SEO has caught the fancy of online as well as offline businesses and it is not without any reason. Organic traffic from search engines is one of the most targeted forms of traffic you can get for your website.

In many cases, when you are in a big niche, doing SEO is easier as you can target multiple keywords and even aim to get into the featured snippet on google among other things. Getting a sizeable amount of traffic in a wide niche is easy. However, if you are in a smaller niche with less number of monthly searches, your options become severely constrained. No longer do you have hundreds of keywords to choose from.

Our blog post today is for people who need to draw a sizeable amount of traffic in smaller niches to make it worth their while. Just because the niche is small does not mean that it should be skipped. Even in smaller niches, you can make a decent profit from the traffic which you get.

One thing however which you need to understand is, the smaller the niche, the more precise should be your strategy. In smaller niches, there is no room for errors.

The number of individuals searching for any keyword can be divided into 2 parts. The first type is the one who would incline towards the paid advertisements and click on the paid advertisements and the second type is the one who would go for the organically ranking website. Since our strategy is much more precise for low volume keywords you have to target both of these categories.

Today, we would be covering both of these aspects and more. We would be specifically discussing the following aspects:

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
2. Paid search results
3. CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation)

Even though there are more avenues for bringing in traffic through digital marketing, but today we would be limiting our discussion to these 3 aspects to provide you with a better grasp on formulating a strategy for the low volume keywords.

Once you are familiar with these 3 acquisition methods of traffic, you can use other methods in the digital marketing arena to drive more traffic in the same niche.

We would be detailing each of these 3 aspects below.

1. Search Engine Optimisation:
Most of the people live in the NOW when it comes to SEO. They always keep on asking themselves, which links can I build now? or How many links can I build this week?. SEO is not about now but rather it is about how. A big part of the answer is the foundation which you build. Once you are on a strong footing right from the start, it becomes easier for you to formulate your future strategy. Many people do not work on strengthening the foundation of their website and directly start building a skyscraper on it. Without a strong foundation, your skyscraper would come crashing down.

There is a very easy way to check the foundation of your website. We would be discussing a simple set of questions, which would enable you to assess the foundation of your website.

 -Do You Have A Clean Link Profile?

   – Is the internal linking structure of your website strong?
   – Is there any deficiency due to which some of your website pages are not linked at all internally?

   – Is there any obstruction in the way of search engines while crawling your site?
   – Is your robots.txt and ht-access file setup the right way?

   – Are there any pages on your website which have been hacked?

   – Have you used proper title tags and meta descriptions for all pages of your website?

   – Are you able to track traffic on your website using tools like Google Analytics?

   – Does your site have authoritative structure?

The answers to these questions would help you in determining the strength of the foundation of your website.

Targeting The Buying Keywords:

Once you have set the foundation in order, now is the time to go to the next stage that is the keyword research.

Relevancy is the first criteria for keyword research. You have to determine which are the search terms that are most relevant to what you have to offer on your website. Only once you sort out the relevancy issue and are sure about your niche, you can move ahead to search volumes.

One thing which a lot of people miss out on is the commercial intent.

Commercial intent refers to the mindset of the searchers while searching that keyword. Commercial intent basically means, how likely a person searching that query is to buy your product or service.

You have to choose the keywords with high commercial intent.

Once you filter out the keyword list according to the criteria above, you have to start matching them with the pages on your website.

In some cases, you would find that the right pages for targeting those keywords are not available on your website. Instead of getting worried about it, you have to just plan for the creation of those pages.

Keywords can be basically divided into 2 parts, that is the short tail keywords which contain 2 to 3 words which can be used for the product offer pages or service pages and the long-tail keywords, which would be perfect for the blog on your corporate website. The long-tail keywords can also be used for the creation of new pages. The long–tail keywords are basically, question type keywords or keywords which contain some type of very specific query and hence they are of 4 words or longer.

Once you are able to divide the keywords, you would be able to decide the hierarchy of the website and thereafter manage the navigation of your website better.

Targeting The Informational Keywords:

Once you have sorted out the above 2 categories of the keywords, the next type of keywords which you would be targeting would be more informational.

The people who are searching for these keywords have the products and services in mind but they are not looking to exactly initiate the transaction. They are in the research mode.

The reason that you should be targeting these keywords, is to provide them with the information which they are searching for and then put them through slow sales funnel.

The content which you would be generating for these keywords would not include a sales pitch but rather it would be entirely informational.

It is important that this content appears authoritative in nature to help you create a good first impression.

You have to even include expert opinions and voices for authoritative individuals in your niche to make it more accurate and authoritative.

We would be discussing an example below.

We would assume that you are targeting the people who want to invest in solar energy.

In this niche, even though the value of even a single customer is significant but the number of searches is on the lower side.

If you take the example of the keyword “solar energy investment”, the searches are only 140 per month.

With these number of low searches, you would not be able to get significant revenue, just by targeting this keyword along.

If you go a bit broad in order to capture the informational keywords, you can go for keywords like “how does solar energy work” which has 4,400 searches and “what is renewable energy” which has 2,900 searches. From these pages, you can try to get the visitors into slow sales funnel for converting them.

In Summary:
-Target commercial intent keywords with direct product/services page

-Target informational keywords with blog pages or question answer pages to initiate the sales funnel
-Informational pages should have authoritative content

2. Paid Search Advertisements:
While SEO does take some time to bring the results, many organizations do not like to wait that long to get the first visitors to their websites. This, in turn, drives them to a strategy which combines SEO with paid search engine advertising. This is the right strategy to use to kick-start your online business.

There are different aspects of paid search engine advertising which you have to get right. We would be discussing these below.

-Track each and everything:
When you are advertising on search engines, you are paying for each and every visitor.

Due to this very reason, it is important to track each and every visitor.

If you are not setting up the tracking right from the start, you would not be able to find out which visitors are converting and which aren’t. Thus, there would be no way to optimize your campaign and you would not be able to produce a good ROI.

There are different tracking tools which you can use like Google analytics or Prosper202.

You have to double check the presence of these analytic codes before you begin your campaign.

If you are using a landing page generator, then many times, after the purchase is initiated or the conversion is completed, the URL would not load again and only a thank you message would be displayed, in such a case, inserting the tracking pixel and code, becomes more difficult. You would have to use the events tracking option for this.

-Getting the keywords right:
While creating your campaign, you have to only choose the keywords with high commercial intent.

This would make it easier for you to get conversions for your website.

Bidding on the high commercial intent keywords might be expensive, but these are the keywords which would be driving maximum conversions on your website. So it is well worth it in the longer-run.

Re-marketing Lists for Search Ads:
These are also known as RLSAs in abbreviation. These ads are specifically targeting people who have been on your website once but haven’t got converted.

Since these people have already visited your website once, they are interested in your products. The main advantage of using RLSA is that you can advertise in front of these visitors at a much lower cost.

For example, if you were bidding on “Solar energy investment” and you get a few visitors but no conversion, you can opt for RLSA and they would be able to view your advertisements on multiple websites on the web. This increases the chance of getting a conversion since they are already familiar with your company.

Since in RLSA you are not competing with anyone to get your ads displayed, it is much more cost effective.

Re-marketing 2.0:
The second type of re-marketing which you can opt for is for visitors landing on the informational pages of your website.

As we mentioned above, the visitors which are coming to your informational pages, need to be put in sales funnel.

You can think about capturing emails from these informational pages.

Once you are able to do that, you can submit that email list to google in order to advertise to those visitors in google, Youtube, and Gmail.

This would make it easier for you to target people who have been to your website and are interested in the broad niche.

This would help you in narrowing down the audience of your ads to specific people who are interested in what you have to offer.

In Summary:

-Make sure you have setup the tracking
-Bid on keywords with commercial intent
-Get the landing pages right
-Use re-marketing to target website visitors

3. Conversion Rate Optimisation:

CRO stands for conversion rate optimisation and it is consists of different aspects which we would go into below.

In niches having smaller search volume, the conversion cycles are pretty long especially if you are in the B2B sales cycle.

In digital marketing, you are not only capturing the visitors who are in transaction mode, but also the visitors which are in research mode and trying to convert them into transaction mode. This takes time.

Getting conversions from the informational pages is possible if you use the sales funnel the right way.

We would be taking forth our example of solar energy investment forward, to bring home this point.

A person who is looking to invest in solar energy, would also be looking for information like “what is a power purchase agreement?” etc. These are informational keywords. If you are able to answer their queries effectively, you not only appear as an authority in your niche but also, you would be able to put that visitor in the sales funnel. That is why, earlier we spoke about creating a website which targets both, the commercial intent keywords and also the informational keywords.

Getting a person to purchase, requires building proper trust and authority as the person needs to be sure that the product or service which you are offering is genuine and also the financial information of the person is safe.

Now, we would be discussing the different aspects of CRO to help you get actual conversions.

-Getting the micro-conversions:
The direct conversions would often come from the product and services page.

However, for the micro-conversions to happen you have to get the informational pages right.

Let’s take an example of the page “What are the advantages of solar energy?”, in this page, you would include all the advantages but in addition to that, you have to also include a call to action for the solar investment program.

You have to keep in mind that only a small percentage of visitors who are searching for the keyword, would actually land on your website.

Due to this reason you have to keep them engaged to get these micro-conversions.

There are a couple of options which you can use to keep these visitors engaged:

 –Capture the emails
 –Delayed email capturing
 –Exit email capturing

Free offers like consultations, free samples or demo

-Accelerated Mobile pages:
Over 50% of the visitors on google use smartphones or tablets to access the internet.

Thus, you have to make sure that your website is mobile optimised.

The pages which are mobile optimised are often fast to load as google caches them, making it easier for them to load on mobile phones.

These search results have a lighting bolt symbol next to them.

Slowly, but surely, visitors would prefer these pages as they would be fast to load.

That is why it is important to get your pages mobile ready in order to capture a larger part of this traffic.

-Tracking:
In order to make your web pages AMP, you have to use special Google analytics tracking code to get your pages included in Advanced Mobile Pages.

-Popups absent:
When your page is listed as AMP, you would not be able to have any popups on your page. Even the existing popups would be disappearing.

Even though AMP might have a few disadvantages, but once users get accustomed to the AMP symbol in the search results, it would automatically drive more traffic to your pages, leading to better overall conversions.

In Summary:
-Build Trust and Authority
-Initiate the sales funnel on informative pages
-Use AMP to get extra mobile traffic

Quick Recap:
All in all, if you are in low volume niche, all is not lost and you can still make a significant amount of revenue.

You have to tie up all the 3 aspects which we discussed in this article, SEO, Paid search advertising and CRO to get more sales for your business.

So, by following these 3 aspects of digital marketing, you would be able to grow your business significantly even when you are in a small volume niche.