Adwords keyword both unavailable and expensive

[mild scientist]

I am a consultant in a niche market, so relevant keywords are not vastly popular (but I don't need millions of clients either). I am looking into Google Adwords, but for a number of keywords, it tells me "Low search volume", which is Adwordsese for 'you are too small potatoes for us to bother'. Yet, when I click on the price, it tells me how much I need to pay for the ad to show at all or on the first page. Does this make sense to anyone here?

 

[AllUpHere]

Low search volume doesn't mean that, it means they don't have enough search data for the keyword for it to be worth using.

 

[mild scientist]

From Adwords:

This keyword isn't eligible to show your ads because few people search for it on Google.

Why this happens: The keyword could be too specific, obscure, or misspelled significantly. When this happens, we make the keyword inactive.

What to do: Try changing your keyword to make it more relevant to customers' searches. If many people search for this keyword in the future, it might become eligible to show ads.

 

[AllUpHere]

From Adwords:

Sorry, I misunderstood your post (so edited my reply).

What keyword was it you were looking at?

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

From Adwords:

This doesn't always happen. I've seen many "low volume" keywords which do bring in impressions and clicks.

Although there are very few. Often too few to bother with.

What match types are you using? Exact match for niche keywords can run into this problem. Phrase match may be better.

If you're focusing on a few core keywords, you could also try broad match modifiers. They will trigger your advert if all of the exact keywords are used in a search query, but regardless of order and regardless of any other words in the query.

You can then use negative keywords (and location targeting if applicable) to tighten everything up.

 

[mild scientist]

This happened for keywords like: computational materials consultant (broad match). This is narrow but quite relevant (that's what a niche is).

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

This happened for keywords like: computational materials consultant (broad match). This is narrow but quite relevant (that's what a niche is).

That exact term doesn't appear to be used anywhere on the internet:

https://www.google.com/search?q=com...ltant"#q="computational+materials+consultant"

In fact, it's so niche that you could probably gain a first place ranking in the organic results just by creating a page with quality content and using that term in the title. No other website on the internet has.

I also wouldn't be surprised if this UKBF thread starts ranking on page one for that term due to the mention of the keyword.

If certain terms have such little competition, you would probably be better off focusing on organic rankings and using Adwords for the more competitive terms.

 

[mild scientist]

"computational materials consultant" may not be found as such in webpages, but it can be found in searches. Also, I said I used the broad setting.

I intend to use both organic and Adwords. (I am on the first page for computational materials consultant.)