keyword tool shows 10-100 searches a month for every phrase in my niche - dead market or bad tool

Cheaper signals than a keyword tool, in the order I would check them.

Job postings. If companies are hiring people to do the thing manually, or listing the tool they currently use in the requirements, that is budget existing today. Search job boards for the workflow, not for the job title.

Forum and community posts asking how do I. Count them, read them, note the exact wording. Twenty real posts in the last year in a niche community is a stronger signal than a thousand searches a month for a vague term.

Spreadsheets. If the current solution is a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds every quarter, ask them how long it takes and what happens when it breaks. Software that replaces a painful spreadsheet is the most reliably sellable category there is.

Mild pushback on the optimism here. Low search volume genuinely does mean something, it just does not mean no demand - it means you cannot rely on search as your first channel.

That is a real constraint and it changes what you build and how you fund it. If nobody is searching, you have to go and find people, one at a time, which is slower, requires a different temperament, and means your first year looks like sales rather than marketing. Plenty of good businesses live there. Just do not walk in expecting a page to rank and the users to arrive, because it will take much longer than you think and you will conclude the product is wrong when the channel was.

Ten conversations with people who have the problem will tell you more in a fortnight than any amount of keyword archaeology. Ask what they did last time it happened, not whether they would use a tool. The first question gets you a story with a cost attached. The second gets you politeness.

Keyword tools are search advertising instruments. They estimate what advertisers can buy, they bucket and round aggressively at the low end, and they under-report anything phrased as a long specific question. A niche B2B problem with two thousand buyers worldwide will look identical to a dead market in that interface.

What separates the two is intent per search, not volume. Forty phrases at 10-100 a month is potentially several hundred searches a month by people describing a specific operational problem in their own words. If you sell at $50 a month and convert a small fraction of that, it is a business. It is a terrible business for anyone selling ads against it, which is exactly why the tools do not represent it well.

The generic high volume term is a trap anyway. You would never rank for it and the traffic would not buy.

Zero volume terms convert. I have a page sitting on a phrase every tool reports as zero which brings a couple of visits most days and roughly one trial a week. The tool is not lying exactly, it just cannot see anything under its rounding floor, and its floor is well above the level at which a small product becomes viable.

Cheapest test available: write one genuinely good page answering one specific question in that niche, publish it, and wait three months. Then read the actual queries in your search console rather than the estimates in a tool.

Real queries from real people beat every estimate, they cost you a weekend, and the page keeps working whatever you decide about the product. Two of the phrases I now build content around were things no tool ever showed me and no human would have guessed.