Would you target a keyword with 50 monthly searches If guaranteed 1st Rank?

Depends on the niche or monetization opportunities. If it's some high value professional service, the kind with $20 adwords bids, you can still get a lot of money from very little traffic. I have a site with about 30 visitors per day making more than $100, maybe 150/month and I'm sure you can make much more with even less traffic (my site is actually no extra high value niche - it's travel/hotels). It's not really targeting just one keyword though.

That said, I would not start a new website solely for one keyword with 50 traffic, not in 2015. I'd rather make it a page or a section within a larger site. But of course it depends on the keyword and the products/services in question, sometimes going the ultra focused niche way is the right way.

Depends. The real question is: how are much each of those visitors worth? $1? $10? $100? Answer that and you can then guess about whether it's worth taking the time to rank there.

There's absolutely nothing to think about- target it. If there is almost zero competition and it's a guaranteed 50 visitors per month, then a few blog posts allows you to own it.

Now, I don't care if each visitor is only worth a nickel....fifty nickels a month over the next ten years adds up to a whole lot of nickels (six bucks worth). Then add in recurring incomes from those leads and you could be in the hundreds or even thousands.

Now, for ten years that may seem to suck, but you gained those leads/sales off of 2 hours worth of work total and never had to think about them again. And if you can find 100 of those teeny, tiny streams of traffic, then you're talking about having a fantastic niche site that's 100% on autopilot.

It depends on how much you could potentially make from these visitors. I would consider it but ideally I'd like to see a higher number

Yes...IF...

> the solution they were searching for was URGENTLY needed

and

> the revenue for solving that problem was significant.


Now an extra fifty bucks a month never hurt anyone, if it's a "set and forget" type funnel.

But if it's one that requires hand-holding, ongoing content development, live conversations etc., you'd better be making $500 or more from a sale.

I am with the "it depends" group. If it is a niche that I can monetize easily at a decent $/visitor then yes. You have to determine what that $/visitor needs to be to answer your question.

Unless the CPC rate for that keyword is $80 to $100, it looks like it isn't worth targeting.

Commercial keywords are the ones that make money. To improve your rankings and make money, you need to understand the difference between commercial and informational keywords. If all your keywords are informational, you will still generate organic traffic. I use SEMRUSH and Google keyword tools to give myself an idea of the most popular keyterms, but then again, I am a link builder, not a keyword monkey, or a soothsayer.

Personally I won't target such a targeted keyword with such small amount of hits per month.

I mean, if they are REALLY REALLY targeted, you still need to factor things such as will they be interested enough click into your site? To add on, will they buy from your site or follow your call to action after they clicked into your number one ranked site?

Once these factors are into play, believe me, chances are that you won't be seeing much result as expected at first.

- Ethan

If that traffic could be monetized in some fashion - you sell them something, you indirectly sell them something (an affiliate product), some percent click on an ad that earns you money, you get some percentage to opt into a list and some percentage buy something from you, the traffic benefits your site in some fashion, etc - then YES, I'd target that keyword.

Unless your content is really, really thin it's hard to target just one keyword. You might start out by writing about that one keyword but that search volume in the Google Keyword Planner is for EXACT traffic volume. It does not tell you what other traffic might come from related, long-tail searches.

Here's an example: I have a post targeting a keyword that gets 170 searches a month in the US. The post has ranked around the 3-4 position in Google for over a year now.

It gets over 1000 visitors a month. Why? Because it ranks for over 200 related keywords, as well, including several short keywords. That's an extra 1000 visitors a month for a year (and counting) in exchange for the few hours it took me over a year ago to write and post the content.

It's hard to anticipate this added potential but you can get a feel for it by looking at the search volume for the shortest phrase in that niche. If there's a lot of search volume for the shortest phrase, there are probably more long-tail variations that you could end up ranking for with that same post.

You can even analyze the SEO competition for long-tail variations of the 50/month search phrase to see if there are pockets of additional traffic you might get right off the bat.

Yes I would for sure.

Then I would go all out to find all the long tail keywords and build a site that covers the niche so deep, you will have page one rank for as long as you want.

The problem is, Google's Keyword tool has got no hope of finding any of those long tail keywords for you.

Plus, people doing online searches type in all sorts of keyword phrases into the 'search box' that Google can't keep track of (only certain tools can do that)

And if you can capture those keywords that real people have been searching for, then you can blanket that niche completely and so thoroughly that no one else will knock you off your ranking.

Thanks for all the input everyone!

Great stuff

Even 10 monthly searches is worth it if your content would naturally rank on the first page without spending any money on backlinks.