In niche marketing SEO, your goal is to find low-competition keywords that are easy to rank for, and that still have enough traffic to merit all the work you need to put into the page to rank. What's the sweet spot between competition and search volume? How do you find that sweet spot? Here's how.

- Less Than 25,000 Exact Match

The "under 25,000" competitors' guideline is perfect for beginners. If you have an established website with a PageRank of 3 or higher already, then feel free to move this up to 50,000 or more.

Basically, the goal is to find keywords with traffic that have less than 25,000 competitors for the exact match term.

How do you find the number of competitors?

Simply put the exact long tail search term into Google, in quotes. For example, if your long tail keyword is: "How to find a date over 45," then you'd type into Google "How to find a date over 45".

The number of competing websites displayed by Google is the number of websites crawled that have that exact phrase on them, in that order. If the number is less than 25,000 (for beginners), then the keyword's competition is probably low enough for you to have a good shot at ranking.

- Is There Enough Traffic?

As a rule of thumb, target keywords with search traffic of between 600 visitors a month and 3,000 visitors a month to start. These are targets per article, not your main overall keyword target.

The number one search result for any given term usually gets about 40% of the traffic. So if you target a word with 1,000 searches a month and you rank number one, you'll probably get 400 visitors a month.

Now, that might not seem like a lot in the beginning, but it very quickly adds up. If you write two articles a week and on average each article brings in 200 visitors a month, you'll very quickly have a website bringing in thousands of visitors in just a few months of work.

If you're doing more than two a week, you can only imagine the possibilities.

Just to reiterate - You should absolutely have a main keyword with a lot of volume and competition that you're shooting for in the long run. But in the short run, aim for keywords with few competitors and enough traffic to make it worth writing an article. You don't need heaps of traffic for each keyword you target; instead, the volume will come from the high number of articles you're putting out every month.

If you follow these two guidelines, you'll have a virtually guaranteed source of traffic. As your site gains more relevance and authority in Google's eyes, move these numbers up and go for more ambitious terms.