As part of the Keyword Research process, SEO Managers use a set of primary metrics which can be called Keyword Metrics and which include the following:
- Keyword Search Volume
- Keyword Difficulty
- Inbound Organic Traffic
- Cost per Click (Paid Search)
Keyword Search Volume shows the amount of searches a keyword receives over a limited period of time, typically a month. Keyword Difficulty specifies how difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword, typically based on the number of required backlinks. Traffic Potential anticipates the number of visitors a URL will bring to the website from one or a group of keywords that it ranks for. Lastly, cost per click (CPC) is associated with paid search and is useful in the context that it answers the question of how much are paid searchers willing to pay to rank for this keyword.
Keyword Metrics
These metrics are the primary metrics which are likely to be included in any SEO software, however, they were made on the basis of Ahrefs as the industry leader in Keyword Research Software.
1. Keyword Search Volumes
As previously stated, Keyword Search Volume shows the amount of searches a keyword receives over a limited period of time, typically a month. SEO Managers will pay attention to keyword search volume averages when determining how popular a keyword is. This information is then used to guide their strategy on what keywords are most likely to garner interest and drive traffic.
One important note to outline is that search volume reflects the number of actual searches of a keyword rather than the number of unique people searching for it. In other words, if a keyword has a monthly search volume of 100, those searches could have been performed by 100 different people, or it could have been performed just by 10 people making 10 searches each.
In Google Keyword Planner and many SEO tools among which is also the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, Search Volume is an annual average value. It should also be noted that Google Keyword Planner groups phrases and words with a similar meaning into one parent topic and shows the search volume for all keywords in a parent topic.
Ahrefs Estimation of Keyword Search Volume
Despite the fact that the primary source for Keyword Search Volume data in Ahrefs is Google Keyword Planner, its Search Volume estimates will rarely match those in Google Keyword Planner. Acoording to an Ahrefs study, the search volume data in GKP is not completely accurate because it groups together semantically related keywords to round up search volume into buckets. Ahrefs, thus ungroups similar keyword clusters which refines search volumes from Google Keyword Planner.
The result is relatively accurate Keyword Search Volumes compared to “Impressions” in Google Search Console.
If you adopt a keyword research perspective, Search Volume for a given keyword does not equate to the Potential Traffic you can expect, because of several key reasons:
Google Keyword Planner is widely regarded as the best source of keyword search volume data, as it comes directly from Google itself and it’s not a secret the vast majority of SEO tools pull their keyword search volumes from Google Keyword Planner. A study conducted by Ahrefs found that two sources of keyword search volume data that come directly from Google and namely Google Keyword Planner and Google Search Console deviate, and do so by a significant margin. So if your page consistently ranks on the front page of Google for a given search query, the number of impressions in Google Search Console should accurately reflect the search volume, numbers which were only similar to Google Keyword Planner in 45% of cases.
In the rest 55% of cases the numbers were overestimated by a significant margin because of several key reasons: Google Keyword Planner Groups Keywords with similar meaning and rounds up search volume based on these parent topics. Similarly, impressions in Google Search Console are sometimes shown exclusively for local searches of a popular keyword.
The search volume might not represent the current demand for the search term, but is merely a monthly average. What this means is search volumes can be quite volatile and the 12-month average number that SEO tools report may not perfectly match the monthly search volume of that keyword by the time you rank for it.
Out of all conducted searches, only an estimated 30% to 40% result in clicks on organic search results, leaving roughly ⅔ as zero-click searches. This is partly the case because PPC advertisers steal clicks away from the organic results which is especially true for commercial searches. Even if you check the search results for the keyword you want to rank for and there are no ads there, there’s no guarantee ads won’t appear in the future. It’s also the case partly because searchers don’t always find what they are looking for and partly because they do find what they are looking for directly in the search results, without the need to click on a landing page.
Depending on the ranking you achieve in SERPs, regardless of the actual position, you only get a fraction of the search volume. Naturally, the higher the position – the higher the percentage of search volume you will receive.
Although Search Volume is a valuable metric for SEO because it’s a Primary SEO Metric for Keyword Research, it is more helpful when considered in tandem with other metrics, like Estimated Organic Traffic, which is so loved by SEO tool providers.
Use Search Volume with Caution
According to Ahrefs, relying on search volumes in isolation is not a good practice for SEO for the reasons listed above, which is why so many SEO Managers rely on Traffic Potential instead.
Based on these insights several best practices related to Search Volume emerge and namely:
It’s important not to make traffic projections based solely on the search volume for a target keyword. As mentioned earlier, you have to consider the possibility of inaccuracy, stolen paid clicks, grouping words, and other factors that can skew the actual potential traffic of your chosen keyword.
Search volume is only one factor when picking a target keyword. At the very least, you also need to consider the difficulty in ranking for that term. Ahrefs has a metric called Keyword Difficulty that can help you see the competitiveness of a keyword at a glance. Often, particularly for new websites, it might be a better idea to target keywords with lower search volumes and thus a lower Keyword Difficulty. As you get more established and build up your Domain Rating, your website has a better chance of ranking for keywords with higher search volumes.
Since search volume is an average annual value, a high search volume does not mean that the keyword has a high search volume all year round. You may be looking at a keyword that was exceedingly popular before, but no longer has the same interest. Similarly, you may find a keyword that is only trending on a seasonal basis, which typically spikes around certain holidays or other annual events.
Use Search Volume with Other Metrics
So, when looking at Search Volume pay attention Traffic Potential metric inside of Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. Traffic Potential or Estimated Organic Traffic shows the sum of organic traffic that the number 1 ranking page for your target keyword receives from all the keywords that it ranks for. This number gives you a much better picture of the actual traffic your page would get when it ranks, as compared to the search volume.
Secondly, use Keyword Difficulty as a good third measure for benchmarking against your competition. Lastly, click on the graph below the volume to check the seasonality of the keyword or whether it’s on an upward or downward trend.
It’s important to note that Keyword Search Volumes may vary significantly depending on the industry. So the size of your site and your budget should factor into your research. If you’re running a large corporate website with a high budget, you may be capable of spending more on highly competitive keywords to maintain your competitive edge. However, if you’re new around the the block, you will be likely to choose a strategy that goes after the keywords with lower search volume because of a lower competition for them.
What SEO Managers are often trying to find is a combination of high Keyword Search Volume with a low Keyword Difficulty, thus plugging gaps in the market. Using overly popular terms may end up with your website ranking very low for these keywords, if it doesn’t have the authority, while using rarely searched terms means very few people may end up finding your content to begin with. So finding the right balance is paramount.
2. Keyword Difficulty
This is where Keyword Difficulty, another metric by Ahrefs, comes in as a quantifiable source of truth for how difficult it would be to rank a web page on the first page of Google for a particular keyword. Keyword Difficulty is only an estimation because Google does not disclose all of its ranking factors, particularly concerned with how difficult it is to rank for a search query. That is why different SEO tools have different approaches to calculating Keyword Difficulty.
Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty
In fact, each SEO tool calculates Keyword Difficulty differently and this is why you will experience seeing different Keyword Difficulty scores for the same search queries among different SEO tools.
Unlike other SEO tools, the Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty score is directly tied to the number of backlinks leading to a landing page and is tied to this indicator only. This is why as an SEO Manager you are encouraged to look beyond this metric and only consider it in a context with the competitive landscape of your website and industry in general.
As previously mentioned, different SEO tools calculate keyword difficulty in different ways, but Ahrefs pulls the top 10 ranking pages for the keyword and counts how many websites link to each. The more websites link to the top-ranking pages, the greater the keyword difficulty which is then plotted in a score from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale.
Ahrefs intentionally keeps their Keyword Difficulty calculation methodology simple because backlinks are probably the only easily measurable confirmed ranking factor.
This makes the Keyword Difficulty score useful, but only when reviewing a large number of pages. You will find that when optimising a single page it is crucial to go to the SERPs and find a domain with a similar Domain Rating to understand how many backlinks (and Referring Domains) you will need to a particular page in order to rank.
Even though there’s no perfect approach to calculating Keyword Difficulty, it remains a handy metric that can help find promising keyword ideas and filter out the most competitive ones at the early stages of the keyword research process. It’s worth pointing out, however, that you can not rely on Keyword Difficulty Metric in isolation. For a better chance of ranking, you have to review the SERPs manually with several things in mind:
As a general rule acquiring at least the same amount of backlinks as the top ranking page is something to strive for and Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty score provides exactly that, or the number of backlinks required to rank on the first page. It’s worth noting however that this is an extremely simplistic approach for several reasons. Firstly, the sheer quantity of backlinks can often be misleading because some backlinks cast a stronger vote than others. In order to properly estimate the strength of the backlink profiles of the top-ranking pages, you’ll have to review all their backlinks manually.
Next, as Brian Dean from Backlinko identifies, the strongest ranking signal when it comes to backlinks comes not so much from the number of backlinks that lead to a single page, but rather the number of Referring Domains that lead to the domain the page is listed under. Only after estimating the authority of your competitors, is it worth looking at the number of referring domains and the number of backlinks pointing to a single page. Although Google itself has consistently denied that it uses any form of sitewide authority metric in its ranking algorithm, the influence a website has over its pages can come in several forms:
- High Domain Rating means that a given website has lots of strong pages with high authority and the page that you see ranking on Google may be receiving lots of link juice from internal links from such pages, making it a high-authority page as well, even in the absence of backlinks from other websites.
- Also, when presented with a list of search results, many people will prefer to click on the brands that are familiar to them, thus the brand having an influence on click-through rates and subsequently on the ranking itself.
Also, analysing Search Intent is crucial for ranking organically. At a basic level, Search Intent is the expectation a user has from a search result and search engines go out of their way to fulfil these expectations. To take advantage of Search Intent you will need to analyse the top rankings results for a search query to better understand how the search query can be solved.
Lastly, see the process of checking your competition’s content quality as an opportunity to shine in the search results. No doubt that competitor research is a topic of its own, however, you can check if the information is accurate and up to date, if the topic is described by someone with expertise, if the information is unique on the website and on the web as a whole as well as if the page is professionally designed and properly formatted. These are but a few questions you will have to pose before coming up with new content to rank against your competition in organic SERPs.
SEO and Paid Search can have synergies, providing the perfect opportunity for sharing resources considering in both cases customers use keywords to find products or services and the measurability is tracked using click through rate (CTR) and Conversion Rates (CR). As previously stated SEO requires time while Paid Search is instant, which is why it’s so important to align the strategies and the reporting of the two. Successful PPC campaigns can also indirectly have a positive impact on SEO as they may be responsible for bringing backlinks.
Considering search engines’ algorithms have gotten so advanced and look to reward high-quality websites that provide a good user experience to their users, in modern SEO, your User Experience (UX) team and SEO Team should be more aligned than ever. Some of the UX factors that affect SEO are mobile optimisation, page loading speed, website security via SSL certification, lack of intrusive interstitials and website structure.
Given the importance of backlinks for SEO, Public relations (PR) can have a significant influence on the overall SEO performance. So much so that SEO Managers have designed an entirely new discipline called digital PR, a spin-off of traditional PR designed to focus on building backlinks and getting mentions from reputable sources on the web for the purpose of building brand awareness.
3. Traffic Potential
One of the most difficult things to do as part of the keyword research process is estimating the actual Organic Traffic Potential to your website. This is, however, not easy to obtain for several reasons. Firstly, not all search results pages get the same amount of clicks.
Depending on SERP features, the amount of clicks given to organic search results varies significantly. For instance, conversational search queries that pose a question may be directly answered in SERPs by the search engine and thus would prevent the searchers from clicking on search results for further information.
Secondly, SERPs with transactional search queries, again, would direct a good amount of traffic to paid search results thus limiting the traffic potential of the SERP for organic search results.
Lastly, not only is it the amount of clicks that differs among SERPs, but calculating the Traffic Potential based on keywords would be simply wrong as it is a metric different from Search volume in that it measures the traffic directed to particular landing pages displayed in SERPs and those can be accessed through a multiple number of different keywords, not just one.
Traffic Potential in Ahrefs
The Traffic Potential in Ahrefs is an estimation of how much organic search traffic your target website, subfolder or landing page gets each month. Is it estimated in the following way:
- Ahrefs finds all the keywords for which your target page ranks in the top 100 organic search results.
- It then estimates how much traffic your target page gets from each of those keywords, based on its ranking position and estimated click-through rate (CTR) for that position.
- The metrics then add up all these numbers.
It’s important to treat the organic traffic estimations in Ahrefs as precisely that: estimations. While these estimates don’t show you exactly how much organic traffic a website gets, they work incredibly well for comparison purposes.
4. Cost per Click (CPC) and Paid Search
A rather underestimated value in SEO comes in the form of cost per click (CPC) estimates. These estimates prove to be indicative of the strengths of the transactional intent behind the search query.
In simple terms CPC shows how much advertisers are willing to pay to rank on page one for any given keyword, thus presenting value to the SEO function in that it helps to determine how well the keyword will ultimately convert. The higher the associated CPC values – the higher, it can be assumed, that the conversion rate for that keyword is.
The main assumption with cost per click (CPC) is that if someone is willing to pay for the keyword, it holds transactional value. However, it must be noted that this value may not be the same for everyone, it really depends on everyone’s individual case.