Keyword Research – Finding the Low Hanging Fruits

ROI (Return on Investments) is a very important success parameter for any form of marketing, especially so in Search Engine Marketing.

It’s easy to find the high competitive keywords that will get you the highest traffic. Anyone selling a product would most probably already know these direct keywords which people often use to search for that product online. But mostly all these obvious keywords will be highly competitive and thus have a low ROI.

It’s not that a marketing team shouldn’t target these high traffic generating keywords. But just targeting competitive keywords isn’t a good SEO strategy. Believe me in all these years of working as a search engine marketing specialist we know that such keywords have lower ROI for approximately 91% of the websites.

So what’s the correct keyword strategy and which keywords have the highest ROI?

In many ways keywords are the key to a successful search engine presence. So when doing keyword research it becomes important to have the right keyword strategy in mind. You do this one step wrong and all your efforts might go in vain.

The main idea is to keep the right mix of keywords with High competitive as well as Low competitive keywords in it. But to find the best low competitive keywords (that have the highest ROI) you will have to dig very deep and find the low hanging fruits.

Please keep in mind for a handful websites even high competitive keywords could be the low hanging fruits, but that’s rarely the case. It basically depends on the current search engine value of a website.

But the right Keyword mix will always contains both low hanging fruit and high competitive keywords. The exact mix or ratio will vary from website to website.

What are “low hanging fruit” keywords?

When it comes to keyword research, “low hanging fruit” are the keywords that are easy to target and have lesser competition.

They will drive quick quality traffic which also means they are closely related to your website niche.

The traffic volume of low hanging fruit keywords can range from Medium to High or .

All in all they are a perfect match alongside the more obvious but high competitive keywords, as they help in maintaining the essential balance in between Investments and Faster Returns.

Example of “Low Hanging Fruit” SEO keywords

Let’s assume you own a hotel in Varadero (which is one of the most famous beaches in the Caribbeans). While your marketing team might target a keyword such as “Varadero hotels” or “Varadero beach hotels” which are highly competitive keywords, you should also think of targeting keywords like “Hoteles en Varadero cuba” or “Varadero Cuba hotels all inclusive”.

Just to give you an idea, the actual monthly search volume of these keywords is:

• Hoteles en Varadero cuba with 8100 searches,
• Varadero hotels with 5400 searches,
• Varadero Cuba hotels all inclusive with 1300 searches, and
• Varadero beach hotels with 320 searches.

While finding the exact low hanging fruits requires a lot more analysis and the strategy will differ from website to website, as we have to clearly evaluate which keywords are currently working for a website, but this gives you an idea of the kind of keywords that might be considered as “Low Hanging Fruit”.

We as an SEO Company look into various aspects when analyzing a client’s website for selecting such “Low Hanging Fruit” keywords.

How you can find the “Low Hanging Fruit” keywords

This is a two step process which starts with creating a list of keywords and then short listing a certain set of keywords using various tools which helps find the best keywords.

When creating a list of keywords, always try to understand the user intent behind that keyword and whether that keyword is a long tail or a short tail keyword. The user intent would generally fall into one of the three categories i.e. Informational, Navigational or Transactional. Low Hanging Fruits would generally (but not always) be Long Tail keywords.

When using tools that help you find the best “Low Hanging Fruit” keywords, always try to find the keywords that are already working for you, but aren’t ranking in the top 7 positions in Google for your target geographical market.

This means they should be fetching good organic traffic but aren’t ranking in the top positions. Their position could be anywhere in between 7 and 70. It is these keywords that will have the highest ROI and are also fall in the category of “Low Hanging Fruit”.

Top 10 Keyword Research Tools

1. Google Analytics,
2. Google Search Console,
3. Google Keyword Planner,
4. keywordtool.io,
5. Mergewords,
6. SEMrush,
7. Moz,
8. Bing Webmaster Tools,
9. Advanced Web Ranking and
10. KW Finder.