This is a preview of an article I wrote for Grow and Convert, which you can find in full here.
Over the past few years, we’ve published various posts that explain how we prioritize content topics and target keywords based on conversion intent, not search volume, including:
Our guide to pain point SEO, which explains our approach to coming up with topics that drive leads and signups.
Our guide to SaaS content marketing and our case study about expanding from bottom-of-funnel content to top-of-funnel, which both talk about the importance of targeting bottom-of-funnel keywords with blog posts.
In all these articles, we share data showing how posts targeting high-conversion intent, bottom-of-funnel (BoF) topics have a really high conversion rate. And we show how they tend to outperform top-of-funnel (ToF) posts for conversions, despite getting less traffic.
As a result, targeting BoF keywords has become the foundation of our content strategy for clients and our differentiation as a content agency.
But despite this data and our reasoning, we still get client pushback on proposed target keywords because SEO tools say the number of searches is low. Clients say they get that these BoF keywords may have higher conversion rates, but they’re worried that a high conversion rate is useless if only a few people are searching for it in the first place.
So this got me thinking: Is there a way we can clearly demonstrate the value of low-volume keywords so we can open up new topic angles for our clients?
The answer lies in the number of conversions they generate. I did this research and it revealed some pretty interesting data, which we’ll share in this post.
Key Takeaways: Why Are They Outperforming Estimates?
There was one overarching takeaway from our analysis: mini-volume keywords consistently generate way more traffic and conversions than back-of-the-envelope estimates predict. For example, people often calculate the value of keywords this way:
This keyword gets 20 searches a month (estimate from SEO software).
Best case scenario, we’ll rank #1. This gets around 30% of clicks, so that’s only around 7 clicks a month.
Even if we get a 2% conversion rate from traffic to lead, that’s 0.14 leads a month.
Conclusion: not worth it!
This logic seems sound but in practice we’ve noticed that this conclusion (“not worth it”) is wrong. As we’ll show with multiple examples below, ranking in the top few spots for keywords with 20 estimated searches or less are generating multiple conversions per month—often way more than the ToF posts with high traffic generate.
This is because of two reasons:
Monthly search estimates consistently underestimate the amount of traffic a keyword will generate if you rank highly for it. Often by a lot.
If you follow our Pain Point SEO process, you should only be going after mini-volume keywords that have really high conversion intent. Those will convert a lot higher than more typical top-of-funnel posts.
Big picture: Taking a snapshot across 2 years and 17 of our clients, articles targeting sub-20 search volume generated more than 1,600 conversions for our clients (leads, signups, demos, etc. directly attributed to our content). But it’s hard to grasp what this means without digging into the strategy and examples, which we’ll do below….