Total searches for a starter niche?

Can anyone come up with a general rule of thumb for just how big of a niche one should shoot for in regards to the number of searches per month on Google and hopefully getting a descent ranking? (And let's say you are a mere mortal when it comes to SEO.)

Let's say a keyword I'm hoping to get optimized gets around 300,000 searches per month. Forget it, right?

But what is too low? 200 searches per month? 1,000 is a good starting point? 5,000?

I realize it all depends on how many back links a particular website already has and if I'm able to match or at least get close to this amount. I'm just trying to get a sense of what I should be shooting for. Should I be grateful if I can rank for a keyword that only gets 500 searches per month?

nothing is too low in my book biks.
If a niche has good traffic and you go after the long tail "dog training for golden retrievers" and there is 30- 50 searches - a day I will go for it.
Check the long tail against competition ie "whatever your keyword is" and look for below 5000 pages. dont forget the quotes.

comparco said:

nothing is too low in my book biks.
If a niche has good traffic and you go after the long tail "dog training for golden retrievers" and there is 30- 50 searches - a day I will go for it.
Check the long tail against competition ie "whatever your keyword is" and look for below 5000 pages. dont forget the quotes.

Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more. Long tail is my personal favorite, and rather than having 5 keywords that I focus on, with longtail I dominate for 15 or 20... combining them gives me a nice solid, targeted stream of free traffic.

My rule of thumb is usually 150-500 searches per day, with less than 5000 competing websites - allowing me to usually rank number 1 spot within a week, if I play my cards right.

Wordtracker all the way baby.. it makes this process like stealing candy from a baby.

Get all you can unless the low searches are yielding high search result pages. Just have to investigate the links a little closer... That 20-50 can be a sale depending on how targeted the phrase is.. It can also be more of a authority purpose too.