i just picked up a client so niche their total addressable market is maybe 0.002% of the world's population. SaaS, insane price point - mid-to-high six figures - but the keyword research came back at about 200 searches a month for every relevant term combined. we ranked for all of it inside two months and traffic was still essentially nothing.
The first reaction was to want to bin the whole brief. But then I flipped my thinking. This is not a SEO problem. It's a demand generation problem. We can't capture what doesn't exist, so we have to create it.
The trick is not to waste a single visitor. Every person who lands on that site is absurdly qualified - that 200 searches a month converts at rates you'd never see in a high-volume space. So we treat the site purely as a conversion hub, not a discovery channel. SEO still runs in the background to own the branded and category terms so that when someone hears about us via another channel and Googles the problem, we're there instantly.
Where do those 0.002% actually cluster? We found them in LinkedIn groups, niche Slack communities, and one annual industry event. I asked the client's existing customers how they found the product. that was far more useful than any keyword tool. Shifted the budget there, built relationships, and used the website to close the loop.
For any B2B marketer staring at a volume of zero: don't chase traffic you can't get. Learn exactly who that tiny audience is, know what to say to them, and make sure your site converts like hell when they eventually show up. Best ROI I've ever seen came from sites with almost no traffic.
