How to analyze keywords

Having access to millions 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 will 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 keyword list.

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

Search volume

Search volume tells you the average number of times a keyword gets searched per month. For example, “donald trump” has a monthly search volume of 3.1 million in the U.S. alone.

There are four important things to know about the search volume metric:

1. 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”). All such occurrences contribute to the search volume of that keyword, even though it’s the same person making searches.
2. It doesn’t equal how many visits it will send you if you rank for it – Even if you manage to rank #1, your traffic from that one keyword will rarely exceed 30% of its search volume. And that’s if you’re lucky.
3. It’s an annual average – If there are 120K searches for a keyword in December and none for the remaining 11 months of the year, its reported monthly search volume will be 10K (120K/12 months).
4. It’s country-specific – Keyword tools often display search volume for the selected country. But some of them also have an option to show you the global search volume, which is the sum of search volumes across all countries.

Almost every keyword research tool will have a search volume filter to let you focus on the keyword ideas with a specific range of popularity. It has two main use cases:

1. Filtering out super high-volume keywords – If your site is new, then you probably don’t want to waste your time looking at keywords with 10K+ monthly searches because they’re likely to be too competitive for you.
2. Filtering specifically for lower-volume keywords – Perhaps you want to find uncompetitive, low-volume keywords where you can easily get a little bit of traffic. These are often referred to as “long-tail keywords.”

Long-tail keywords are a household name in SEO. And yet they’re often overlooked. It seems no one wants to go after a keyword unless it gets at least a hundred searches per month. Let alone if it comes up as having zero search volume.

Such “zero volume” keywords will only bring a few visitors per month if you rank for them. But the thing is they add up! If you publish a hundred articles targeting such keywords, your annual total traffic may actually add up to a few thousand highly targeted visitors.

It’s a common rookie mistake to disregard low search volume keywords. They’re just as useful as their more popular counterparts. Often even more useful, since they’re more specific and often have high commercial value.

Another important thing to remember about search volumes is that they may vary slightly from tool to tool. That’s because each tool calculates and updates this metric in different ways. 

All in all, search volume is an incredibly important metric in SEO. So I highly recommend that you read this dedicated article that I wrote about it.