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Most people would skip a keyword with 30 searches a month.
I didn't, and one call from the site I built around it paid me $156.
That's not luck, it's maths that almost nobody bothers to do, because keyword tools train us to chase big numbers and ignore the small ones.
The truth is that small search volume can pay off big when the competition is weak and each call is worth real money.
And I'll show you how that maths works, and how to scale it, in this post.
Why Everyone Chases Big Search Volume
Open any keyword tool and the first thing you see is the search volume column, sitting there in bold, begging to be sorted from biggest to smallest.
So that's what most people do, and they never look further down the list.
The result is that everyone piles into the same big-city keywords, which are exactly the ones with the most competition and the highest cost of ranking.
Meanwhile, the keywords nobody wants sit untouched, and that's the part most people get backwards.
Volume tells you how many people search, but competition decides how hard a keyword is to win, and the two have very little to do with each other.
So let's do the maths most people never do.
The Maths Behind a 30-Search Keyword
The keyword was 'Hood River Roofing', for a small town in Oregon with around 8,000 people in it.
Keyword data showed about 30 searches a month, which is nothing special, and I doubt many people would put much weight on it, let alone build a whole website around it.
But a keyword's value isn't decided by how many people search, it's decided by what a call is worth, so here's how it works out:
- 30 searches a month for a roofer in Hood River
- About 7 visitors, because a site at the top gets maybe a quarter of those searches
- 1 call, if just one of those seven visitors picks up the phone
- $50 to $156 for that call, depending on the job
One call from that site paid me $156, and the other calls I've had have mostly landed in the $50 to $60 range.
And that's for one keyword only, which matters because a site like this usually ranks for several related searches, so the single-keyword figure is the floor rather than the ceiling.
That's what happened with one site, not a promise of what every site will do, but it shows why the volume column is the wrong place to start.
Why Small Towns Are Easier to Win
The reason a keyword like that is winnable comes down to who you're up against.
Big agencies and franchises target cities, because that's where the volume is, so a small town with real demand often has nobody competing for it properly.
Open the results for a small-town service and you'll often find a weak page, a generic directory listing or a national brand with no real local presence, which is exactly the kind of competition a well-built local site can beat.
It's not always about the biggest city or the highest-paying offer, and a small town can be the better opportunity when a few qualified calls are worth real money.
Keyword tools also tend to underestimate small places, where people still pick up the phone rather than filling in forms, so a low number isn't proof that nobody is calling.
What matters is checking the niche properly before you build, by looking at who's ranking, what a lead is worth and whether anyone will pay for it.
What a Call Is Worth Decides Everything
Thirty searches for roofing and thirty searches for something cheap are not the same opportunity, because the value of a call depends on the job behind it.
Roofing, restoration and specialist trades involve expensive work, so a business will pay far more for a lead than it would for a low-value service.
That's why 30 searches for roofing can beat 3,000 searches for a service where each job is worth very little.
The money comes from one of two places, either a local business rents the site and takes the calls, or a lead buyer pays you for every qualified call the site sends, with the value of each call set by the job it's likely to turn into.
Either way, you need to know which calls your site is producing, which is where tracking every call back to the site that earned it comes in.
Not Every Site Works, So Build More Than One
Here's the part that turns a small win into a business.
Some small-market sites won't rank, and some will rank and still not get many calls, and that's completely normal.
What usually happens is that a new site gets an initial boost, then its rankings move around for a few weeks before settling, and only some sites end up where you want them.
So instead of betting everything on one site, you treat each site as a test.
Build sites across many small towns and services, keep the ones that rank and bring in calls, and sell or drop the rest.
Not every site works out, so I build ten more and keep only the winners, and the losers I can sell or just let drop.
Why Building Lots of Small Sites Is Now Practical
That approach only works if each site is cheap and fast to build, because the whole point is to run plenty of tests without spending much on any one of them.
Each new site costs me about $12 and takes around 20 minutes to build, which means ten test sites come in at well under $300 including the domains.
At that cost, a single keyword that pays $50 to $156 a call covers a lot of sites that never work.
Xagio Studio is what makes that speed possible, because you give it a service and a location and it researches the keywords, plans the pages, writes the optimised content and builds the site for you.
And KillerEMD is how you find the small-town openings in the first place, by searching a service across many locations and scoring how beatable the competition is in each one.
Between the two, a portfolio of small sites stops being a fantasy and becomes something one person can realistically run.
The Keywords Everyone Ignores Are Your Advantage
Judge a keyword by what a call is worth and how weak the competition is, not by its search volume.
And when other people think a keyword is too small to bother with, that's not a problem, because it's exactly what keeps the competition away.
So which small town will you test first?
Find a small-market opening with KillerEMD, then build the site in Xagio Studio.