I often see people reaching out and asking for advice on the range of monthly search volume they should be aiming for with the keywords that they base their articles around. So many people fall into the trap of either not checking the keyword search volume at all and getting no traffic or going for keywords that are so high in search volume that they are high competition and very difficult to rank.
Although you should still do keyword competition analysis to work out if your chosen keywords are high competition or not, as bloggers, we are often able to pick and choose our target keywords and select the ones that we want to produce our content for. So many people instantly dismiss the lower search volume keywords as they feel that they will not get the traffic to make producing the content worth their while but I feel that this is a huge mistake.
Personally, I rather have a high chance of actually ranking for a low search volume keyword and getting traffic than a low to zero chance of ranking for a high search volume keyword and getting no traffic. A large number of blog articles ranking for a large number of keyword themes with each keyword theme having multiple low search volume keywords within it can result in a surprising amount of traffic.
This is why I am moving more and more in the direction of growing blogs with massive word counts with all of their articles based around low search volume, low competition keywords rather than a few articles targeting high search volume, high competition keywords. Some of these keywords actually get zero predicted searches per month but still bring in hundreds of hits but more on that later.
As usual, I will share my thoughts on what a good monthly search volume for your keywords is below in text format but I also have the below video sharing my thoughts on the topic in video format. Different people prefer to consume their content in different ways so doing it this way usually covers both bases.
What Does Search Volume Mean?
The search volume of a keyword is a prediction of how many people are searching for a particular keyword each month. This can then give an indication of the level of traffic that you can expect that keyword to generate if you target an article around it and managed to rank that article in the first place of Google for that search term.
As this search volume prediction is all of the searches for the keyword, it is then usually spread over all of the entries ranking on page one for that search term. Although it is difficult to work out, the entry in position one seems to get around 30% of the searches, position two around 20%, position 3 around 15% and then it drastically drops off from there.
These search volume predictions are often incorrect too with different tools often suggesting a massive difference in search volume for the same keyword. This means that even if a tool suggests a keyword may get 1000 searches per month, you may only get 333 hits for that particular keyword if you rank top in Google and thats if the keyword prediction tool you are using is accurate.
Thankfully though, you are usually able to integrate a number of different keywords into the same keyword theme for an article to help increase the amount of traffic it may be able to pull from search engines. Keep in mind that some keywords do have a seasonal fluctuation in their traffic meaning that even if you get 1000 hits for one month, you may get much lower during other months.
Take the term “best BBQ grill” as an example. There is a high chance that this keywords search volume will spike during the warmer months as more people are interested in having BBQs. During the colder months, this search volume will then taper off and surge again the following year.
How Do I Find The Search Volume For A Keyword?
Although there are a bunch of tools and services out there that you can use to get keyword predictions, the two I usually recommend are Keyword Surfer as it is currently a free plugin and Keywords Everywhere that costs $10 per 100,000 credits at the time of writing. Although a large number of people may be attracted to Keyword Surfer due to it being free, in my experience, the predicted search volumes for the tool can be way off.
The image above shows the predicted global search volume for the keyword “best dab pens” from Keywords Everywhere in the bottom left coming in at 6600 monthly searches. It then shows the USA only predicted monthly search volume from Keyword Surfer to the right of the search query coming in at 8100 monthly searches.
Even though the Keyword Surfer plugin is showing a prediction for USA only searches, it is higher than the 6600 monthly searches that Keywords Everywhere predicts globally. Although Keywords Everywhere does cost $10 per 100,000 credits, it does usually match up to the type of search volume I would expect when I add all of their predicted search volumes up for a keyword theme and then check the real traffic for an article in first place.
What Is A Good Keyword Search Volume?
So, with all of that out of the way, when it comes to an actual good keyword search volume, I have some articles based around keyword themes where the primary keyword gets a predicted monthly search volume of 30 but gets 500-1000 organic hits from Google per month. This is due to theming the article around multiple keywords that all fit well and allow you to pull traffic from a wide range of keywords.
Although my article themes are usually based around a primary theme with the highest search volume, it will then have secondary keywords within it as sub-headers to pull traffic. In addition to this, you can also pull traffic from one-time searches on Google too, this is essentially a search query that Google has never seen before, and may never see again. Although this exact search may happen only once, all different variants of the search can end up resulting in a surprising amount of traffic.
Although the keyword theme for this particular article is higher competition than I would usually recommend, it can serve as an example of this. The primary keyword I am targeting is “What Is A Good Keyword Search Volume For Blogging” and the two secondary keywords that I am targeting are “How Do I Find The Search Volume For A Keyword?” and “What Is A Good Keyword Search Volume?”. Within the body of text of the article, there is then a number of chances for Google to serve this article as the top result for any one time searches it sees too.
What About Targeting Zero Search Volume Keywords?
As I mentioned earlier, I have a large number of articles that target keywords that get zero predicted monthly searches but end up bringing in traffic. If you are building an affiliate blog with high ticket items then you are able to quickly earn decent money from these zero search volume keywords. As I touched on back at the start of the article though, finding the zero search volume keywords that can actually bring you traffic is not as easy as just creating an article about a topic that is displayed as having zero search volume.
I have the video below going into how I personally find these keywords and how you are able to use the same method that I use to find keywords for your own blog too. Thankfully, the method has no need for high price tag keyword research tools, you just need time and Google. Due to so many people over looking these keywords as they are displayed as having zero monthly searches, they are often much lower competition than keywords with an actual predicted search volume.
Conclusion
That brings my article going keyword search volume for your article themes to a close. Blogging is not an exact science as many of the tools we have to use do not have access to Googles data so the search volumes these tools show are predictions. Different tools get these predictions in different ways meaning that there is often a wide discrepancy between the suggested search volume of a keyword.
I would highly recommend that you at least try the zero search volume method in the video above on a handful of test articles just to try it out in your niche. The highest trafficked page I personally have using this method gets 300 hits per month but I have seen some other bloggers get around 1000.
