It's quite common for inexperienced SEOs to take keyword search volume metrics literally, leading to poor marketing decisions and wasted valuable business resources.

In this post, we'll take an in-depth look at the search volume metric, explaining what it is, where it comes from, and how it can sometimes be misleading.

What is keyword search volume?

Keyword search volume is an SEO metric that indicates how many times per month, on average, a keyword is searched for in a given location. Search volume typically refers to the number of searches on Google, but this metric can also refer to other search engines.

It is important to highlight that search volume reflects the number of actual searches for a keyword, not the number of unique people searching for it.

Therefore, if a keyword has a monthly search volume of 100 searches, these could have been performed by 100 different people, or they could have been just 10 people doing 10 searches each.

This brief explanation is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the things people commonly get wrong when analyzing keyword search volume. But there are five more things you should know to make better use of this metric.

1. Search volume numbers are annual averages

Most SEO tools report search volume as an annual average.

This isn't a big problem for searches that have relatively constant demand throughout the year. But it can be quite misleading for seasonal searches or those related to the latest trends.

Let's compare the search volume trends for the following two keywords: "content marketing" and "NFT".

The keyword “content marketing” has fluctuated between 1.000 and 2.000 monthly searches throughout the year. Therefore, the annual average of 1.500 searches is a reasonable prediction of the search volume it is likely to receive in the coming months.

However, the keyword “NFT” is another story. Over the course of a year, it went from virtually nothing to 108.000 searches in March 2021. It then dropped to 26.000 in July 2021 and rose to 270.000 in January 2022.

In other words, it is very difficult to predict how search volume will fluctuate in the coming months and where it will settle once interest in NFTs moderates.

What I want to illustrate with these two examples is that Search volumes can be very volatileThe 12-month annual average reported by SEO tools may not perfectly match the monthly search volume for that keyword at the time you rank.

2. Not all searches generate clicks

The fact that people are searching for something does not necessarily mean that they will click on any of the search results.

In fact, Google's goal is to satisfy its users within Google itself without them "wasting time" going to another page. According to a study last year, two-thirds of Google searches in 2020 ended without a click.

Two-thirds of Google searches in 2020 ended without a click.

For example, the keyword “horror movies” gets 22.000 searches each month (on average). But the number of clicks on the search results (according to Ahrefs) is only 11.000.

Why does this happen? Because Google offers, practically, an instant answer to that question, discouraging users from clicking on any of the search results:

Therefore, if a particular query has a high search volume, it doesn't necessarily mean it will attract a lot of search traffic. Google can (and does) simply display the answer in its search results.

3. Advertisers can steal your clicks

There's something else that can steal these valuable clicks from you: Google Ads.

Currently, Google displays up to four paid search listings above the organic search results. In fact, if you track the visual history of these paid placements, it's quite obvious that Google is trying to make these ads virtually indistinguishable from the organic search results.

It also tends to enhance those ads with images and links from the sites to maximize the space they occupy and push organic results further down.

In other words, ranking at the top for a popular keyword no longer guarantees that you will get a lot of clicks.

It doesn't matter if you check the search results for the keyword you want to rank for and it doesn't show any ads; there's no guarantee that ads won't appear in the future. In fact, by ranking at the top of a keyword, you're pushing your competitors' pages down, depriving them of search traffic. This is a signal that triggers ads to start appearing.

4. Search volumes are not very precise

Google's Keyword Planner (GKP) is widely considered the best source of keyword search volume data, as it comes directly from Google. It's no secret that the vast majority of SEO tools pull their keyword search volumes from this planner.

But how accurate are the search volume figures in the GKP?

There is one data source that is universally considered the “one source of truth” when it comes to search volumes: Google Search Console (GSC).

If your website consistently ranks at the top of Google for a particular keyword, the number of "impressions" your website receives for that keyword will be its actual search volume.

This means we can easily study the accuracy of search volumes in the GKP by comparing the search volumes with the actual impressions of the same keywords in GSC.

And that's exactly what we did in our experiment.

It turned out that the search volumes in the GKP were “more or less accurate” in only 45% of cases. In the remaining cases, the planner's search volumes deviated from the GSC impressions by a considerable margin.

In other words, it's a huge exaggeration to say that the search volumes in Google's Search Engine Planner are "accurate." We can't even criticize the Planner for this, since it's a tool for advertisers, not for SEO.

Google's Keyword Planner tends to group search queries with similar meanings together, without any option to see the individual search volume for each query. This is very useful for advertisers, but it can be a real headache for SEO professionals.

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

• PC games free download (free PC games download)
• free pc games download (free PC games download)
• Free games download for PC (free games to download for pc)
• Download free games for PC (download free games for pc)
• free pc game downloads (free pc games downloads)
• Download free PC games (download free PC games)
• free games to download for pc (free games to download for pc)

The vast majority of SEO tools mimic this behavior because they (supposedly) get their search volumes from Google's keyword planner. Therefore, they will show the same search volume for each of these keyword variations.

But here at Ahrefs, we combine some other data sources in our search volume estimates (including some years of historical clickstream data), which allows us to "ungroup" many of these keyword groups and show a distinct search volume for each keyword:

This "unbundling" makes Ahrefs' search volumes slightly more accurate than GKP's. However, our search volumes are still only estimates and not exact values, something many of our users will appreciate.

5. Higher keyword search volume ≠ more traffic

The main use of keyword search volume metrics in SEO is to estimate the potential organic search traffic your page can get if it ranks for a keyword, right?

Let's take a look at these two keywords:

If we compare their global search volume (i.e., worldwide), the keyword “local SEO” appears to be 27 times more popular than the keyword “submit website to search engines”.

Does this mean that the page ranking #1 for “local SEO” should get significantly more search traffic than the first page of the search “how to submit website to search engines”?

Let's check it out in Ahrefs' Site Explorer:

It turns out our assumption is completely incorrect: The top-ranked page for a much less popular keyword appears to receive almost twice the search traffic.

How is it possible?

This happens because pages don't rank for just one keyword. If you look closely at the two screenshots above, you'll see that the top-ranking page for “Local SEO” It ranks on Google for 311 keywords (look for the "Organic Keywords" tab in the panel), with eight of them occupying the top three spots.

Regarding the first page for “submit website to search engines”, it ranks on Google with a total of 1400 keywords, of which 201 are in the first 3 positions.

These are some of the keywords:

Whatever search query you have in mind, different people will phrase it differently. Google is smart enough to understand that all these people are essentially looking for the same thing. Therefore, they rank the same page for all these variations of the search query.

We have studied this “phenomenon” in the past, and it turned out that the top-ranked page also ranks, on average, for about 1000 similar keywords.

This means you can't blindly rely on the search volume of individual keywords when estimating your search traffic potential. Instead, you should examine your top-ranking pages and see how much total search traffic they receive from all the keywords they rank for.

At Ahrefs we fell so in love with this concept that we created a unique metric called Ptraffic potential:

For any keyword you see in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, we extract the highest-ranking page and look up the total amount of search traffic it gets across all the keyword variations it ranks for on Google. That value then becomes the traffic potential of that keyword.

At Ahrefs' content marketing team, we've been doing this manually for quite a few years. This has greatly helped us refine the tool, and now it's available in the Keyword Explorer for everyone to use.

Final Thoughts

These are the top five things beginner SEOs often overlook when dealing with keyword search volume metrics.

After reading this article, I'm sure you'll no longer treat search volume metrics at face value, which will greatly improve the quality of your SEO decisions.

There's one last thing I'd like to mention. It's obvious, but this article would be incomplete without it:

Never select keywords solely based on their search volume.

There are many more factors involved in keyword research than simply looking for keywords with the highest search volume.

Here are some other questions to consider:

• Would this keyword add value to my business?
• Would this keyword generate any sales?
• Would it be able to beat the top-ranked pages for this keyword?
• What would it take to rank for this keyword?

Always keep these questions in mind when choosing which keywords you want to focus on.

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