they often have really niceh convertion rate. As to how much can earn, well, it depends on what kind of niche they choose, for example, niches like credit card, insurance and fitness products often can make lots of money.

Yeah, but it is my understanding that even micro niche guys stay away from niches that have less than 20,000 searches per month.
I found a niche that has 3,000 monthly searches. MarketSamurai claims it can generate ~$400 monthly but I don't know how accurate this prediction is.
To me even $40 per month sounds unrealistic for a 3,000 searches niche.
That's why I'm asking how true is this whole deal about super small micro niches that have a high CTR & high CPC ratios.

[Billy Rey]

Its certainly possible with the right affiliate offer. You can easily make thousands with just a few searches per day.

If its just mainly from adsense, I just halve the value market samurai shows to give me a somewhat realistic view. Even if it is in the insurance/credit niches.

[Bulldozer]

Originally Posted by Billy Rey

Its certainly possible with the right affiliate offer. You can easily make thousands with just a few searches per day.

If its just mainly from adsense, I just halve the value market samurai shows to give me a somewhat realistic view. Even if it is in the insurance/credit niches.

Yeah, I'm only interested in the AdSense income. And I believe that it would be a real struggle to get $400 out of this niche. This is the estimated value that MarketSamurai suggested.

I think that selling affiliate products with only 3,000 total Google searches per month (which will result in roughly ~1000 visits to your site) will be even harder. So I will completely exclude the affiliate marketing element from my equation.

Does halving the money value that MarketSamurai estimates really get you close to the real life earnings?
I mean, have you tested this 1/2 formula yourself?

In my case it would mean estimated virtual USD $400 divided by 2 = real life USD $200!
...Which still sounds very unrealistic.

[Bulldozer]

Still waiting for advice from people who have first-hand experience with this kind of niches.

[dp40oz]

3000 exact searches a month can earn big time! One of my sites ranks #2 for an insurance term that gets 1600 exact searches monthly. It pulls in about $500 a month on that term alone through adsense.

[Bulldozer]

Originally Posted by dp40oz

3000 exact searches a month can earn big time! One of my sites ranks #2 for an insurance term that gets 1600 exact searches monthly. It pulls in about $500 a month on that term alone through adsense.

Jesus Christ!
Thank you for this answer, now I do know for sure that super small micro niches (shouldn't they be called nano niches? whatever) can actually generate profit, regardless of the very small traffic that they get.

dp40oz, how many of those 1600 exact Google searches convert to visits to your #2 ranked site and how many of those visits you get convert to AdSense clicks?

[dp40oz]

Originally Posted by Bulldozer

Jesus Christ!
Thank you for this answer, now I do know for sure that super small micro niches (shouldn't they be called nano niches? whatever) can actually generate profit, regardless of the very small traffic that they get.

dp40oz, how many of those 1600 exact Google searches convert to visits to your #2 ranked site and how many of those visits you get convert to AdSense clicks?

Well I usually get about 30 visits to the website a day. I'd say its about 20 for that term and then about 10 visits from long tail versions of the term that I could never have imagined.

This is not my niche or the term but heres an example. Let say my term was car insurance. I rank #2 but I also get traffic like.

car insurance for old men in wheelchairs
car insurance for baseball players

Ya know just random stuff. So out of those 30 visits I average between 5-7 clicks because the site is really optimized for adsense clicks and the ads are extremely relevant. In this niche I average about $3-5 a click so I usually end up making anywhere from $400-600 off this one page.

If you are in a high paying niche you can really clean up like this. Ive found though that as much as this 1 super specific page is doing well ive also been burned doing this as well.

I have another page in a super specific niche and no matter what I do I can't get it to break #6 for 1300 exact term match. Ive spent a ton of time trying to rank it and since its super specific it gets no traffic other then that 1 term I am #6 for. The site only makes about $100 a month, which is fine but I really put a lot of time into it that could have been spent elsewhere or could have made me more money had a went after more broad terms that would receive traffic from many different searches. I guess what I am saying is that if you go this route you are really dependent on having to rank that term top 3 to really do any serious damage.

[Bulldozer]

Originally Posted by dp40oz

Well I usually get about 30 visits to the website a day. I'd say its about 20 for that term and then about 10 visits from long tail versions of the term that I could never have imagined.

This is not my niche or the term but heres an example. Let say my term was car insurance. I rank #2 but I also get traffic like.

car insurance for old men in wheelchairs
car insurance for baseball players

Ya know just random stuff. So out of those 30 visits I average between 5-7 clicks because the site is really optimized for adsense clicks and the ads are extremely relevant. In this niche I average about $3-5 a click so I usually end up making anywhere from $400-600 off this one page.

If you are in a high paying niche you can really clean up like this. Ive found though that as much as this 1 super specific page is doing well ive also been burned doing this as well.

I have another page in a super specific niche and no matter what I do I can't get it to break #6 for 1300 exact term match. Ive spent a ton of time trying to rank it and since its super specific it gets no traffic other then that 1 term I am #6 for. The site only makes about $100 a month, which is fine but I really put a lot of time into it that could have been spent elsewhere or could have made me more money had a went after more broad terms that would receive traffic from many different searches. I guess what I am saying is that if you go this route you are really dependent on having to rank that term top 3 to really do any serious damage.

Thanks a lot for this insightful post!
What do you mean when you say that your page is "really optimized" for AdSense? What is your preffered ad placement scheme?
Or maybe it's the content that is optimized and makes your ads look like part of the web site, like sections that the user wants to check out?

Also, I am surprised that you are ranking pages, not whole web sites. People are always saying that Google ranks pages anyway.
But I suspect that having just one page on a web site will not get you anywhere.

What is your case? Do you only have 1 single page per web site?

[dp40oz]

Originally Posted by Bulldozer

Thanks a lot for this insightful post!
What do you mean when you say that your page is "really optimized" for AdSense? What is your preffered ad placement scheme?
Or maybe it's the content that is optimized and makes your ads look like part of the web site, like sections that the user wants to check out?

Also, I am surprised that you are ranking pages, not whole web sites. People are always saying that Google ranks pages anyway.
But I suspect that having just one page on a web site will not get you anywhere.

What is your case? Do you only have 1 single page per web site?

Adsense optimized refers to certain wordpress themes I use that have been proven over time by others and myself to give the highest adsense CTR's.

The websites im referring to have about 10 pages of content each but the home page is the one I am trying to rank for the specified keyword. All other pages are there to help build up the homepage for that keyword.

Recently I have moved away from these small style 1 keyword type of sites and have been doing bigger authority pages. I would recommend though if you are just starting out to do smaller sites, learn the ropes then move on to bigger websites.

[markowe]

I wouldn't say micro-niche site builders were avoiding kwds with search volumes of 3000, I thought that fit well into the definition of a micro-niche. I have one about that volume in home improvement, just some common DIY item. The home page never really got more than 15-20 searches a day, but with a decent CPC that's enough to fetch around $150+ monthly. But the beauty then is in adding more related content (and sometimes doing some work to rank it) and seeing the snowball effect of the long tail. I have tripled the earnings of that site in a few months. So small search volumes can be full of surprises - that's why it's worth at least having a glance at the broad match volume to see the potential that's there.

[mikelmraz]

Originally Posted by Bulldozer

Does anybody here have experience with niches that have less than 3,000 monthly searches but generate high income because of high CPC and CTR rates?

In other words: is traffic king or is it true that quality beats quantity?

I would appreciate answers from people with real experience with such niches, please.

What is a realistic income from a Top 10 ranked site of this kind, etc.

There probably are. But mostly I believe have to do with sales rather than Adsense ...