Low Volume, High ROI Keywords: Include Them In Your Strategy

If SEO and content marketing play an important role in your marketing, then keyword research will be a big part of that.

When marketers and SEO professionals do keyword research, the goal is often to go after keywords with high search volume in order to get high traffic. But as we’ve talked about many times before, as a marketer working for a financial services company the metrics you are typically accountable for are leads, SQLs and MQLs.

But an increase in traffic doesn’t always equal an increase in conversions, which is why targeting keywords that will bring in high traffic won’t always translate to business results. If your goal is MQLs and SQLs, then you need to be strategic about the keywords you focus on.

And in this article, we’re going to talk about a specific type of keyword that is often overlooked, and yet often brings in the best results.

Enter, low volume, high ROI keywords.

What are low volume, high ROI keywords and what do people get wrong about them?

If you’re targeting prospects that do research online, then it’s likely either you or your SEO agency is using a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush to do keyword research.

When an external party such as a consultant or agency goes through the process of keyword research, they typically start by first putting in your competitors into their tool, sorting for volume and competition, and then prioritizing keywords that way.

But the issue with that approach is that you end up ranking for high volume keyphrases that your target market might not even be searching. For example, if you’re a spend management tool for companies, this approach might suggest that you target keywords like “what is spend management” or “annual operating plan”.

Sure, these keyphrases bring in a lot of traffic, but if you’re targeting CFOs and finance managers, are you sure they’ll be researching such beginner topics?

An SEO professional may see on that list of keywords a more conversion focused keyphrase like “business credit cards for employees”. But when they see that this keyword only gets 50 searches per month, they likely won’t believe it’s worth it because of the math: if the first position gets 27% of the clicks, then ranking highly for that keywords will only bring in 13.5 clicks, and therefore under 20 pageviews per month. With a conversion rate of pageview to lead of 1%, they’ll assume they’ll only get 0.14 leads per month, or 1 lead every 7 months.

With those numbers, it makes total sense that a marketer or SEO professional would believe it’s not worth it. If you believe that getting leads from SEO and content marketing is mainly a numbers game, then it makes sense to believe that more traffic = more leads.

But this line of thinking doesn’t work when you realize your audience will likely never be researching these high traffic keywords and that it’s not exactly a numbers game. It’s an intent game.

We’ll now go through three main issues with this line of thinking:

1. SEO tools vastly under report on search volume

We’ve been in many situations where an SEO tool said that a keyword only gets 10 searches a month, and ended up getting 100s of pageviews per month via the piece of content ranking for that keyword.

Let’s take a Mint Studios article as an example. According to SEMRush, “fintech newsletters” only gets 70 searches per month, so 840 searches per year.

However, according to Google Analytics, we get 250 pageviews per month to this article, or 3,000 per year (and we’re not always in the first position on Google!).

What about conversion rates? The fact is that the average conversion rate of an article or page depends a lot on:

The intent behind the keyword (is someone looking for inspiration, information or to take action?)
The content itself
Technical factors such as whether the pagespeed is fast and the page loads correctly

We’ve seen that Top of the Funnel content (targeting people looking for information rather than taking action) typically converts at a rate of about 0.01% - 0.5%, whereas Bottom of the Funnel (targeting people looking to take action) can convert as high as 8%.

Although “fintech newsletters” is a TOFU topic (they’re not really looking to buy), someone typing this up is clearly looking for newsletters to sign up to, which is action-driven. If we took the typical conversion rates of blog posts and click through rates, then we’d assume we’d get under 1 lead per month. But in fact, we know that this article brings in at least 10 conversions (in this case newsletter subscribers) per month. In February of 2024, it actually brought in 17 subscribers.

So in fact, this blog post has a conversion rate of 6.8%!

In other words, if we had followed typical assumptions, then we might have assumed: 27% of 70 searches per month assumes we should have 19 sessions per month. With a 0.5% conversion rate, that’s 0.01 “conversions” per month (or 1 conversion every 10 months). Even if we were generous and used a 2% conversion rate, it would still only lead to 0.4 conversions every month.

But the real numbers paint a different picture: we’re actually getting 250 pageviews per month, a 6.8% conversion rate, and we’re bringing in well over 10 conversions per month!

You may argue that subscribing to a newsletter is different to submitting a form and becoming a lead, and that’s likely right. However, this is a pattern that we’ve seen across many of our clients. Most importantly, we’ve seen it with clients where one lead was worth hundreds of thousands, and yet SEMRush reported a search volume of 10 searches per month.

In the sections below, we go into what these keywords were and the incredible results we were able to generate by targeting those. The main point here is that relying solely on a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush can lead to many missed opportunities. If your focus is on generating leads and business, then you want to include low volume, high ROI keywords into your content strategy.

2. What matters is conversion intent, not search traffic

Would you rather have a keyword with 50 searches a month and a 5% conversion rate? Or 500 searches a month and 0.01% conversion rate?

The point here is that what matters is the conversion intent of the keyword, not the traffic. It doesn’t matter how much traffic an article brings, if it’s not at all relevant to your audience it won’t bring in conversions.

No matter how many Call to Actions you add to an article on “Top restaurants in Chicago”, if your company is a payment provider selling to fintechs, you won’t get any fintech leads. Taking the example above, someone typing up “fintech newsletters” is clearly looking for newsletters – of course it makes sense that the conversion rate is over 6%.

This is why good keyword research based on what your customers are actually looking for is so important. Pick the right keywords, and you’ll get leads and millions in business. Pick the wrong ones, and you just get traffic. For a spend management company, someone typing “spend management software for small business” is clearly ready to buy. Even if your SEO tool says it’s just 0 - 10 searches per month, that could still translate into new customers.

This is especially true if a customer has a high price point and is worth a lot to your company. Your blog article may only bring 50 sessions per month, but if one customer is worth $100k+ and the conversion rate is 5%, then that’s a pretty good ROI of 2.5 leads per month for just one article.

In the sections below, we’ll go through a real financial services example and see how this actually happened with a payment client of ours.

3. Your blog will end up ranking for other keywords

Although your objective might be to rank for one specific keyword, it’s likely that your article will end up ranking for other keywords as well. Keywords that you may not have thought of. Specifically, buying-intent keywords you may not have thought of.

Some of these will bring in additional traffic, and even conversions. This can be hard to predict, even for your SEO tool. Which is why again, you shouldn’t rely only on what these tools report on. As we’ll see below, the best method is to base your keyword research on customer research.

To summarize: Why you should target low volume, high ROI keywords

Hopefully it’s now clear why targeting keywords with the highest volume typically doesn’t translate to conversions. As a company, you care about acquiring customers, and traffic is just one part of that puzzle, but not the whole one. When doing keyword research and setting your strategy, it’s important to keep the focus on what your ultimate goal is: acquiring customers.

Another key reason low volume, high ROI keywords are great to target is because typically, competition for these keywords is a lot lower. Since these are keywords that few companies are targeting (everyone still prefers targeting high-traffic keywords), it’s a lot easier as a website for you to rank.

Based on everything we’ve said above, this is why we advocate for targeting keyphrases that have much lower search volume, but much higher intent.

Interestingly, we actually did work with a corporate expense card company, and examples of keywords we went after are and their search volume include:

business credit cards for employees - 50 per month
business credit cards no foreign transaction fee - 30 per month
global expense management - 30 per month

All of these brought in multiple conversions per month.

In fact, across our clients, some of the blogs targeting the lowest search volume have brought in the most conversions. And yes, we’ve even targeted keywords with 0 search volume.

For example, with our payment client Zai, we wrote an article targeting the keyphrase ‘API for utility bill payment” which according to SEMRush, had a search volume of 0 in Australia. However, it was in the top 6 pieces of content that brought in the most leads when measured on an absolute basis. Imagine how much opportunity Zai would have lost if we had used an SEO tool to guide us!

We got some of the best results by targeting low volume, high ROI keywords with Zai, that’s it’s worth going into it in more detail:

Example of low volume, high ROI keywords in practice: a blog article that had a 0.6% TRAFFIC to DEAL conversion rate

The best example of the great ROI these types of keywords can bring in is via our payment client, Zai. With payments, a customer is worth hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions. That means that the ROI on selecting the right keyword can be huge.

Low volume, high ROI keywords were the bulk of our strategy at Zai, as we didn’t want to compete against the large websites going after difficult keywords. These were keywords like:

Direct debit API
API for utility bill payment
Direct debit solutions

Interestingly, if we look over the past 2 - 3 years of those articles being published, the top 5 articles that brought in the most leads each had search volume of:

20
20
30
20
20

The top 5 articles by number of deals, were each targeting keywords with a search volume of:

20
20
40
30
10

In fact, the article that brought in the highest amount of revenue over the course of 2 years was ranking first for a keyword that had a search volume of 20 searches per month.

Can you imagine how much Zai would be missing out on if we had just focused on targeting keywords with high volume?

And the best part, as mentioned above, is that these keywords are often easier to rank for because no one is going after them.

The second highest article in terms of total leads had a traffic to lead conversion rate of 2.8%. And when we looked at how many turned into deals, it had a traffic to deal conversion rate of 0.6% – that’s 0.6%, still higher than the average conversion rate of Top of the Funnel content of 0.5%! And guess how much search volume the keyword was getting? 20 searches per month.

We’ve seen this across many of our other clients as well: often, the articles with the highest ROI, have the lowest search volume in terms of keywords.

And if you think about it, it makes complete sense. If we follow the classic marketing funnel, the smallest number of prospects are those who are at the Bottom of the Funnel since they are the ones close to buying. It makes total sense that the search volume is super low – but that does not mean that they are not worth targeting.

Your prospects are already researching online “direct debit API” and “top spend management solution” and are ready to convert – why not target them and get in front of them?

How to find low volume, high ROI keywords

The three main reasons it makes sense to target low volume, high ROI keywords are:

They will bring in leads and customers, not just traffic
Your competitors won’t be targeting them because they’re focused on high-traffic keywords
You’ll rank for these keywords a lot more quickly (because few people go after them)

For quite a few of our clients, the articles we published ranked highly within a few days. A keyphrase like “BPAY API” is not very competitive and often the content that is already ranking for that is low quality.

So how do you get started with finding those keywords? As long time readers of our content will know, we advocate for basing your content strategy on customer research. In other words, don’t look for keywords by putting your competitor website into an SEO tool and sorting for high volume. If not you’ll also end up competing for the same keywords as everyone else.

Instead, base it on customer research. So, interview either your customers or salespeople to get a good understanding of what words they would be using to research a solution like yours. We explain the process of how to do this here: How to Do Research for Bottom of the Funnel Content Marketing

Essentially, you want to interview your salespeople, product people and customer success team and ask them questions like:

Who are our best customers?
What are their pain points?
What are our key value propositions when compared to others?
What are the most common use cases for using our product?

Once you’ve done your interviews and research, this is where you start your keyword research. Ideally you’ve recorded all the interviews and put them through a transcription tool. As you’re listening back to them, keep your spreadsheet or notes open, and keep a note of any keyphrases that you think people would be using.

For example, say your product is a corporate expense card tool, and you ask the salesperson a question like:

“Who was the easiest customer you’ve closed?”

Let’s say they respond with something along the lines of: “Someone who was not happy with Amex and looking for a cheaper alternative.”

That answer sparks some ideas for keywords. It might be worth doing research on phrases that involve Amex, and then opening your SEO tool and start experimenting with different variations of keywords. You may find:

“Alternative to Amex” – too competitive, it’ll be hard to rank for
“Cheaper alternative to Amex” – not the right phrasing
“Amex without fees” – not specific enough (we’re targeting business competitors)

By seeing what comes up on Google and combining that with your SEO tool, you’ll eventually land on a low volume keyword that could work. For example, “Amex business card no annual fee” could be a good one. It’s got a search volume of only 20 searches per month, but it’s incredibly high intent.

Interestingly, we did actually write a “Amex business card no annual fee” article for our client, Jeeves, and it brought in multiple conversions per month. When we first published it, it ranked quite high, above Amex’s own article (Jeeves have now taken it down since their product has changed and isn’t comparable to Amex).

This part of keyword research is more of an art, than a science. It relies on you having a deep understanding of your target market, taking the time to interview sales people and using your intuition to guess what words people are using. It’s a process that takes hours, but the result is that you find high ROI keywords that can bring in customers, and not just traffic.

The great thing is that your competitors won’t be going after these keywords, since most of them are following the “high search volume” approach. Hence this is why it’s such a great opportunity.

How about the writing side of things? This is a topic in itself, and long time readers will know that we have a specific process we follow for creating expert-based content to rank for those keywords. We mainly interview people on the team, and create content based on that. To learn more about how we create that type of content, read the following:

Low volume, high ROI keywords: a no-brainer for any company wanting to acquire customers via Google

Whether you’re a marketing professional that’s interested in exploring the SEO and content marketing channel to generate leads or are looking for ways to get better results from your content, you need to look into low volume, high ROI keywords.

The competition is lower, the ROI is higher and few financial services companies are targeting those keywords.

Not sure if this strategy would work well for you? Feel free to book a call with our Managing Director, Araminta Robertson, to hear a second opinion!

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Low Volume, High ROI Keywords: Why You Should Include Them in Your Content Strategy