If you don’t know what a keyword is, it’s anything you put in a search engine to find something.
Examples: “nike yellow lobster,” “why are nike yellow lobsters so expensive?,” “buy nike yellow lobster” – anything.
Only people who actively practice SEO (search engine optimization) think about the next part, but it’s useful for anybody who has a business or makes content. Every social media platform is its own search engine, after all.
The traffic estimates that keyword volume tools give are heavily misleading.
If you make a page rank #1 for one keyword, it will rank #1-5 for many more.
So, if you’ve ever looked at keyword tools to try to figure out how much traffic you could get from doing a bit of SEO, it’s more than you think. You actually have to multiply the given estimate by a lot to get the actual estimate.
It’s a positive. SEO considerations bring more traffic than most people realize.
Examples
Here are examples from two of my websites.
For keyword volume estimates, I use moz.com/explorer, which also has a free tier. Moz is my SEO tool of choice due to its On-Page Grader tool, but I like its whole suite.
For actual results, I’m taking click data as provided by Google Search Console – which measures traffic directly from Google Search.
Page: https://edwardsturm.com/articles/best-games-youtube-2023/
Primary target keyword for this page: “best games for youtube”
Estimated monthly search clicks for this keyword: 11-50
The pages ranks #1 for this keyword.
Does it get only 11-50 clicks per month? No, because it shows up #1-5 for many more keywords.
Actual monthly clicks from Google search (not paid) to this page: 2,352
A lot more than 11-50.
Three months clicks: 8,345
One year clicks: 33,612
Another example.
Page: https://reverb.chat/uses/voice-recording-for-students/
Primary target keyword for this page: “voice recording for students”
Estimated monthly search clicks for this keyword: 11-50
Actual monthly clicks from Google search (not paid) to this page: 356
Three months clicks: 670
One year clicks: 3,146
If you’re wondering why example 1 has much more volume than example 2, it’s because example 1 is top-of-funnel and example 2 is bottom-of-funnel.
People searching for things like “best games for youtube” are exploring.
People searching for things like “voice recording for students” know exactly what they want and are just looking for a brand to give it to them so they can use/purchase.
Bottom-of-funnel keywords, in general, have lower search volume but result in more conversions by percentage and require fewer words and images on a page to target. These keywords are easier to go after and also make you more money!
Example 2 is also seasonal, as teachers search this mostly during the school year.
Either way – it’s still more than the estimated volume for a single target keyword.
You don’t just have to do SEO with your own website
Social media has taken tons of market share from Google and other search engines like Bing.
Other top places you should think about keywords to maximize the traffic you get:
- TikTok
- YouTube
- TwitterX
As written earlier, any social network of large enough size becomes a meaningful search engine.
Put your keywords in the titles and descriptions for each of these to get extra traffic.
