Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If at all possible, I would base a decision like this on primary research rather than secondary. Sure, one keyword might get more traffic - but is it good traffic? Is it converting traffic? We have a very similar situation with "us based" + writing terms. For example we rank for terms like "US based content writing service" which has a documented search volume of nothing and is equally as competitive. YET - I get 2 or 3 clients a month that are worth an average of $300 on their first order and $4,500 within the first 6 months. From a purely secondary research point of view I would never have ranked for these terms. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was a fluke to begin with. But so far this measley keyterm has brought a lot to my bottom line. So sometimes... it's about what works for you, not the masses.

I agree with Janet. Testing and PPC will help, but more than that your intuition helps most. Bucket those keywords based on intent. Essay editing, booked editing, and resume editing are slightly different so I'd make a page for each (include examples, be specific to that type of project). But when it comes to broad variations, go by the intent. Essay correction and Essay editing should be the same page, and I'd mainly target editing as it sound more like what your product is, but use essay correction in the text. And try to vary the anchor text to the page when you link internally and externally. When it comes to small slice of a big pie or big slice of a smaller pie, that's a call for you to make. Check out the competition on essay editing ... can you compete? Are you better than them for the searcher? How? Make that apparent and push for it with marketing. If you are the same ... but can own "essay correction" (the SERPs are not as competitive) ... go after that first. Hope this helps!

Definitely worth setting up RSS news feeds from both Google Alerts and Google Blog Search for your keywords to keep an eye on what's happening in your niche. As well as lots of ideas for new content/articles you'll also see what's happening in your niche and what your competitors are up to. You can also set up a twitter search for your main keywords too. I'm sure there must be opportunity there - lots of students tweeting about getting their assignments proof read etc.

Tbiz, Write an article. Publish in that article directory. Wait 1 month and see the result. Dont let others affect ur own experiments. Regards, PP

Thanks Marcin, that makes more sense. For example, I noticed papercheck had a ton of links from verisign.  It appears they did some case-study for the company and the links were all over their other country specific domains, etc. It makes sense that it would be more about increasing the number of linking root domains than the total number of links and I now understand how one link on a very large site can result in hundreds, if not thousands, of links. I didn't really understand this and in the back of my mind I keep hearing Rand telling me that link building is valuable but hard work and time consuming.  I'm thinking... s*$t, it really is going to be a lot of work to get 100,000 links   But it's nice to know I need to simply focus on high quality linking domains... easy enough

There's a few things I'd do. First of all, recognise that many of these keywords are going to be seen as synonyms as far as google is concerned  and even if not exactly synonyms, they'll be regarded as heaviy related. Optimising pages for a number of these keywords/phrases really will help the way your entire site is perceived. While exact match numbers seem to be pretty low, I wouldn't mid putting a bed down on some good long-tail traffic out there. I would: Take a look at what my competition are doing. I'd do a search for each of my target keywords and grab the top 10 ranking sites and take a look at them in Open Site Explorer. Take a note of the number of links to the domain and then have a look at the anchor text. (Select links to all pages on this domain). This will show you how strongly these site are optimising their link building and what target phrases they are using. Get a list of all these terms and check out the traffic and the difficulty. You can see that the stronger ranking sites will have lots of keywords in their anchor text. Can you also do this when building links? Also take a look at the top pages report. This will show you how they are building optimised pages and the titles can reveal the kind of keywords they're targeting. Think also about your audience and what their needs might be. How can you make you offerings more specific to them. "Copywriting for students" or "copywriting for medical students" etc for example. Or how about "lastminute copywriting" or "fast copywriting".. Having an offering that talks directly to each audience and highlights the particular problems/needs in that niche can help with your conversions. Think also about how you can stand out from the crowd. What is it about your service in particular that makes you different, makes you unique. Why should people come to you and not the next guy. There's no benefit sticking with the herd here.