Keyword Volume is an estimation of the number of searches per month for a certain keyword or key-phrase.

Higher search volume means more potential traffic to your website, but really high volume keywords can often be more competitive as well as more broadly targeted.

You may think that you should always pick the highest volume keyword possible, but that’s not always the case!

Here are some important considerations for keyword volume:

High Volume Keywords

High volume keywords are often very competitive and broadly targeted.

Although ranking for such keywords can send a lot of traffic to your website, it may not be worth the effort because they are too competitive and will require too much time and money to rank.

For example, let’s take the keyword “computers”.

You can see that although the search volume is high, the keyword difficulty is “high” according to this tool from ahrefs.

High volume keywords might also not be worth it because the keyword phrase is too broad and often won’t lead to conversions on your website.

In this case, the search intent isn’t explicitly clear.

Some people searching for that keyword might be looking for information about computers, while others might be shopping for a new computer.

People searching for this keyword are less likely to actually buy a computer than someone searching for a specific brand or type of computer.

High-volume keywords might be worth targeting if you have the resources to outperform the competition.

Such keyword phrases can take longer to rank for, but they can drive a lot of traffic to your website.

Medium Volume Keywords (Medium-Tail Keywords)

Medium tail keywords can drive a significant amount of traffic to your web pages and can also be specific enough to drive targeted traffic and conversions.

Although there is no strict definition, medium tail keywords generally contain 2-3 words.

For example, if you are selling a specific type of computer like business laptops, then ranking for “business laptops” might be more worthwhile than trying to rank for “computers”.

Although the search volume is lower, the phrase is more targeted towards someone likely to buy what you are selling.

The keyword phrase is still competitive, but probably not as competitive as “computers”.

Long-Tail Keywords

Keywords that have 3+ words are often referred to as long-tail keywords.

Although these keyword phrases can be lower in volume in comparison to short-tail keywords, they often send highly targeted traffic that is more interested in what you have to offer.

For example, if you are selling a specific type of computer, like a Dynabook Toshiba Terca, then you might be better off targeting the phrase “Dynabook Toshiba Terca” instead of “computers” or even “laptop computers”.

You will receive less traffic for that search term, but the traffic you do receive will be much more likely to buy and you will also have less difficulty ranking for that lower volume keyword phrase.

When creating informational content like blog articles, sometimes you can get traffic for long-tail keywords by simply including them on the page.

Some long-tail keywords have very low search volume, but the cumulative traffic from lots of long-tail keywords can add up. In fact, an estimated 70% of all search traffic comes from long-tail searches!

Conclusion

Keyword search volume is an important factor in keyword research, but you won’t always want to pick the highest volume keyword possible.

Finding the right match between search volume and user intent is vital when selecting your keywords!

The good news is that you don’t need to get hung up on picking the “perfect keyword.”

By writing long-form content, web pages tend to rank for multiple keywords, even keywords that you are not intentionally targeting. Ranking for multiple keywords can result in additional traffic to your web page.

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Search intent is understanding what type of information users are searching for when they enter a search phrase.

Understanding this is crucial because to rank a web page in the search engines, the type of content you create must match the content that the searcher is looking for.

Otherwise, your chances of ranking and attracting the right traffic are low.

Yes, that’s right, even if you have your optimisation perfect, you still might not rank.

Here’s how it works:

Understanding What Users Are Truly Looking For When They Search

When people search on Google, it’s not always clear exactly what they are searching for.

For instance, if someone searches “pool,” what are they actually looking for? A swimming pool, or the game of pool (billiards)?

If someone types “cookies,” are they looking for a recipe for cookies, or are they trying to understand the cookies that are stored in their browser?

You can see how a search query could mean many things!

Search engines tweak their algorithms to make sure they are displaying the results for what people want – even when it’s not explicitly clear.

These are just some simple examples of disambiguation, but search intent goes further.

Categories of Search Intent

We can categorise search intent into several categories:

1) Informational Intent

Information intent means users are looking to get more information on a topic.

For example, if someone searched “how to ride a bike” they are looking for a guide. The search results will display articles or videos about how to ride a bike.

2) Commercial / Transactional Intent

Commercial or transactional intent refers to when a searcher is looking to purchase something or compare prices.

For example, if someone searches for “buy blue trek bike” they are likely looking to purchase. The search results will often display product pages, because this search is so specific.

Note: Just because users are looking for products doesn’t always mean your product page will rank! Google often prefers review-type content or lists of the best products to actual product pages!

3) Navigational Intent

Navigational intent occurs when a searcher is looking for a specific website or destination.

For example, searchers might type in a brand name “Ebay login” into the search engines when they want to find the login page to Ebay.com.

Why Is Search Intent Important?

The reason this is important is that it will be very difficult to rank for your chosen keyword if your content doesn’t meet the search intent for that keyword.

This is one of the biggest mistakes in trying to rank!

Google often changes the search results for a keyword based on what they think the correct search intent is, and often display more informational type pages vs transactional pages.

As an example, in the past, if someone searched for a health supplement, Google might have seen the search intent as “transactional” meaning people wanted to buy the product, and therefore displayed product pages.

It was easy for a brand that sold the health supplements to rank their product pages for that keyword.

But then Google changed the keyword intent to “informational,” and now only articles about the supplement are ranking. Now it would be very difficult for a brand to rank a product page there.

It’s the same keyword, but because Google determined the search intent differently, the type of content you’ll need to create will change!

This is a very common scenario, and why creating long-form content around your products or services gives you a higher chance for ranking versus trying to rank your product or service pages!

So how do you make sure you understand the search intent of the keyword?

It’s easy:

How To Determine Search Intent

The simplest way to determine search intent is to perform a search on Google and see what results come up.

For example, let’s take the word “email marketing software”.

A quick search shows that most of the results are lists of the top email marketing software.

If you’re running a business that sells email marketing software and you want to rank, you’ll need to create a piece of content that matches what Google is currently ranking.

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On an entry level they work by having 3 basic functions: 

1. Crawling the internet to find new web pages and documents

2. Putting that content in a giant index / database

3. Ranking that content on various factors

We are going to be going into this in a bit more detail now.

Crawling: How Does A Search Engine Crawl The Web?

Search engines discover new content by sending out search engine spiders, or crawlers, to find it.

Crawlers are computer programs or robots that find new content like web pages, PDF files, videos, and images by visiting links on web pages.

These crawlers can visit web pages very quickly which allows them to discover new websites, pages, and other content.

When creating new content, linking to it from existing pages on your site or from another site is a good way to make sure it gets discovered by the search engines.

Crawlers also tend to visit popular websites that create new content more frequently than smaller unknown websites. Getting a link from a popular website could result in your content getting discovered more rapidly

Creating a sitemap also helps search engines crawl your site. A good sitemap will link to every page on your site.

Signing up for a Google Console account is a good step to take if you want to see more data on pages that get Google has crawled. You can also see any crawling errors that may have occurred.

A few issues that might cause pages to not get crawled include poor navigation structure, redirect loops and server errors.

In the past, it was popular to “submit” your site to search engines, but this is no longer needed as they have become much more advanced at detecting new content that is published on the web!

Indexing: How Does A Search Engine Read and Store Website Information?

When crawlers discover new pages and content, they store the information in an index.

You can think of an index as a very large database containing all the web pages on the Internet that a search engine has found.

Search engines will analyse and fetch content from their index when searchers enter a search query.

By default, search engines will crawl and try to index every page on your site that they can find.

However, if you have pages you don’t want web searchers to be able to find through search engines, like private member-only pages, then use can use Robots Meta Tags will help.

You may also want to exclude pages that aren’t useful like tag and category pages in WordPress.

Ranking: How Does A Search Engine Rank Websites?

Search engines use algorithms to analyse websites and decide how to rank them for various search queries.

These algorithms assign scores to various ranking factors and then rank web pages with the best scores from highest to lowest.

Search engine algorithms also change over time in an effort to improve search results. Keep in mind that the goal of search engines is to provide quality content so that their users are satisfied with search results and keep using their search engine.

So what factors do search engines use to determine what content ranks at the top?

We discuss the top ranking factors in the next chapter!

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