The primary use case of the keyword search volume metric in SEO is to estimate the potential organic search traffic that your page may get if it ranks for the keyword, right?
Well, let’s look at the following two keywords:
Dividing the workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on their strengths. The improvements are similar on desktop and mobile. Most of the focus in 2021 was on mobile results.
If we compare their Global (i.e., worldwide) search volume, the keyword “local SEO” seems to be 27 times more popular than the keyword “submit website to search engines.”
So does this mean that the #1 ranking page for “local SEO” should get vastly more search traffic than the #1 ranking page for “submit website to search engines?”
Let’s check that in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:
Estimated monthly search traffic to the top-ranking page for 'local seo'
Estimated monthly search traffic to the top-ranking page for 'submit website to search engines'
It turns out our assumption is completely wrong. The top-ranking page for a 27 times less popular keyword seems to be getting two times more search traffic.
How come?
Well, this happens because pages don’t just rank for a single keyword. If you look attentively at the two screenshots above, you’ll see that the top-ranking page for “local SEO” is ranking in Google for 311 keywords (look for the “Organic keywords” tile), with eight of them ranking in the top 3 positions.
As for the #1 page for “submit website to search engines,” it ranks in Google for a total of 1,400 keywords, with 201 of them ranking in the top 3 positions.
Here are some of these keywords:
Keyword rankings for the top-ranking page for 'submit website to search engines'
Whatever search query you have in mind, different people will phrase it differently. But Google is smart enough to understand that all these people are basically looking for the same thing. It, therefore, ranks the same page for all these search query variations.
We studied this “phenomenon” back in the day, and it turned out the average top-ranking page would also rank for about a thousand similar keywords.
This means that you can’t blindly rely on the search volume of individual keywords when estimating their search traffic potential. What you need to do instead is examine the top-ranking pages and see how much search traffic they get in total from all the keywords they rank for.
Here at Ahrefs, we got so enamored with this concept that we have created a unique metric called Traffic Potential: