Meaning

Having tons of keyword ideas is all well and good. But how do you know which ones are best? After all, going through them all by hand would be a near-impossible task.

The solution is simple: Use SEO metrics to narrow things down and separate the wheat from the chaff before adding them to your content calendar.

Let’s explore five keyword metrics you can use to do this.

• Search volume

• Clicks

• Traffic potential

• Keyword Difficulty

• Cost Per Click (CPC)

1. Search volume

Search volume tells you the average number of times a keyword gets searched per month. For example, “moka pot” has a monthly search volume of 40,000 in the US alone.

There are three important things to note about this number:

It’s the number of searches, not the number of people who searched. There are cases where someone might search for a keyword multiple times a month (e.g., “weather in singapore”). These searches contribute to the search volume, even though it’s the same person doing them.

It doesn’t tell you how much traffic you’ll get by ranking. Even if you manage to rank number one, your traffic from a keyword will rarely exceed 30% of this number. And that’s if you’re lucky.

It’s an annual average. If there are 120k searches for a keyword in December and none for the remaining eleven months of the year, it’s monthly search volume will be 10k (120k / 12 months).

In Keywords Explorer, you’ll see a search volume filter in every keyword ideas report.

This filter is useful for two main things:

A)  Filtering out super high-volume keywords.

If your site is new, then you probably don’t want to sift through pages of keywords with 100k+ monthly searches because they’re likely to be competitive.

B)  Filtering specifically for lower-volume keywords.

Perhaps you want to find uncompetitive, low-volume keywords where you can easily suck up additional traffic with short articles. These are known as long-tail keywords.

DID YOU KNOW THAT MOST KEYWORDS ARE LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS?

Long-tail keywords are terms with low search volumes. They get their name because of where they end up on the so-called “search demand curve:

As you can see, at the front of the curve, we have a very small number of incredibly popular search queries, like:

• youtube — 181M

• facebook — 168M

• weather — 52M

• google translate — 42m

• craigslist — 30m

These are called “fat-head” keywords by SEOs.

And the long tail of that curve consists of hundreds of millions of keywords with very low search volumes. Examples include:

• best fonts for a resume — 150

• four pillars of a man’s heart — 150

• definition of deuteronomy — 100

• 5 by 5 meaning military — 100

• how much is my overwatch account worth — 50

• angel food cake without pan — 50

• funny christmas cards for singles — 50

If you need to see search volumes for a country other than the US, there are 171 countries in Keywords Explorer to choose from. You can also see global search volumes (the sum of search volumes from all countries). Both of these options are useful if you do business internationally for two reasons:

You shouldn’t limit yourself to one country. If you sell products worldwide, then the US might only be a small segment of your market. If people are searching for what you offer elsewhere, you need to know about it.

You should consider the “buying power” of countries with search volume. Perhaps you see a promising keyword with 100k monthly searches, but 90% of them come from a country with low GDP. In this case, the keyword might not be a great target as the “buying power” of searchers is probably quite low.

For example, take a look at the keyword, “backlink generator.” It has a global search volume of 13,000, but over 70% of those searches come from countries with a low GDP per capita like India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. So even though you could probably get a lot of traffic by ranking for this keyword, the ‘business value’ of that traffic would probably be quite low compared to a keyword that gets 70%+ of its searches from the US.

Another important thing to remember about search volumes is that they vary from tool to tool. That’s because each tool calculates and updates this metric in different ways. You can read more about the intricacies of search volume estimations and why even Google’s data isn’t truly “accurate” here and here.

BE AWARE OF KEYWORD TRENDS

Given that search volume is an annual average, it’s often useful to check the trend graphs in Keywords Explorer for keywords that you’re considering. If keywords are seasonal or spiking or declining in popularity, then search volume might not be the best predictor of month-to-month traffic.

Christmas-related searches are a good example. They all spike in December before dropping to zero in February, but the search volume doesn’t reflect this.

2. Clicks

Many people might search Google for something, but that doesn’t mean they all click on search results and visit the top-ranking pages. That’s where the Clicks metric in Keywords Explorer comes in handy. It tells you the average number of monthly clicks on the search results for a keyword.

Just take a look at a query like “how much caffeine in coffee.”

Despite having a monthly search volume of 48,000, it only gets 8,600 clicks.

That happens because Google answers the question right in the search results. There’s no need for people to click to find the information they’re looking for.

Google is providing answers in the search results for more and more queries. That’s why the Clicks filter in Keywords Explorer is so invaluable. You can use it to weed out keyword ideas with miserable search traffic potential.

You should also be wary of keywords where paid ads “steal” lots of clicks. For example, 28% of clicks for “braun coffee maker” go to paid ads, so that keyword might be a better target for PPC.

3. Traffic potential

Let’s say that you’re considering a keyword like “side effects of coffee.” According to Keywords Explorer, this gets an estimated 1,000 searches and ~800 clicks per month.

However, keep in mind that if you rank for this keyword, your page will probably also rank for all kinds of related keywords and synonyms, like:

• what happens if you drink too much coffee — 450 monthly searches

• effects of drinking too much coffee — 200 monthly searches

• too much coffee side effects — 200 monthly searches

• side effects of drinking too much coffee — 100 monthly searches

Since all these search queries mean roughly the same thing, estimating your potential search traffic from just a single search query is a mistake. It’s better to look at how much traffic the current top-ranking pages currently get, which is super easy to do in Keywords Explorer.

Here, we see that the top-ranking page for “side effects of coffee” gets an estimated ~3,500 visits per month and ranks for over 930 keywords:

Ranking for more than one keyword like this is quite the norm. We studied three million search queries and found that the average top-ranking page ranks in the top 10 for almost 1,000 other keywords.

The moral of the story? Don’t judge keywords on their Search volume (or Clicks) alone. Look at the top-ranking results to estimate the total search traffic potential of the topic. In most cases, the search volume of a keyword will indeed correlate with the topic’s overall ‘traffic potential’. However, being attentive to this detail will help you prioritize your keywords and find keyword opportunities that your competitors have overlooked.

1. Keyword Difficulty

SEO professionals typically gauge the ranking difficulty of a keyword manually. That is, by looking at the top-ranking pages for their target keyword. They account for many different factors to judge how hard or easy it’ll be to rank:

• Number (and quality) of backlinks

• Domain Rating (DR)

• Content length, relevance, freshness

• Use of the target keyword, synonyms, entities

• Search intent

• Branding etc

This process varies from person to person, as there’s no consensus on precisely what is and isn’t important here. One person might believe that DR is important, and another might think that relevance plays more of a role. This lack of consensus makes life a little difficult for keyword research tool creators, as they each try to distill the ranking difficulty of keywords down to a single actionable score.

After talking to many professional SEOs about the signals that a reliable Keyword Difficulty score should factor in, we realized that everyone agreed on at least one thing: backlinks are crucial for ranking. So, in the end, we decided to base our Keyword Difficulty (KD) score on the number of unique websites linking to the top 10 ranking pages.

As you can see in the image above, each KD score relates to an approximate number of websites that should link to your page for it to get to the top 10 search results.

Knowing how KD works, many people misuse the score by setting the filter from 0 to 30 and focusing solely on the “low-hanging” opportunities. They never bother to cover high-KD keywords on their websites, and that’s a big mistake for two reasons:

a)   You should go after high-KD keywords sooner, not later.

As you’ll need lots of backlinks to rank, it pays to create your page and begin promoting it as soon as possible. The longer you delay, the bigger headstart you give your competitors—making it harder to outrank them in the future.

b)   You should see high-KD keywords as link opportunities.

The fact that the top-ranking pages have lots of backlinks is a sign of a ‘link-worthy’ topic. In other words, if you nail this topic, it might attract a lot of backlinks for you.

The bottom line is this: KD is not there to deter you from targeting specific keywords. It’s there to help you understand what it’ll take to rank for a given query and the ‘link-worthiness’ of the topic.

Just know that you should always manually assess keywords before going after them and not rely solely on any tools’ keyword difficulty score to make your final decision. No keyword difficulty score can distill the complexity of Google’s ranking algorithm into a single number. Be wary of tool creators that suggest otherwise.

5. Cost Per Click (CPC)

Cost Per Click (CPC) shows how much advertisers are willing to pay for each ad click from a keyword. It’s more a metric for advertisers than SEOs, but it can serve as a useful proxy for a keyword’s value.

For example, the keyword “office coffee” has a relatively high CPC of $12. That’s because most searchers are looking to buy coffee machines for their office, which can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But it’s the opposite story for “how to make good espresso.” That’s because most searchers aren’t looking to buy anything. They’re looking for information on how to brew espresso.

However, one important thing to know about CPC is that it’s much more volatile than Search volume. While search demand for most keywords stays roughly the same from month to month, its CPC can change any minute. That means that the CPC values you see in third-party keyword tools are snapshots in time. If you want real-time data, you’ll have to use AdWords.