Using search volume metrics to forecast your traffic is wildly inaccurate.
There, I said it. Go ahead and throw your monitor out the window in a fit of rage. Curse my name and unfollow me.
Here’s the problem: Content doesn’t rank for just one keyword.
And, when you do keyword research you’re only forecasting based on one keyword.
Content can rank for thousands of keywords
But how?
The number of keywords your content ranks for depends on two factors:
- The number of variant keywords that people are searching for your topic.
- How in-depth you have written your piece of content.
Let’s unpack both of these so that they make sense.
There are some topics that people will search for in many different ways. They will use a very wide variety of keywords that ultimately have the same exact intention.
Take the keyword “Is eczema lifelong?” as an example. The top ranking URL is ranking for 4,307 keywords!
That means that you can search all 4,307 keywords and this page will show up somewhere in Google for each one of them.
Let’s take a look at some of the keywords this page ranks for:
That’s a TON of search volume, no?
And when you factor in each keyword’s ranking position, you’ll have be able to estimate the amount of traffic driven to that page via that keyword.
Via each of these 4,307 keywords, Ahrefs estimates that page drives over 55,000 sessions per month!
But how does this happen?
For starters, Google is making a guess about a searcher’s intent.
It understands that someone who searches “is eczema lifelong” probably wants to learn about causes, types, cures, etc. It’s assuming that these sub-topics will be of interest to that searcher.
Second, if you write a piece of content that is sufficiently thorough – meaning you do a great job of covering all the sub-topics someone would care about, like causes, types, and cures – you’ll rank for your target keyword along with these variant keywords.
But here’s a crazy kicker, the keyword “Is eczema lifelong” is only searched 50 times per month.
So if you were doing keyword research and landed on a keyword with a search volume of 50, you might immediately discard it!
But in reality, this topic has a potential of tens of thousands of visitors per month!
So how do I forecast traffic?
You should first thing of “keywords” more along the lines of “topics.”
“Keyword” implies something singular and finite. In reality you should be creating content that completely dives headfirst into a topic and fully supports it with as many sub-topics and detail as possible.
Then, when you use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs, enter a keyword and take a look at the estimated traffic for the first page of results and create an average.
Let’s go through an example together.
If we enter the keyword, “How to cure eczema”, I’ll see a monthly search volume of 900. Not bad.
But then if I scroll down to the top ranking pages for this keyword, I see a completely different story…
The top ranking pages for this keyword are driving tens of thousands of visitors per month.
The median value for page one content is 12,951, and the average value is 18,585.
So in reality…if I were to rank on page one for this keyword I wouldn’t be driving my share of 800 searches per month…I would probably be driving somewhere around 10-20k visitors per month.
Also keep in mind, sometimes the reverse is true! Sometimes search volume can over-inflate your expectations of how much interest there is in a topic.
Conclusion
I back-checked this strategy with the actual traffic we generated to landing pages when I worked at Brafton Inc. The result was 82% accuracy! When I threw out a couple outliers, it was over 90% accurate.
So, if you want an idea of how much traffic your keyword choices will drive, I can’t think of anything out there that’s more accurate.