Keyword Search Volume: Everything You Need To Know

Are you unsure about key SEO terms, such as search volume, SEO difficulty and CPC?

In this post, we’re going to focus on keyword search volume, an important search engine optimization (SEO) metric you’ll find when using any keyword research tool.

In this post, you’ll learn what it is, how to find it and what different search volumes mean.

What is keyword search volume?

Keyword search volume is a metric keyword tools use to represent the number of times search engine users search for a particular keyword in a month.

Most keyword tools allow you to choose a search engine and a geographic location, so the figure you see is often manipulated based on these selections.

A keyword’s search volume gives you insight into two details about a keyword:

• The level of interest a keyword generates in your niche
• The chosen keyword for a particular topic

Knowing how much interest a particular topic or product generates is important to know.

If a topic generates very little interest, you likely won’t benefit from covering it. If a topic generates too much interest, you might find it difficult to rank for.

This metric gives you a very clear indication of the topics your target market cares about the most.

There also may be multiple keywords for a particular topic. If one keyword is too competitive, you may be able to find an alternative to target that’s not as competitive.

Similarly, your seed keyword may have a low search volume, which may lead you to believe that the topic isn’t very popular in your niche.

However, if you input that seed keyword into a keyword research tool and find a keyword synonym (a different keyphrase that has the same meaning) that has a higher search volume, you can safely come to the conclusion that the topic is something your target market is interested in.

You simply need to find the keyword the majority of your target market enters into Google to find more information on it.

This is why search volume is such an important metric. It helps you choose the right keywords to use in articles and on product pages.

It can even help you choose the right keywords to target with pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns.

About search volume in Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a free keyword tool that’s mostly intended to be a way for advertisers to discover keywords they may want to target in Google Ads campaigns.

It’s a great way to discover new keywords, but unfortunately, the average monthly search metric it provides is a range that represents how many times the keyword was searched for throughout the previous 12 months.

The ranges it provides are far too broad to be used for proper keyword research. You’ll mostly see the tool give search volumes of “1k to 10k,” “10k to 100k,” and even “100k to 1m.”

I recommend using more sophisticated keyword research tools for this reason as a free keyword research tool cannot provide accurate search volume data.

How to find search volumes for keywords

Your best bet at finding accurate keyword search volume data is stepping away from free keyword research tools and using premium keyword research tools that use sophisticated data collection to output very good estimations for search volume.

Any one of these tools will allow you to input a seed keyword and output keyword ideas that relate to that keyword. The tool will output search volume and other metrics for your seed keyword as well as any related keywords it finds.

Ahrefs and Semrush have two of the biggest keyword databases in the industry, so they’re most recommended by SEO professionals.

Semrush’s database contains 25.3 billion keywords from 142 geographic locations while Ahrefs’ contains 28.7 billion keywords from 226 geographic locations.

Both get their data from Google. Semrush states they use machine-learning algorithms to gather additional data and use “proprietary methods” to clean that data up.

This sophisticated data collection and analysis allows these two companies to output keyword metrics for billions of keywords. Therefore, while the metrics will never be entirely accurate because they don’t come from the original source (Google and other search engines), they’re as good as you can get for estimations.

Unfortunately, Semrush and Ahrefs also happen to be among the most expensive SEO tools out there, each costing over $100/month at minimum.

For this reason, we mostly recommend SE Ranking, a beginner-friendly SEO tool that costs half of what the other two tools cost.

SE Ranking’s keyword database contains 4.7 billion keywords from 190 countries. To paraphrase the company’s own words, it retrieves data through the use of API connections and the company’s own crawlers.

It works the same as these other tools. You enter a seed keyword into the tool’s keyword research tool. SE Ranking will output metrics for that seed keyword, including keyword search volume.

It’ll also provide suggestions for related keywords and will provide search volume data for those keywords as well.

What different search volumes mean

Keyword research tools assign colors to different SEO difficulty metrics.

Red is for a keyword that’s hard to rank for, orange for a keyword that’s not as competitive but still hard to rank for, and green is for a keyword that’s easy to rank for.

Unfortunately, keyword search volume is much more complex than this. What’s low for some niches may be high for others.

Therefore, I can’t simply tell you that “500 searches/month” is low or “100,000 searches/month” is high. It’s really dependent on how popular your niche is as a whole.

One thing you can do is think of the most popular topics in your niche. For example, our niche is SEO, so popular keywords would include “seo,” “keyword research,” “seo tools,” etc.

That means we can use the search volumes of these keywords as baselines for what’s considered a high search volume in our niche.

Do the same for your niche to determine what’s considered a high.

What search volume says about a topic

Let’s talk about what high and low search volumes mean.

A low search volume typically indicates a topic that has low interest or a keyword alternative that isn’t used as often.

A high search volume typically indicates a topic that has a high amount of interest and is widely used in your niche.

It’s typically safe to assume that keywords with high search volumes are also highly competitive, but you should always use a keyword’s SEO difficulty score to determine this.

Should you target low-search volume keywords?

Most bloggers prefer to target high-search volume keywords because they have a better chance at generating a higher amount of organic traffic.

You’ll typically only receive a fraction of a keyword’s search volume as traffic, even if you rank in the number one position for it, so it makes sense to target high-search volume keywords.

However, low and medium-search volume keywords still have quite a bit of value.

For starters, these keywords still represent topics that are relevant to your audience. Remember, you’re not only utilizing a marketing technique with your blog, you’re also trying to become a source of information in your niche.

Low and medium-search volume keywords are relevant keywords in your niche. This means targeting them with well-written content will help you fill your site with content that’s highly relevant to your niche.

It also gives you additional pages to insert internal links on, which gives more pages for Google’s search engine bots to crawl and helps the algorithm understand exactly which niche you’re targeting.

Some low and medium-search volume keywords also act as keyword alternatives for high-search volume keywords. Targeting keyword alternatives instead of competitive keywords gives you a better chance at getting your article to rank for at least one keyword.

They’re also great to use as keyword synonyms if you want to avoid using a high keyword density for your main keyword.

Be aware of trends in search volume

It’s important to know that the search volume metric you see in your keyword tool is the average number of monthly searches a particular keyword had over a 12-month period.

This doesn’t give you the full picture of a keyword’s popularity since some topics are trends, some are seasonal and some are evergreen:

• Trend – A keyword that was or will only be popular for a short period of time before fizzling out, likely forever
• Seasonal – A keyword that’s only popular during a certain time of year
• Evergreen – A keyword that’s popular year round and will likely be relevant in your niche forever

Fortunately, most keyword tools show trends in search volume for individual keywords. They typically won’t do this in your seed keyword’s list of related keywords, though, so you’ll have to view each one individually to see this trend.

In SE Ranking, the Search Volume panel shows how popular a keyword was over time.

It’s best to focus on creating content for evergreen keywords that are popular year round as they’ll provide the most consistent amount of traffic if you can rank for them.

At the same time, ranking for seasonal and trending keywords is a fantastic way to attract a higher number of new visitors to your blog, who you can then convert into customers or email subscribers.

Final thoughts

And that’s pretty much everything you need to know about search volume.

Just remember that higher volume keywords are usually more competitive. And some keywords are subject to seasonal trends.

When deciding which keywords to target, search volume is definitely something to consider along with keyword difficulty. In addition, I’d recommend looking at what already ranks in Google to help you identify the types of content Google is looking to rank.