Part 2. How to determine the full traffic potential of a keyword.
Ok, so we have four cool keywords to target and we know how many times people search for them
in Google per month, which is called "search volume."
Let's say I decided to write an article targeting the least popular among these four,
"authors like terry pratchett."
According to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer it only gets 150 searches per month in the US,
and the global search volume from all around the world is not much bigger.
By the way, the search volume numbers that you see in Ahrefs, and pretty much in any other
keyword research tool are estimations.
Most keyword tools take their search volume from Google's own Keyword Planner tool,
which shows you rounded annual averages.
Which is not very precise, as you can tell.
Here at Ahrefs we decided to go a step further than most keyword research tools.
We paired data from Google Keyword Planner with an additional data source - clickstream.
This way we get slightly more accurate search volumes and we can update them more often
than most other tools.
But at the end of the day, they're still estimations.
So back to the lesson.
Having monthly search volume estimation on our hands, we can try to calculate how much
search traffic we can get if we rank on the front page of Google for that keyword.
I'm pretty sure you already know that the #1 ranking result in Google will get approximately
30% of all clicks.
Then around 15% of clicks will go to position #2,
And around 10% to position #3.
And if you rank lower than top 3, you'll get even less clicks, so let's not even bother calculating.
These percentages will of course be quite different for each search query, but SEO professionals
just use these simplified averages to make traffic estimations.
So what do we have here.
With the search volume for "authors like terry pratchett" of 150 searches in the United States,
you'll get 45 clicks if you rank #1, 22 clicks if you rank #2, and 15 clicks if you rank #3.
These numbers don't seem very exciting, do they?
Especially when you consider how much work it would take to write a decent article on that topic.
But in reality, you're going to get much more traffic than that.
Here in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer we have a handy SERP button.
It pulls the top 10 ranking pages for your keyword and shows a lot of useful data for each of them.
The column that we're interested in is called Traffic.
And it says that the page that ranks #2 for the keyword "authors like terry pratchett"
seems to be getting over a 100 visitors from search every single month.
This is 5 times more than we have just estimated for that page.
That's because this page doesn't rank for "authors like terry pratchett" keyword alone.
It also ranks for many other related searches.
Which can be seen from the column called "Keywords".
It says that this article ranks in Google for 31 keywords.
Let's click this number and see what they are.
This link brings me to Organic keywords report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool, which
lists all the keywords that we see this article rank for in top 100 search results.
But I don't need top 100, we just discussed that most traffic goes to top 3.
So let's use positions filter to see the keywords where this article ranks in top 3.
And except for my original keyword, "authors like terry pratchett", this page ranks for three more
similar searches: "authors like terry pratchett" and "douglas adams," "authors similar to terry pratchett,"
"books like terry pratchett."
A duplicate keyword with quotation marks icon tells me that in addition to regular search listing,
this page also ranks in a big featured snippet for each of these keywords.
So, as you can tell, different people may use different search queries to look for the exact
same thing in Google.
And Google is smart enough to understand that these searches are similar and therefore ranks
the same page for all of them.
We've already discussed this in the previous lesson, where I showed you a weight-loss article,
that was ranking in Google for almost 10,000 keywords related to weight loss and pulling
over 300,000 visitors per month from search.
But that was way above the average.
Guess how many keywords an average top-ranking page will rank for?
Here at Ahrefs we studied over 3 million Google searches to answer this question.
And according to our data, the #1 ranking page will rank for about a thousand related keywords.
Which leads us to a following takeaway.
Search volume of a single keyword is a bad indicator of the total search traffic potential
of the article on that topic.
The search volume of the "authors like terry pratchett" keyword in the United States
is only 150 searches per month.
Which may lead to a conclusion that this keyword is not worth targeting.
But according to Ahrefs data, the article that ranks at position #2 for this keyword
is generating over a hundred visitors per month from search, because it also ranks
for a few more similar keywords.
A hundred highly targeted new visitors every month is quite a solid number for most newbie bloggers.
And, as I said before, this number in Ahrefs is an underestimation.
Which means the actual search traffic to that page can easily be up to 5 times higher.
So please don't make content marketing decisions based on the search volume of a single keyword,
look at the total search traffic of the top-ranking pages for that keyword.
I wonder if you've noticed another thing here, which is insanely cool.
The page that ranks #2 gets 3 times more traffic than the page that ranks #1.
How is that even possible?
Well, just open both pages and compare them.
The top-ranking page is a simple list of book authors, with no extra details about them.
But the page that ranks #2 is a public discussion on a forum, where people are sharing their recommendations
with some reasoning behind them.
Which results in more content for Google to process.
In other words, a better, deeper coverage of a topic will often lead to ranking in Google
for more related keywords and therefore getting more search traffic in total.
But we'll talk more about it later in this course.