If you've ever done keyword research for a specialist B2B company, you'll know the feeling. You plug your seed keywords into SEMRush or Ahrefs, the results come back, and the search volumes are... underwhelming. 30 searches a month. 20. Sometimes the tool just shrugs and says "N/A" or rounds down to zero.
At which point, a lot of people give up. They look at those tiny numbers, decide that niche SEO isn't worth the effort, and either chase broader keywords that have nothing to do with their actual audience, or abandon organic search altogether in favour of paid ads.
We think that's a mistake. A big one, actually. And we say that as an agency that's spent the best part of two decades doing keyword research for niche B2B companies in sectors like engineering, oil and gas, tech, and professional services. Some of the most valuable keywords we've ever found for our clients have had search volumes that would make a consumer-focused SEO laugh out loud.
Here's why those small numbers are misleading, and why you should be paying a lot more attention to them.
Keyword tools are guessing (and they're not great at it)
The first thing to understand is that the search volume figures in tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs are estimates, not facts. They're based on clickstream data and sampling, and they're reasonably good at estimating volumes for popular keywords with thousands of monthly searches. But for niche keywords, especially technical B2B phrases, they're often way off.
There's a simple reason for this. When a keyword only gets searched a few dozen times a month, the sample size is tiny. The tools don't have enough data points to give you a reliable number, so they round down, or bucket everything below a certain threshold into "0-10" and call it a day. Google's own Keyword Planner does this too, unless you're running ads, in which case it suddenly becomes more generous with the data (funny, that).
We've lost count of the number of times we've seen a keyword show "10 monthly searches" in SEMRush, built content around it, and then watched Google Search Console report 40 or 50 actual impressions per month once the page starts ranking. The tools undercount niche keywords. It happens all the time, and if you're making decisions based solely on what the tools tell you, you're working with incomplete information.
It's about who's searching, not how many
But let's set the accuracy issue aside for a moment, because even if a keyword genuinely does only get 20 searches a month, that doesn't automatically make it worthless. The question you should be asking isn't "how many people search for this?" but "who are those people, and what do they want?"
In consumer markets, you need volume because conversion rates are low and individual transactions are relatively small. If you're selling phone cases, you need thousands of visitors to make the economics work. But in B2B, especially specialist B2B, the dynamics are completely different. A single enquiry from the right person can be worth tens of thousands of pounds. Sometimes more.
Let's say you manufacture bespoke industrial filtration equipment. Someone searching "industrial filtration system for pharmaceutical clean rooms" is not a casual browser. That's a procurement engineer, or a facilities manager, or a project lead with a specific requirement and (most likely) a budget to spend. If your page ranks for that keyword and captures even a handful of those searches per month, the ROI is enormous compared to ranking for something vague like "filtration systems" where you're competing with everyone from domestic water filter companies to swimming pool suppliers.
This is something we've seen over and over with our clients. The keywords that look unimpressive in the tools are often the ones generating the most valuable enquiries, because the specificity of the search phrase acts as a natural filter. Only people who genuinely need what you sell would ever type something that specific into Google.
The long tail adds up
There's another way to think about this. Individual low-volume keywords might not look like much, but if you're targeting 30 or 40 of them, the cumulative effect is significant.
Imagine you've identified 35 niche keywords for your business, each averaging 25 searches per month. Individually, none of them are going to set the world on fire. But collectively, that's 875 searches per month from people who are actively looking for exactly the kind of thing you sell. If your content is good and you rank in the top few positions for most of those keywords, you could realistically capture 200 to 300 visits per month from a highly targeted audience.
Compare that with chasing one broad keyword that gets 2,000 searches a month but where you're up against household name competitors, the conversion intent is murky, and you'd need to invest months of work (and probably a lot of link building) just to crack the first page. The long-tail approach isn't just more achievable, it usually delivers better results because the traffic it brings is so much more qualified.
If you're not sure how to build a keyword list like this, our guide to finding the right keywords walks through the whole process step by step.
Low-volume keywords are easier to rank for
This one's straightforward but worth stating plainly: the less competition there is for a keyword, the easier it is to rank for it. And niche, low-volume keywords tend to have much less competition than their higher-volume counterparts.
Think about it. If a keyword only gets 20 or 30 searches a month, most of your competitors have probably dismissed it for the same reasons you nearly did. They're all chasing the bigger keywords, pouring money into content and link building to try and rank for the broad, competitive phrases. Meanwhile, the low-volume keywords are sitting there, relatively uncontested, waiting for someone to write a decent page about them.
We've seen brand new blog posts rank on the first page of Google within weeks for niche B2B keywords, simply because nobody else had bothered to create proper, in-depth content for those phrases. Try doing that for a keyword with 5,000 monthly searches and you'll be waiting a lot longer. If you're curious about timelines, we've written about how long B2B SEO typically takes to produce results.
Google Search Console is your secret weapon
If you want to find low-volume keywords that are already working for you (or nearly working), Google Search Console is the place to look. It's free, it uses Google's own data rather than third-party estimates, and it shows you exactly which queries are triggering impressions for your pages.
Go to Search Console, open the Performance report, and filter by pages. Pick one of your key service pages or blog posts and look at the queries driving impressions. You'll almost certainly find keywords in there that SEMRush doesn't even know about, phrases you never deliberately targeted but that Google has decided your page is relevant for.
The ones to pay special attention to are queries where you're getting impressions but your average position is somewhere between 8 and 20. These are keywords where Google thinks your content is relevant, but you're not quite ranking well enough to get significant clicks. Often, all it takes is a bit of targeted content improvement (adding a section that specifically addresses that query, beefing up the depth of your coverage, improving the page's internal linking) to nudge the ranking up a few positions and start capturing that traffic.
This is actually exactly how this blog post came about. We noticed "how to research keywords for a niche" generating thousands of impressions in Search Console for our niche keyword research guide, with an average position just outside the top ten. Rather than ignoring it because the keyword tools show modest volumes, we created this companion piece to strengthen our coverage of the topic. That's how you use Search Console data in practice.
Building a content strategy around low-volume keywords
So how do you actually put this into practice? Here's the approach we use with our clients.
Start with your niche keyword research (our painless guide covers the full process). Don't filter out the low-volume keywords. Keep everything that's relevant to your business and your target audience, regardless of the number next to it.
Then group your keywords by topic. You'll usually find that several low-volume keywords cluster around the same broad subject. "Pharmaceutical clean room filtration", "clean room HEPA filter replacement" and "GMP compliant filtration systems" are all variations on the same theme, and a single well-written, comprehensive piece of content can target all of them.
Next, prioritise by intent. Keywords where someone is clearly looking for a solution or a provider ("pharmaceutical filtration system supplier UK") should get service pages. Keywords where someone is researching or comparing options ("HEPA vs ULPA filters for clean rooms") are perfect for blog posts. Keywords where someone wants to understand a concept ("what is GMP compliant filtration") make great explainer content. Our post on writing SEO-friendly content covers how to structure these different types of pages.
Finally, create a content calendar and work through it methodically. One well-researched, genuinely useful blog post per week (or per fortnight, if that's more realistic for your team) will build up a substantial library of content over time, and each new piece strengthens the others by building topical authority in your niche.
The real question isn't "how many searches?" It's "how many enquiries?"
We'll leave you with this thought, because it's the one that matters most.
When you look at a keyword with 20 monthly searches and think "that's not worth bothering with", try reframing it. If you rank number one for that keyword, you'll probably get 8 to 10 clicks per month. If 10% of those people get in touch (which is a realistic conversion rate for highly targeted niche B2B traffic), that's one new enquiry per month from a single keyword. One enquiry per month from someone who was actively searching for exactly what you sell.
Now multiply that across 30 or 40 keywords. That's the kind of steady, predictable pipeline of qualified leads that most B2B companies would bite your hand off for, and it all starts with taking those "unimpressive" low-volume keywords seriously.
If you're working in a specialist market and you'd like help figuring out which keywords are worth targeting, have a chat with us. This is genuinely what we do best, and we promise not to try and sell you anything you don't need.
