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The "Search volume" represents the popularity of keywords, that is, the number of times a user searches for a keyword through search engines during a specific period of time. The "Search volume" of keywords is used as a measure to determine the potential of a keyword and estimate the traffic that can be achieved by using it.

Definition

The term "Search volume" refers to the search requests that users make on search engines, mostly through Google. The frequency with which a keyword is searched during a month, for example, is what we call "search volume" for that keyword.

Oscillations and inaccuracies in the results

This value cannot be registered with total accuracy and therefore we have to pay attention that the values are always estimates.

The "Search volume" it can vary due to different factors: a particular topic is essential only during a certain period, events in a specific region. For this reason, you can review the changes and trends of this value with the tool Google Trends. A clear example is the search keyword "Oktoberfest" that is normally used during the months of September and October.

Calculate search volume

This value is generally obtained through the tool Google Planner which was replaced in 2013 by the tool Google Keyword Tool. This tool analyzes users' search volume for a keyword or a list of keywords. The results that it offers together with the list of words are displayed as an average number per month and the approximate search volume of the last 12 months. You can do more specific searches and restrict your results to different regions or other factors.

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Relevance for SEO

For SEO, the search volume of keywords is a very important value for determining the most relevant words and their popularity, very useful information when it comes to finding out the words that users use the most many times.

The greater the search volume for a keyword, the greater the competition and the greater the potential for traffic that can be achieved by using it. With a low value, the competition is also low, but, precisely for this reason, the potentials to monopolize most of the traffic are high since the number of competitors is very low. Definitely, the traffic potential is always higher for the words that have a higher search volume.

In practice, it is recommended to use a combination of the two using not only popular keywords, but long tail keywords as well.

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