What Is Keyword Search Volume?

Search volume is probably the most commonly used metric in SEO. It can help us measure the popularity of various keywords, and we can predict the search traffic that can be obtained from their rankings.

But all too often, inexperienced SEOs only see the surface of keyword search volume metrics, leading them to make poor marketing decisions and waste valuable business resources. 

In this article, we'll take a closer look at the search volume metric, explaining what it is, where it comes from, and how it can lead you astray. 

Keyword search volume is an SEO metric that tells you, on average, how many times a keyword is searched for in a particular region per month. Search volume usually refers to the number of searches on Google, but this metric can also be used for other search engines.

An important difference to point out is that search volume reflects the actual number of searches for a keyword, not the unique number of people searching for that keyword.

So, if there are 100 monthly searches for a keyword, those searches may be performed by 100 different people, or maybe only 10 people with an average of 10 searches.

This phenomenon is just the tip of the iceberg, and people often don’t take it into account when analyzing search volume for keywords.

So let's discuss five things you need to know to make better use of this indicator.

1. Search volume figures are an annual average

The search volume reported by most SEO tools is an annual average.

That's not a big deal for search terms that have relatively consistent search demand throughout the year. But this can be very misleading for seasonal search terms, or popular trending terms.

Let’s compare the search volume trends for the keywords “content marketing” and “NFT”.

For one year, the monthly search volume for the keyword “content marketing” has been hovering between 12k and 17k. So its average annual search volume of 16k is a reasonable prediction.

However, for the keyword "NFT", the situation is completely different. In one year, it went from almost nothing to a whopping 2.3 million searches in March. Then it dropped to 374k in June and rose to 952k in August.

In other words, it’s hard to predict how its search volume will fluctuate in the coming months, and where it will eventually stabilize once the NFT craze subsides.

I would like to use these two examples to illustrate that search volume can be very volatile. And the 12-month average search volume reported by the SEO tool may not exactly match the monthly search volume you find when ranking for that keyword.

2. Not all searches result in clicks

When people search for something, they don't necessarily click on any search results.

In fact, Google's goal is to satisfy its users immediately and then not let them "waste time" clicking on any search results. In 2020, two-thirds of Google searches ended without a click, according to a recent study.

In 2020, two-thirds of Google searches ended without a click.

For example, the keyword "Elon musk age" gets 37,000 searches per month (on average). But the number of clicks on search results (according to Ahrefs) is only 6.3k.

This happens because Google gives an instant answer to this question without the user having to click on any search results:

So, if a search term has a lot of search volume, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will bring you a lot of search traffic. Google may show the answer directly in its search results.

3. Advertisers can "steal" your clicks

There's one more thing that might "steal" those precious clicks: Google Ads.

As of today, Google displays up to four paid search listings above organic search results. If you've looked at the history of these paid placements, it's clear that Google is trying to narrow the difference between these ads and organic search results.

It also tends to prettify these ads with images and site links to maximize the space they take up and push organic search results down below.

In other words, ranking for certain popular keywords no longer guarantees that you will get a lot of clicks from them.

Even if you look at the search results for the keywords you want to rank for without ads, there's no guarantee that ads won't appear in the future. In effect, by ranking high for a keyword, you're pushing your competitor's page down and leaving them with no search traffic; this is likely to motivate them to start advertising.

4. Search volume is not very accurate

Google Keyword Planner is widely regarded as the best source of keyword search volume data because it comes directly from Google itself. It's no secret that the vast majority of SEO tools pull keyword search volume from GKP.

But how accurate are the search volume numbers in GKP?

Well, in terms of search volume, there is one data source that is widely considered to be the "single source of truth": Google Search Console.

If your site consistently ranks at the top of Google for a keyword, the "impressions" your page gets for that keyword will be its actual search volume.

This means that if we compare search volume with actual impressions from GSC for the same keywords, we can easily study the accuracy of search volume in GKP.

This is exactly what we did in our recent experiments.

It turns out that search volume in GKP is only "roughly accurate" 45% of the time. In the rest of the cases, GKP search volume differs significantly from GSC impression volume.

In other words, calling the search volume in GKP "accurate" is rather far-fetched. We can't even criticize GKP for this, because it's an advertiser's tool, not SEO.

GKP tends to mix search queries with similar meanings into a group without choosing to see different search volumes for each query. This is very convenient for advertisers but can be a real headache for SEOs.

For example, the following six keywords will all be merged into one:

pc games free download

free pc games download

free games download for pc

download free games for pc

free pc game downloads

download pc games free

free games to download for pc

Most SEO tools mimic this behavior because they get search volume from GKP. Therefore, they will show the same search volume for each of these keyword variations.

But at Ahrefs, we mix a few other data sources into our search volume data (including several years of historical clickstream data), which allows us to "cancel" many of these keyword clusters and create an individual cluster for each cluster. Keywords show different search volumes:

This makes it possible to group Ahrefs' search volumes to be more accurate than GPS. However, our search volumes are still estimates, not the exact values ​​that many users expect to see.

5. Higher keyword search volume ≠ more traffic

The primary use case for keyword search volume metrics in SEO is to estimate the potential organic search traffic your page might receive when ranking for a keyword, right?

Well, let's look at the following two keywords:

If we compare their global search volumes, the keyword "local SEO" seems to be 27 times more popular than the keyword "submit website to search engines".

So does this mean that the number one page for "local SEO" should get more search traffic than the number one page for "submit website to search engines"?

Let's check it out in Ahrefs Site Explorer:

It turns out that our assumption was completely wrong. Pages with less traffic in theory seem to get twice as much search traffic.

Why is this happening?

Well, that's because pages don't just rank for a single keyword. If you look closely at the two screenshots above, you'll see that the top-ranking pages for "local SEO" rank in Google for 311 keywords (in the organic keywords column), 8 of which rank at the top 3 digits.

As for the number one page for "submit website to search engines", it ranks in Google for a total of 1400 keywords, of which 201 are in the top 3.

Here are some of those keywords:

No matter what search term comes to your mind, different people express it in different ways. But Google is smart enough to understand that all of these people are basically looking for the same thing. Therefore, the search results for these search term variations are all about the same page rank.

We immediately investigated this "phenomenon" and found that the average top-ranking page also ranks for about a thousand similar keywords.

This means you can’t blindly rely on the search volume of a single keyword when estimating its search traffic potential. Instead, what you need to do is check the top-ranking pages to see how much search traffic they are getting in total from all the keywords they rank for.

At Ahrefs, we are so obsessed with this concept that we created a unique metric called Traffic potential:

For any keyword you see in Keywords Explorer, we'll pull up the top-ranking page and look at the total search traffic it's getting from the various keyword variations it can get from Google. This value is the Traffic potential of the keyword.

In the content marketing team at Ahrefs, we've been doing this manually for years, and it's been a huge help in choosing the right topics to target. Now this metric has been added to the Keywords Explorer for everyone to use.

At last

Above, these are five things that novice SEOs often overlook when dealing with keyword search volume metrics.

Now that you have this knowledge, I believe you will stop taking search volume metrics at face value, which will greatly improve the quality of your SEO decisions.

At the same time, I want to mention one last thing. It might seem a little too obvious to put it in the body of this post, but it feels a little incomplete without it:

Never choose keywords based on search volume alone.

Of course, keyword research isn’t just about finding the most searched keywords.

Here are some other issues to consider:

Will this keyword bring value to my business?

Will this keyword lead to an increase in sales?

Can I beat the top-ranking pages for that keyword?

What does it take to rank for this keyword?

Always keep these questions in mind when choosing which keywords to use.