What is a Zero Volume Keyword?

My most successful SEO strategy is the Zero Volume Keyword Strategy I teach in the
Profitable Part-Time Blogger. Sometimes I also call it “Zero to Hero” because of how it skyrocketed my site to Mediavine in 6 months.

I grew by over 14k sessions in just 1 month with 10 posts using this strategy!

The strategy is more advanced, but it’s a great opportunity for beginners to find easy wins and rank immediately.

I’ve grown a niche destination site to 1k pageviews in less than a month with no backlinks with this method.

Now I’m not going to explain the whole method here. Honestly, it’s too complex to write out in 2k words and I don’t want us to be here for 10 hours with a 40k word post. That just sounds exhausting doesn’t it! But I’m gonna give you an overview to help ya get started.

If you’re interested in pursuing the strategy further and growing your traffic with shorter posts, fewer backlinks, and less time waiting on Google to pay attention to your blog, I highlight recommend checking out my Profitable Part-Time Blogger program where I teach you multiple types of zero volume keywords and how they should fit into your blog strategy for success.

I even teach my students how to find zero volume affiliate keywords to rank for buyer intent keywords faster.

For those who want to know what a zero volume keyword is first, read on!

What is a Zero Volume Keyword?

A zero volume keyword is NOT zero volume.

That is the most important thing I can teach you.

Zero volume keywords are actually zero competition.

I call them zero volume because it’s the first term I learned for them on Twitter in 2021 and it stuck in my brain. I actually learned the term before I fully understood SEO, so I really didn’t understand what the person was talking about (I genuinely don’t remember who tweeted it or I’d credit them, sorry!).

Zero volume keywords, also called “hidden keywords”, “golden ratio keywords”, and “zero competition keywords” – sometimes even “Nina keywords” which is very flattering but I did not invent this method – are keywords Google doesn’t care about yet.

They often have their traffic under reported by a keyword research tool. And that low traffic number means that most other bloggers don’t target them, making them easy pickings for those of us in the know.

These keywords typically have hyper niche focuses for a very specific audience. They’re not going to be terms like “things to do in Rome”. They’re more likely to be “things to do in Rome after 12pm for free”.

So why doesn’t Google care about them?

Google Doesn’t Know All

You see Google gets over 8.5 billion searches per day, and 15% of those are things that it’s never seen before.

This could be as simple as a new misspelling of a term (I’m probably a good chunk of that 15% from my fat thumbs alone!), a new service/industry/product that just launched, or it could be a niche request.

If Google doesn’t even know everything that’s going to be searched in a day, your keyword research tool definitely doesn’t either.

Keyword research tools get data in part from the Google Adwords API where Google shares common search terms for people to buy Google Ads.

Remember, the focus is on buying ads, NOT writing blog posts.

If you’re buying an ad, you want a guarantee that you’re going to get in front of an audience. So you care more about high volume search terms that are super popular.

That means Google Adwords cares more about those keywords, too.

And since your keyword research tool is pulling from that data, they’re also technically focusing on Google Ads. It’s why they all include cost per click data, which is a Google Ads metric.

So these tools under report the traffic of new terms or terms they don’t see as popular for ads, because that doesn’t serve the Google Ads intent.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t use keyword research tools. We all should. But we need to remember they’re not God. It’s why they’re a base for our strategy, and not the whole strategy.

You Can’t Just Search for 0 Volume on Keysearch

Remember I said these aren’t actually “0” volume keywords?

That’s for two reasons:

1. They do bring you traffic to your site. I’ve never had a zero volume keyword bring less than 50 clicks per month from Google.

2. A keyword having “0” as the volume in a keyword research tool does NOT mean that it’s a zero volume keyword.

The first point means that they are good to write on because they do bring traffic.

The top 20 posts on my travel blog are 90% zero volume keywords, and they bring in thousands of pageviews per month.

The second point means that you can’t just filter for “0” searches on Keysearch and call it a day.

I’ve found some that were as low as 0 search volume on Keysearch, but I’ve found others as high as 6,000 per month. The traffic reported by a keyword research tool is largely irrelevant to determining whether a keyword is zero volume or not.

Like any keyword, you need to do proper research and have a strategy to find these keywords.

In fact, there’s multiple types of zero volume keywords and ways to find them.

I’ve even created some names for them to make them simpler to understand and differentiate. But they all come down to the same thing: they are keywords where the top ranking posts in the SERPs do not adequately satisfy the user intent.

👉 Get Keysearch – my favourite keyword research tool – for 30% off with code “sheknowsseo”!

Example of a Zero Volume Keyword

I recently wrote a blog post about Custom GPTs that ranked #1 immediately because they had come out a week before and there wasn’t an extensive article by anyone else yet.

Google didn’t know about Custom GPTs yet, so no keyword research tool could give me any search data.

But I got hundreds of pageviews off that article – also because it got a couple days on Google Discover.

Other people likely weren’t writing on the term because 1) it was new and they didn’t think about it, or 2) a keyword research tool didn’t tell them it was a high volume keyword to target.

Most people go after the keywords in Keysearch with 10,000 pageviews a month. That makes those ones extremely competitive and usually require 10+ backlinks to rank.

These keywords are underserved, but also have their traffic underreported by the keyword research tool.

New terms aren’t the only examples though. I’ve written many evergreen posts on questions that were zero volume keywords.

Types of Zero Volume Keywords

I’ve categorized a few of the most common types of zero volume keywords for y’all to help you understand them a bit better. Notice that the throughline is that the answers don’t serve the user.

1. Google Autofill Keywords

Google Autofill keywords come from Google Autofill.

You find them by searching your desired term like “Rome” and then seeing how Google autocompletes the sentence when you add other letters before or after it.

It’s pretty similar to the concept behind Answer the Public, except you’re actually going through the results as you go and checking if the top 10 results satisfy the user intent.

You’d be surprised how many terms people are often searching that the top 10 never actually reference.

2. Forum Keywords

These are keywords where forums rank in the top 10.

Pre-September 2023 Helpful Content Update, these were easy pickings. In fact, Low Fruits used it as a method of determining whether a keyword was easy pickings, too.

Since then, it’s become a bit more challenging.

You have to do more evaluation to determine if the forum is helpful or not. Often they’re not. And even if you rank below them, the CTR is higher because users just don’t want Reddit as much as Google seems to believe they do.

3. Golden Ratio Keywords

These are keywords Doug Cunnington used to teach where you are looking for underserved keywords based on the amount of posts written with the keyword in the title.

This is a bit pre-Semantic SEO in my opinion, since Google now understands more variations of keywords and considers non-exact match domains (think adding “in” to “things to do Rome”).

The way this method works is by searching “allintitle:[keyword goes here]”. You then look at the total number of search results and divide that by the monthly search volume from a keyword research tool.

That’s the other flaw in my opinion: keyword research tools aren’t perfectly accurate on volume.

It’s an interesting method meant to target keywords were there’s less than 0.25 as a result from the equation. But if the top 10 perfectly answer the question and provide immensely helpful information that you can’t improve on, it’s not an easy win keyword.

4. Google Search Console Keywords

These are keywords you can find from your own data.

We often rank for keywords that aren’t relevant to the post we wrote. If Google is considering you for these keywords, especially close to the first page, that means they don’t have anything better to put forward to their audience.

So if you write a strong post on the keyword, you can get an easy win!

It’s also one of the only methods with accurate data as Google Search Console will give you a more accurate picture of impressions than a keyword research tool. However, it gives these to you for the page you’re on. So you will have to extrapolate for page 1.

5. Unanswered Keywords

This is kind of a catch all for all other types of zero volume keywords where the top 10 just don’t answer the question.

You can stumble upon these in all sorts of ways, usually just when searching in the wild for your own purposes as a user.

I even find these in Facebook groups all the time. People ask the question because they aren’t satisfied with the answer on Google. We can fix that by writing a better post for Google.

Essentially this is just audience research so I don’t necessarily count it as a zero volume strategy in particular, but I know other people do so I figured I’d add it in.

But What if They Really Are Zero Volume?

There is always a risk that the keyword could actually be zero volume.

I’ve written on over 500 at this point across my sites and none have been less than 50 clicks a month – and that was for a seasonal keyword that got significantly more volume the rest of the year.

But I’m willing to take the risk for 2 reasons:

1. You can still rank highly, and Google cares about #1 rankings. It’ll bring up your site’s overall standing with the search engine.

2. It adds to topical authority and helps my user.

You shouldn’t be writing on these keywords just because they’re easy. They should genuinely help your audience.

So I’m not going to write about upside down pineapples (which I recently learned about on cruise Tiktok and now I’m scared of pineapples) on this site just because I find a zero volume keyword.

That has nothing to do with my niche – SEO – and would probably put y’all off following my content cause it’s so out of left field.

And for my travel blog, I’m not going to write one on how often you should really wash your pillows, because that’s not travel specific. Now, if it was about hotels washing pillows or travel pillows, sure I could make that work.

Just like any other keyword, it’s important that it serves your audience and fits into your topic silos.

One of the reasons I love zero volume keywords, beyond them ranking so well, is because they help build out my silos when I feel like I couldn’t possibly hit 50 posts on that topic.

They also help me connect with my niche audience directly because I’m writing posts that solve their very specific problems. It shows that I really know their pain points, and helps turn them into die hard fans that keep coming back to my site.

Want to Learn More?

Zero volume keywords seem easy at a glance, but there’s a lot of nuance. I get a ton of questions about how to outline these posts, how many to write, how to fit them into a content strategy, and even more detail on how to find them.

The good news is you can find all of that information in one easy place: the Profitable Part-Time Blogger! My signature SEO course that covers everything I know about running a multi-6 figure blog will help you master zero volume keywords so your blog can grow 10x faster.

I do real time demos finding these keywords, outlining them, and writing the posts for a niche site so you can see my exact methods. There’s no vague checklist. I share the exact steps in a way everyone can follow.

Ready to become a Profitable Part-Time Blogger? 👇

Read More About Keyword Research

• How Many Keywords Should I Use for SEO?
• Are SEO Keywords Case Sensitive?
• 12 Best Ubersuggest Alternatives for Keyword Research
• SEO Pageview Calculator and More!
• 23 Best Ahrefs Alternatives For Bloggers (Free & Paid)
• 19 Best Surfer SEO Alternatives for Bloggers
• How to Find Blog Competitors on Mediavine & Mine Keywords
• What is a Zero Volume Keyword?
• Keysearch Review: The Best SEO Keyword Research Tool

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