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.
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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.
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This filter is useful for two main things:
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.
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:
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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 want to learn more about dealing with different types of long-tail keywords, check out our full guide.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
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.