“A bird in hand is worth two in the bush”

This old saying definitely applies to SEO. The difficulty in ranking well for a high traffic keyword is exponentially more difficult than ranking for a lower traffic keyword in a small niche area. SEO beginners often make the mistake of going after keywords which are beyond their ability.

The chances are small that a novice SEO’er could ever rank on the first, second, or even tenth page of search engine results for a high traffic keyword. However, only basic SEO knowledge is all that is required for a beginning Internet marketer to rank on page 1 for a niche keyword.

Although that page may only generate 500 or 1000 visits per month, it will be far more productive than the one optimized for a high traffic keyword which displays on Google’s tenth page of results. Also, it is incredibly easy to get a page ranked well for a niche keyword.

Although it may only generate a few hundred visits per month, remember that every niche will have numerous keywords which can be optimized for. Imagine optimizing for just 5 different keywords in a small niche; the traffic can combine to produce good results!

In the beginning our Cactus Canyon retail site only had one product. Its pages ranked very well for that small niche product and had “top of the fold” first page rankings in Google and Yahoo. The traffic was extremely targeted and generated an average of over $15 per page view!

Yes, it was VERY exciting to see my efforts pay off like that! Now that the site has grown over ten times in size the site generates many more visits. The traffic does not convert at that rate anymore because the expanded content shows up in many less targeted searches…which is to be expected as many more pages  are added.

The moral here is to go after those small niche categories when learning SEO. Your chances for success will be far greater; it really is possible to be quite successful with even low traffic sites if SEO brings in highly targeted traffic!

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