Just because a keyword has a lot of searches, doesn't mean you should be targeting it

Just because a keyword has a lot of searches, doesn't mean you should be targeting it

When people get into website design, SEO and marketing they will always search what the best keywords are for their website, and those are usually the ones that have the most searches within Google every month. People tend to target these keywords right away because the more searches per month mean the more you could potentially make. This is great and all, but you'll soon hit the realization that these keywords tend to be extremely difficult to rank for and your efforts probably would have been better spent on multiple low trafficked keywords that you could have ranked for in a month or two.

Targeting high trafficked keywords isn't a bad idea, don't get me wrong, I'm just saying that they shouldn't be your main target when it comes to rankings. If you do end up ranking for these difficult keywords, that's awesome, but by the time you rank for those keywords you could have been ranked for dozens even hundreds of other keywords that might have sent you, even more, traffic and sales.

Some people might come to this discussion and say something along the lines of "You don't know what you're talking about, I rank for all my difficult keywords!" and that's great! But I doubt they all get 300,000+ searches per month and took you years to achieve top rankings lol. Most marketers know that you should target the low hanging fruit in order to get the initial traffic and sales in, so you can then bootstrap your profits in order to push your website even further up the totem pole

If you haven't figured it out yet, this discussion will cover keyword targeting and why your top trafficked keywords might not be the best idea to target right away.


People value total keyword searches too highly
Everywhere I go online, there's always someone spewing about how their main keyword gets XXX,XXX searches per month. What they never tell you is that they rank on page 96 for that keyword and aren't getting seen even by accident lol. People boast their top searched keywords like they were an expensive car at a car show. They're basically saying "My keyword is more popular, so you should be jealous!" lol.

When I look into a website that I want to set up, I look over my entire dictionary of niche related keywords and see what will be the easiest to rank for right away and what will take months or years to see any results. My easier keywords will always have under 10k searches a month, and I'll tend to start off with the keywords that get 1k or fewer searches per month. I do this because these keywords are my low hanging fruit and tend to have less difficulty than the rest of the list. Sure, they don't get a ton of searches, but I can rank for 100 of these in a month and that's equivalent to being ranked for a 100k searched keyword. The difference is that a 100k searched keyword could take you a couple years to see any rankings on the first page, but my 100 low traffic keywords are ranked in a month or two


Keyword difficulty means it takes longer to make money
When you are targeting your high searched keywords, it simply means it will take a much longer time to be ranked, and make money. Sure, you could rank for these types of keywords and make $1,000+ per day, but how much time do you have to invest into getting there and it's not even a guarantee that you will achieve top rankings?

Investing this amount of time to rank for 1 keyword might be good because you can rank for others on your journey, but I still think it's better to target less trafficked keywords and your top searched ones should be secondary.

How many people do you think are trying to rank for these keywords? If they're super difficult to rank for, I'm sure there are plenty of corporations hiring dedicated SEO teams to rank them on top for these keywords. This means you'll be battling top-tier SEO's and that means your probability of success is pretty low.


Targetting 10 low trafficked keywords could be better than 1 difficult keyword
Many people target their main keywords because of the search volume, but what if I told you that it's better to target 10 lesser keywords? I say this because you could spend less time and effort in your SEO campaign by targeting say 10 keywords with 10k searches each month. Now, these are considered medium difficulty keywords so they could take a little longer, maybe 3 months, to rank for.

The beauty of this is that you can sometimes find a diamond among these level keywords. You can be targeting these 10k keywords and you might jump to page 1 for a couple right away. This means that not many of your competitors are actually doing SEO for these keywords, and now you benefit!

This doesn't happen all the time, usually, a 10k keyword will take some time to rank for simply because your competition has authority over you. But every once in a while you will see your website jump for these kinds of keywords and you will start making money sooner than your more difficult keywords


More work is involved, and you might not be successful
Working to rank for your top tier keywords is a good idea as long as you have a steady income and don't have to rely on the website you're currently working on to make money. You can always set up a big website, add loads of content and do everything right, but it will take time to rank for your main short-tailed keywords.

Even if you invest all of your time, money and skills into ranking for your top tier keywords, there's no guarantee that you will rank #1 for them. Hell, you might not even see page 2 or 3 with all of your efforts. There have been plenty of people who just do the "Go Big or Go Home" method, and they usually have to Go Home lol. You need to play it smart when it comes to keyword targeting and get your easier keywords ranked first while still targeting your difficult keywords, but not relying on them to rank right away.



In Conclusion
I'm not trying to discourage you, I actually want to encourage you to target the right keywords instead of submitting all of your time on keywords that you might not rank for quick enough. People always need money, so if you're relying on these main keywords to rank, you might want to change gears and target something else. You can rank for hundreds of keywords before your main one, as long as you're targeting them and optimizing the right way. Get to work, be smart about it and profit from the low hanging fruit all while you target your main keywords at the same time in hopes to rank for them next year




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Thanks!

Razzy