Are Zero Volume Keywords Worth It?

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SEO show. I am Michael Costin and I'm sitting opposite Arthur Fabik. Oh, you didn't let me intro myself today. I didn't. I'm just going to keep on going with the intro because it's a high octane episode today. Is it high octane?

ARTHUR: What's the episode today?

MICHAEL: I think it's something that's going to be enthralling. Something that's exciting. If you're into SEO, it's something you want to listen to.

ARTHUR: Would you not say that's every episode?

MICHAEL: Every episode. And every topic. I do get excited about every topic, but this one's especially exciting. It's not link building, by the way. No, it's not. It's onsite today. We're into the onsite pillar, the realms of content with this topic, zero volume search terms.

ARTHUR: I feel like that deserved a drum roll after you hyped it up that much.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: And now we have it on the soundboard.

MICHAEL: We do, but I have no idea which one. Should I just hit one and see what happens? Don't know what that is. Nothing happened. Got to put the volume up. Oh, that's appropriate.

ARTHUR: Zero volume search terms.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So on that note, everyone's hyped up. You ready to chat about it?

ARTHUR: Ready as I'll ever be.

MICHAEL: Are you hyped up?

ARTHUR: I'm hyped up. Let's talk zero volume.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, zero volume search terms. What are they? Do you want it? Do you want me to tell you what they are?

ARTHUR: No. Yeah. I'd love for you to tell me what they are.

MICHAEL: A zero volume search term is a keyword where if you go into like Ahrefs or SEMrush or Google Keyword, Google Keyword Planner, it will say that there's zero search volume for that keyword. Or maybe let's say at most 10, like just very little. Very little searches. And it may be the case that traditionally people doing their keyword research come across these and thought, I'm not going to bother with them.

ARTHUR: Traditionally, I probably would do that.

MICHAEL: Cause it's zero volume.

ARTHUR: Why would I waste my time? Well, we're about to find out.

MICHAEL: We are going to dive into why you might be interested in a zero volume search term. So let's give an example. I'm going to go with accounting. This is freestyling here.

ARTHUR: Couldn't think of anything more boring.

MICHAEL: Well, we're already dealing with the enthralling topic of zero volume search terms.

ARTHUR: Can I do one? Go on. Golf clubs.

MICHAEL: Yep.

ARTHUR: So golf clubs, the term would have a lot of volume, search volume, very competitive. It would be very hard to rank for that. But something like the best golf clubs for… I wasn't gonna go there. Maybe for short people with, I don't know.

MICHAEL: Some sort of- Best golf clubs for short people is even, that would probably have the search volume.

ARTHUR: Search volume, maybe something like best elderly people who are short. Something like that, best golf club. Best elderly people who are short. No, no, no, best golf clubs for elderly people who are short.

MICHAEL: Sure. Would be super- Probably need to get more of like a service or commercial one. Cause golf, let's say E-com focus one. I don't know, maybe, when I think of zero volume search keywords, I'm thinking more like information- Accounting is the key.

ARTHUR: Around services, yeah. Oh, you do yours.

MICHAEL: Well, accounting, you want to rank for accounting Sydney, that's a huge search volume head term. But if you wanted to rank for accountant to do bookkeeping for horse breeder, that would be a zero volume search term. There wouldn't be thousands of searches a month for that.

ARTHUR: You wouldn't think so. Can we fact check that?

MICHAEL: I reckon I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that there wouldn't be.

ARTHUR: Okay. All right. So now we know what a zero volume search term is.

MICHAEL: Yep. We've got a great example there. A couple of great examples. Um, let's jump into why you might invest some time. Well, actually, you know what, let's start with The cons like, because people have shied away typically, you yourself said I would shy away from it if it was zero. Yes. But let's cover off why that's the case. So the first thing, the most obvious one is you could invest all this time working on something that drives no traffic. Yeah, definitely.

ARTHUR: I think so as well. And it would be when you're presenting keyword research to clients, traditionally talking years ago, they always wanted to target keywords that had a lot of volume. You'd always try to steer them away sometimes at the start, you know, target long tail keywords and things like that. But typically anything that had zero to 10 searches were often just excluded from keyword research just because it was not enough volume. Yeah. So yeah, a con could be, you could be focusing all your energy and time trying to rank for a keyword that isn't going to drive any traffic to your site.

MICHAEL: Yes. And it takes time to write an article, to format it, to get the images done, to publish it, wait around for it to get traffic. And then there's an opportunity cost. You know, if you were to spend your time focusing on the best golf clubs for short old people or whatever it was. Yeah. Whatever it was that you wanted to do. Um, the opportunity cost is that you could have gone after the best golf clubs for someone that shoots over a hundred or something, which has much more search volume potentially. So we all only have a limited amount of time in a day and you want that time to be spent in the areas that will generate the most return. So that might be a reason you don't go for a zero volume search term. And then the other one I had here is if the topic really does get no traffic and you've got it on your site, it can actually be detrimental to have dead, I'm going to call them dead pages on your site, like pages that get no traffic, but just sit there taking up crawl budget and having no appearance in the SERPs, no traffic. And there's plenty of examples of people going and pruning content from their site and seeing an increase in traffic because Google likes to see a nice clean site without these pages doing nothing. So they're the cons. You might've guessed that this episode, we're not here to say that zero volume search terms are no bad, no good. No bad, no good. We're here to say they're no, no bad, good. Good. Yes. Let's get into the pros. Why would you do it after all those cons? Surely they're not something you spend time on. Well, first and foremost, low competition.

ARTHUR: if there's little search volume, people like me probably won't be focusing on it. So the opportunity to rank for that keyword is probably going to be greater than anything that's more competitive. So if you're a site that's just starting out, if you've got no history, no backlinks, basically starting from scratch, there's a higher chance you're going to rank for low or zero search volume keywords than you are for any other keywords.

MICHAEL: Yeah. We always talk about SEO being a long-term thing, but for a brand new site early on, absolutely. And for a site already killing it, but like maybe capping out on what they can write about, maybe looking to add incremental traffic, I guess at the other end of that spectrum, then it can also be good for that.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And also I don't think as accurate as a keyword planning can be, it's not, you know, Always a hundred percent accurate. There's going to be people searching for different variations of a search query. So yeah, there's potentially a lot more people searching for that than what Google makes you believe.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. Because Google keyword planner is where a lot of the search volume for keywords comes from. Even for third party tools, they get their volume from Google, their data from Google. So if something Google also says, like, you know, I forget what the percentage is, but a certain number of searches every day are new, never before seen. Yeah. So these tools kind of count for that. Um, they kind of count for trends. Like if something.

ARTHUR: Well, it kind of can, like it does when you look at search volume data, it does go back historically.

MICHAEL: But like, let's say remember fidget spinners, like if they just blew up in the space of a day or a week, all of the tools wouldn't have yet reflected that. Maybe Google Trends might have. No, you're right. Yeah. Yeah. So if you are jumping on a trend early, if you know, let's say, you know, that in your industry, there's going to be a big news article done about something. You could create content around that, get it indexed in Google. It's zero search volume, but once it pops, once that news article goes out or it's on the TV or whatever, you will show up in Google when people go search for that. And it's technically a zero volume search term, but you know, there's going to be some interest in it.

ARTHUR: I think, yeah, fidget spinner would be a good example.

MICHAEL: Yeah. The other one I'm thinking of that comes to mind is it's a client of ours that's in the medical space or cosmetic or even surgery space. Sure. They knew that there was going to be a big news story around something to do with common surgery and they published some content about that. And then It was on, you know, news.com.au, it was on channel nine, that sort of stuff. And they got a ton of, well, their play was Google ads, but if you'd gone and done it as an SEO play, it would have worked as well. So if you thought, well, Google's telling me that that keyword gets zero searches and not done that, you would have missed out on all of those leads and business that came in the back of it.

ARTHUR: So staying on top of industry trends would be important. Knowing what's going to be happening, knowing what sort of things are happening in the industry in the future, doing some keyword research and then building like a strategy around all that.

MICHAEL: Hmm. A big one that comes to mind for me along those lines is, which wouldn't have had zero search volume. So it's not an example of that at all. I was going to say during COVID, you know, the people that jumped on, um, numbers, case numbers early and created sites around that just drove immense amounts of backlinks and traffic. But, um, obviously that would have had a lot of search volume at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Um, the other thing I would say is, With the audience you're trying to target, it can be really, you can go super bottom of funnel with really high intent search. So although the volume is low, the dribs and drabs that do come through from it can be super valuable. Definitely. So with our agency website, We created a few, we call them vertical pages around different verticals. So it might be SEO for pool builders, for example. There's very little volume around that, but the odd one that does come through will land on it. You're addressing the intent. It's very likely you get a lead from it. Then when you go and talk to them and try and pitch them, it's likely that they're warmed up to you because they've addressed their intent. So. That's a great use for zero volume search keywords for any business. Like if you're in a super niche B2B services company or a B2B company that by very nature, what you do is niche and there's not much volume around it. You still need to create all of that content to capture the dribs and drabs that the intent is strong and they'll turn into customers. What do you reckon about that one?

ARTHUR: I know. I love it.

MICHAEL: I agree. You look absolutely stoked with that one.

ARTHUR: I'm just thinking like, and if you're searching for SEO for pool builders and you're the only agency that's got a page for that, you know, they're going to reach out to you because you are targeting that keyword. You know, if I'm, if I'm a pool builder, I'm pool builder. I'm going to reach out to the only agency that's mentioning that.

MICHAEL: So the other agencies listening right now, it doesn't really work guys. So don't worry about it.

ARTHUR: You don't need to do that. Don't give away our secrets.

MICHAEL: All right, let's move on. How do you find these things? So we've already touched on one, like keep in touch with what's going on in your industry and create content when you know something's going to be a talking point or a buzz in your industry. Create pages around the types of customers you want to service. Like what the example we gave there, SEO for pool builders, for example. Quora and Reddit are pretty cool ones in my mind. Like you can go onto each of them and search, I guess, big head terms and then see like the questions and things people are asking and then really just get ideas.

ARTHUR: Sort of content around that. Yeah. I like that.

MICHAEL: Thank you.

ARTHUR: Thank you. It's almost like you know what you're talking about.

MICHAEL: It is. I tell you what I know about as well is wearing headphones so you can hear yourself because you sound very quiet.

ARTHUR: So I did say that really quietly.

MICHAEL: Um, autocomplete, go into Google, start typing stuff in and then Google handily gives you ideas for keywords. People also ask as well, jump down to the end of the search results, all of the searches related to a keyword, keyword planner itself. Keyword planet itself, you go in there, type in some seed keywords, it's going to spit out stuff. And the zero volume ones are those ones at the end that normally get ignored, normally, you know, have four, five, six search term or keyword words in the search term.

ARTHUR: I would filter all the keywords by search volume and looking at the ones with all the search volume. And literally I would just use formulas and filters just to remove anything. Now I'm going to do it the other way around.

MICHAEL: These poor little discarded zero volume search keywords that could have all that potential traffic. Here's a cool one. Talk to your sales team or your customer support or customer service people. Oh, yeah, because they will hear. Questions, queries, feedback. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Yep. About specific topics that you can build content around.

MICHAEL: Yep. Sales people are great to speak to, to build content around because you're addressing like the common pain points people come to them with and questions, fears, concerns, all that sort of stuff will come up in the sales process, create content around it. even if it only gets one or two visits a month, or even if it's just visited as people, you know, internally going to it on your site, it's still serving a purpose there and building trust and more than the prospect up.

ARTHUR: Totally agree.

MICHAEL: I'm glad you agree. I don't really think there's that much more to cover on the topic of Zero Keyword.

ARTHUR: Did you mention Google Trends? I thought that was a good one.

MICHAEL: We did touch on it. Yeah. Well, tell us about Google Trends.

ARTHUR: just having a look and using Google trends, typing in keywords or topic keywords and having a look at how it's trending. And if you see that there's a slight spike, you could capitalize because if there's a slight spike, it might continue to increase. And then that way, once it does increase, hopefully you would rank. But I mean, sometimes you might not when other sites catch on and start to rank. Cause I was thinking of, you know, people building content around TV shows where is there going to be like a new season or something that's like a really super long-term long tail, sorry, keyword. They don't know the answer, but they just build out fluff pages to rank for that. That's what I think of when I think of searches like that.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And that's painful. Yeah. Like the play there is those people are usually running display ads and they just, it's a volume game. They have millions of those pages and they get big one is, um, celebrity net worth. Oh, Woody Harrelson's worth $400 million.

ARTHUR: I mean, we used to search that when we played that little game. Yeah. I guess people's net worth. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And it's how do you, how do you even know that you don't, it's 100% made up. Yeah. It can't not be.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: But it's a great zero volume search. We'll see that again. That's not a zero volume.

ARTHUR: There'll be a lot of people searching for net worth of celebrities. Yeah. That's a high volume search. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So zero volume search term comes back to like SEO for custom in-ground concrete pool builders definitely is a zero volume search. A hundred percent.

ARTHUR: No one's searching for that. No, I guarantee it. Yep.

MICHAEL: It's got ARP as guarantee, people. That's all you need to know. So, um, let's wrap things up. Hope you enjoyed this episode. We will be back next week.

ARTHUR: Wait, did we answer the question? Should you target zero volume search times?

MICHAEL: Well, you know what? We didn't. The answer is yes. You should. Yeah. I thought it was implied that we gave a few cons at the start and then there's a quite a lot of ponds, ponds, ponds and ponds of pros. I would particularly say if you're B2B starting out, Starting out. Definitely. They're the two scenarios where you absolutely have to be doing it. But then again, if you're much more established and you have a content team, then why not go after them too? Because I can add incremental growth to your SEO campaigns results. So we are on team zero volume search time.

ARTHUR: We should get a shirt made.

MICHAEL: Yep. That would be absolutely Epic. People would be stopping us in the street. Like, yes, you know what? Me too. Big fans of the show.

ARTHUR: Let's wrap it up.

MICHAEL: Yeah. All right. We'll be back next week with another episode of the SEO show, but until then happy zero volume search terming. Happy SEOing. See ya.

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