Is my niche even worth the effort?

I finally finished the new site for my work. Now I get to start on SEO. But, as I begin my keyword research I realize that there are no high search volume keywords that I could optimize for, being a Texas based rehabilitation center.

Most anything including Texas, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, or any other targeted keywords that I need to use in order to target my audience gets 0 - 10 searches a day and look quite difficult through the lens of Market Samurai.

That being said, considering that each lead is worth $12,500 to my business, you'd think the SEO would be worth it. But I will have to optimize for no less than ten or fifteen keywords to get a real spike in exposure through the search engines.

What say you? What would you do in this situation? Say fuck the lemons and bail, or just go for it, regardless of how daunting of a task it will be?

whats the niche?

I would do it.

I'm sure you could generate a few leads through SEO if you work at finding the right keywords.

But beyond that, you still have branding and reputation management to think about. When someone Google's your company, or your niche, it's a great branding opportunity to have your site at the number one spot.

For a rehabilitation center why don't you target a broader keyword. Something like a trauma or something that needs rehabilitation. I'd say stay with it, think of more KWs to target. Look at some relevant to the niche terms that could bring traffic.

If not SEO, try SMO...

Social media optimization helps in pulling good traffic to the website...
Sign up for the popular social networking websites of your target area. Find people with similar interests and promote your website among them. If you cannot optimize your website for social media, Hire some experts for this task.

If the leads are that big, I'd probably just take the expense of getting some LSIs done with some sort of scrape after for that SERP so these leads are at least exposed..

I would try and give it a shot!

Go for it. With seo once you get ranked and start getting leads, you don't have to keep working as hard as you did to get ranked.

Thanks for the input guys. I've already took #10 for one keyword, #12 for another and moving closer with the others.

I've decided to try the impossible. I'm going to go for things like "drug treatment" and "alcohol rehab" that get a couple thousand searches a month but aren't as targeted. Why? Branding; as stated above by lineguy. I figure people in my state most likely don't always search with my state name or city, so I can probably do well with going for the harder keywords.

You know what, I get a paycheck to do this for 8 hours a day. Why not shoot for the big ones? I've all the time in the world.

Do/can your city specific queries trigger a google places result?

Personally I would probably have a separate domain optimized for each metropolitan area.