What comes to your mind when you hear the term search volume? In a way, this term is one of the metrics commonly used by SEO practitioners in sorting out which keywords you want to target. To note, search volume is a metric that tells us how many times per month on average a keyword is searched for by a user in a particular place or country.
The higher the keyword search volume, automatically more and more people are looking for these keywords and we can use them to attract large amounts of traffic.
However, the question is whether it is still relevant today if we focus on keywords that have high search volume? Can it attract good traffic for the website? Come on, let's discuss together through this article!
What is Search Volume in SEO?
Search Volume is the average number of monthly searches performed for a particular keyword. It shows the number of people searching for a particular query. Considering search volume is crucial when creating a content strategy as it reflects the popularity of a query. It's important to find keywords with high search volume and low search competition.
For businesses, it is important to know the search volume of a keyword because it provides valuable information about which keywords can attract significant traffic to the website and help achieve high rankings in search engines.
In other word, search volume is the average number of searches for a keyword in one month. The larger the number, the more popular a keyword is. Therefore, search volume is an indicator that you can use to determine target keywords.
You can find out the number of keyword search volumes by using various tools that are available for free or paid, such as Google Keyword Planner.
In SEO, the role of search volume is as an indicator that measures how potential a keyword can bring in a certain amount of traffic. The greater the number of keyword search volumes, the greater the traffic opportunities you can get.
Search volume offers data that not only reflects the popularity of a keyword, but also provides an idea of the competition you may face when trying to rank for that keyword. However, these metrics should not be the only factors relied upon in SEO. Other aspects such as conversion rate, user experience (UX), and keyword difficulty also need to be considered.
Are High Search Volumes a Good Thing?
Search volume or keyword search volume is important for a number of reasons. This allows you to identify how valuable a keyword is to your strategy, allowing you to understand whether it is highly searched for and its fluctuations.
High search volume means the term is popular and if you rank for it, you will get more traffic. These metrics should not be relied solely on. Things like conversion rates, UX (User Experience), and the likelihood of your website ranking for keywords are also important.
Even though search volume is something you need to pay attention to, this metric is not the main indicator in determining keyword usage. There are other indicators that are no less important, namely topic relevance and search intent.
You can consider keywords that suit your business niche or have a buying intent to target. Even though the search volume is low, both can have a positive impact on SEO performance.
1. Keywords according to your business niche
If you find keywords with low search volume but are very relevant to your topic or business niche, then don't hesitate to target those keywords.
This is because websites that have lots of keywords on one specific topic will gain topical authority more quickly.
2. Keywords that attract buyers' interest
The thing you have to pay attention to when you want to increase website conversions is no longer search volume, but the purchase intent of a keyword. You can find keywords with high purchasing intent in the transactional keyword type.
Transactional keyword types usually have low search volume. But the people who are looking for it already have the desire to make a purchase. The characteristics of this keyword contain action words such as 'buy', 'sell', 'rent', 'download' and so on.
What are High Search Volume Keywords?
1. Search volume is calculated on average per month, for the past year
Reporting from Ahrefs, most SEO Tools report the amount of search volume on keywords as an average per month for one year.
What does this mean? That means, not all keywords that have relatively high search volume are consistent in the number of searches on search engines. It could be, keywords with a high number of search volumes are only searched for in certain seasons or are trending among the public.
This means that some of the keywords that you encounter with a high number of search volumes are seasonal/trending content or it could even be evergreen content. As a case in point, here are the differences in the data visualized by Ahrefs regarding two keywords, namely "content marketing" and "NFT".
We can see that the annual average displayed by the keyword “content marketing” has a total search volume of 16k. If we look at the statistics, "content marketing" has a stable graph.
That is, the keyword "content marketing" can be used to increase traffic per month because it has a fairly high average search volume per year.
Another case with the keyword "NFT". As we know, NFT is a trending issue recently. We can see that in the previous year not many or even no one searched for "NFT". Then, it suddenly rose rapidly until the total search volume touched 2.0M. That way, we cannot predict whether in the following months many will be looking for NFTs or not.
On the other hand, we don't know whether the NFT topic will continue to trend in the following months or not. This is what SEO practitioners should underline when doing keyword research. Therefore, we can conclude that search volume is fluctuating. The high number of search volume does not guarantee you to increase the ranking of content within a month.
2. Search volume is not very accurate
One of the SEO tools that displays search volume sources with the best data, namely Google Keyword Planner or GKP, comes directly from Google (to be exact, it is part of Google Ads). However, how accurate are the search volume figures in GKP?
Ahrefs conducted research regarding this matter. To find out the accuracy of the search volume displayed by GKP, they took search volume data from Google Search Console which is a tool with the best presentation of data in terms of search volume.
Why is that? Because, if your website consistently ranks top for a certain keyword, you can say the number of impressions or impressions you get on content for that keyword will be the actual search volume.
This means that this can be seen directly through the Google Search Console itself. Through this analysis, Ahrefs compares the accuracy of the search volume of various keywords displayed by GKP with the results displayed by GSC.
The result is like this:
From the results of the Ahrefs analysis above, we can see that GKP shows the search volume of keywords accurately in only 45% of cases. Thus, we can conclude that the search volume figures from the tools that we see are not entirely accurate.
How to do Right Keyword Research?
Now we understand that not all high volume search volumes can help us achieve high traffic for websites (because there are seasonal factors and data accuracy factors). The question is, what are the right steps or strategies when doing keyword research in order to get the right target keywords?
If you launch from the Search Engine Journal, instead of targeting keywords with high search volume, it's better if you choose keywords that have the potential to be on page one or even rank number one on search engines.
How to?
The main thing that you need to pay attention to is changing the mindset that keyword research activities are not only about high, medium, or low search volume. When doing keyword research, you need to identify in advance how much opportunity your friends have to increase traffic on certain keywords.
This must also be aligned with the quality or authority of your website. Is it strong enough to compete with competitors' websites on page one? As we know that most of the high search volume has a very difficult level of competence as well.
To get good results in keyword research, there is one method introduced by SEJ, namely targeting keywords that have high search volume, but low competition.
How do you Find High Volume Low Competition Niches?
1. Utilize Google SERP and identify long tail keywords
In keyword research, you must often find cases where keywords with high search volume have very tough competition. On the other hand, when we look at Google SERP, these keywords are already dominated by websites with high authority.
For example, if we type the keyword “asthma” into Google, two large websites will appear that are involved in the health industry, such as Mayoclinic.
If new friends create a website about health, it is quite difficult to beat the two competitors with the keyword "asthma". Instead of targeting the keyword "asthma" which we will most likely have trouble beating the two competitors above, we can use long tail keywords with similar content to gain traffic.
For example, we can use the keyword "how to overcome asthma". If we look at the SERP, it is not Mayoclinic that takes over the first position, but the Mitra Keluarga website.
You can apply this strategy if friends are just starting a website, don't have high authority, and have a level of intense industry competition like the example above.
2. Exploration of keyword research tools to find “treasures”
Keyword research tools really help us to find the right target keywords. This is because almost all tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and others have complete filters when conducting keyword research activities.
Through tools, you can explore to your heart's content when doing keyword research, start doing content explorers to find hidden keywords, one of which is keywords that have high search volume and low competition.
So, when you already have access to keyword research tools, make sure your friends dig deeper to find hidden treasures for a keyword.
How do I Find Exact Search Volume?
There are several things to consider when trying to navigate search volume.
1. Look at Your Competitors
Once you have compiled effective relevant keywords for your marketing campaign, you should look at your competitors. Analyze which high search volume keywords you rank for and which you don't. You can use your findings to inform you about possible directions you can take to beat them in the rankings.
2. Look at the Trends
Since keyword search volumes are constantly fluctuating, you should always keep an eye on changing trends and analyze how they impact keywords.
For example, seasonal changes. Searches for 'bikini' will be a very popular keyword in spring/summer as people prepare for their holidays, but less so as the weather drops into autumn again.
You can see the ups and downs of the season clearly in the screenshot below from a quick search on Ahrefs.
3. If You're New to SEO, Don't Overthink It
If you have a new website, or one that has low domain authority for any reason, it's probably best to target low-volume, low-competition keywords first. This is because high competition keywords are not feasible during the growth period of a website.
On the other hand, keywords with low competition and low volume help increase your visibility gradually. As your website gains authority, choose keywords with higher volume.
4. Perform optimization according to website capabilities
Pay attention to the website's capabilities before you determine which keywords to target. New websites with low domain authority and a small amount of content will have difficulty winning the competition in the SERPs.
Therefore, use keywords with low search volume but easy competition. This method can gradually increase the visibility of your website.
5. Consider Your Location
It is also important for a website to target keywords with specific locations. Local SEO is very useful, especially for those of you who only run business in certain areas.
Apart from helping you get the right audience according to your business location, content that focuses on specific locations is also highly recommended by Google so that your content will rank more easily.
Should you Focus on Zero Search Volume Keywords?
Let's leave aside high search volume first. The reason is, you can also take other ways to get traffic through low search volume! Why is that? It could be that your competitors don't pay attention to low search volume so you can make good use of it to get the best ranking on search engines.
Based on Search Engine Land, keywords with low search volume often give you unique opportunities to be able to create content that is relevant to your users. Even though friends don't immediately see thousands of traffic for your website, this practice allows you to get new target markets or even convert old users to take action on your products/services.
That means you can't just ignore low search volume! This keyword also needs friends to consider to develop a business. Provided that the content you create is relevant to your user friends and provides solutions to their problems.
On the other hand, there are various benefits if friends target keywords with low search volume.
- High level of relevance; usually low search volume are long tail keywords and are very relevant to the user. Example: When users have problems changing WordPress themes, most of the keywords they search for are "how to change themes on WordPress".
- Build user interest or interest; The thing that is often overlooked by SEO practitioners is that low search volume sometimes helps to increase user interest in new or small target market niches.
- Get good ROI; Low search volume also helps you to convert users into customers or even customer loyalty
- Pretty good traffic; Even though hundreds or even thousands of traffic don't land right away, low search volume can slowly increase your content ranking, even having the opportunity to get more traffic!
Find Topics Relevant to Your Audience
This last method may be considered extreme, because we don't use keyword research tools at all to find target keywords. We can just target keywords with zero search volume according to keyword research tools.
Search Engine Journal adopts this method, in essence by focusing on what is the problem of our target audience. The example given is "link building for beauty salons", where this keyword is relevant for use by SEO practitioners who are looking for link building opportunities for their clients in the beauty salon sector.
In Indonesia, this kind of practice is starting to be carried out by several SEO practitioners, one of them is Reza Putra (ex-SEO Lead of Tokopedia, now Organic Marketing Lead at ASTRO). One of the things Reza often teaches us is to use the “People Also Ask” feature, which is provided directly by Google, to find topics that are relevant to the keywords we entered at the beginning.
For example, if we search with the initial keyword “bathing the cat” (this is one of the most frequently asked questions by pawrents), Google displays several other questions that are frequently searched by pet owners.
Google displays People also ask with topics that are more specific than bathing a cat, including: how many times should a cat bathe, when can a cat not be bathed, is it legal to bathe a cat, and can a cat be bathed every day.
In this way, we can get a variety of topics that can be used as content material, which are relevant to our target audience, even though they have a search volume of 0 when checked on keyword research tools.
Closing
If we return to the original question, is it still relevant not to target keywords with high search volume The answer is still, as long as friends don't focus too much on this strategy alone. You also have to consider the level of keyword competition and the authority of your website (is the website you currently have able to beat big websites in the same industry?)
In addition, friends can also consider keywords with low search volume to gain traffic and dredge new market targets or strengthen existing ones in small quantities. In essence, you need to make variations in keyword research. Don't get too hung up on high search volumes.
The relevance between the quality of the content and the topics/keywords you are looking for, and the usefulness of your content remains the main key to getting the business goals you expect from SEO.