Keyword Search Volume: Back to Basics
If you are on this page, chances are that you have a website or blog to manage and that you are looking for ways to get more traffic. As far as website traffic is concerned, keyword search volume is of paramount importance. This phenomenon refers to the number of searches for a specific phrase or keyword during a given period of time. Let’s find out more.
Importance of search volumes
While doing your search for keywords and phrases, keyword search volume is on the list of most important metrics. With this information, you can:
Get a better idea of the traffic potential
Get familiar with the search trends
Choose the right topics for content
In other words, if you have selected the keywords that no one searches for, you won’t get any traffic to your website.
How can you get the search volume of a keyword?
There are many keyword search tools designed for this purpose. Let’s find out more about them.
1) Free tools
Although you can use a free of charge tool, know that they don’t offer a lot of features. And most of them charge subscription fees if you want to unlock special features. If you are looking for a free of charge tool for this purpose, you can try out Google Keyword Planner. While it is designed for PPC campaigns, it can also be used to find out the search volume for specific keywords and phrases.
2) Professional tools
If you are into Search Engine Optimization, it is better that you invest in a quality keyword research tool. These tools provide reliable data. Apart from this, they provide you a deeper insight into search volume data, such as SERP results, PPC and CPC values, search trends, and keyword difficulty metric, to name a few.
Sources of the data
Generally, there are two primary sources of search volume given by keyword research tools. Let us discuss two of the primary sources:
Google Data: As far as reliability is concerned, the Google database is on top of the list. You need to process data for specific keywords because Google puts together similar keywords when providing search volume.
Clickstream data: This tool collects data through a lot of applications, plugins, and extensions installed on your computer. Apart from this, other giants, such as Ahrefs and Moz provide search volume data on the basis of Clickstream data.
Once you have considered this factor, we suggest that you consider the other two aspects as well. The description of these aspects is given below:
Keyword relevance: Make sure that the keywords you have selected are relevant to your website or blog. For this purpose, we suggest that you conduct a detailed SERP analysis.
Keyword difficulty: Make sure that you know the keyword difficulty level, which means that the selected keyword should not have extremely high competition. It is better that you start with keywords and phrases that have a low difficulty level.