Video Transcription
Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today I'm going to be talking to you about metrics, but specifically metrics for keyword research. Now I think this is a very fundamental part of SEO. A lot of people think of it as a very basic part of SEO, which can be a problem sometimes.
I think often this might be the very first task you're asked to do in your SEO career. But I think there are some common sort of mistakes or misunderstandings within keyword research that are quite easy to fix, and a lot of it comes from metrics. So these are the three metrics I want to talk about today. So there's search volume, click-through rate, and difficulty. I want to talk to you about how you can sort of use these together and where you need to be careful.
Search volume
So search volume, I think obviously you're not going to get away from this as a metric. I'm not asking you to get away from this as a metric, don't worry. But it does have some well-known problems and some lesser-known problems.
Problems with Google Keyword Planner data
So one of the better known ones is, I think, probably about seven years ago now, I can remember the late great Russ Jones talking about some of the problems with Google Keyword Planner data, which is really a ubiquitous data source in a lot of tools.
I understand why. In a lot of cases, it's the only practical data source to use. But Google Keyword Planner data has some issues. So I'm not going to go into those now because, like I say, it's been talked about a lot in the industry. Hopefully, some of those older resources will be linked to below.
But I just want to talk about how impactful it can be in your research and in what you're trying to do for your business. So I did a test recently where I gathered a bunch of sample keywords and I benchmarked them in various metrics and various tools to see what volumes I got. Now, the source of truth I'm using here is Google Search Console. So you can be reasonably confident that if you rank first for something, then in Google Search Console, the number of impressions you have will be equivalent to the true volume.
Now, there are some caveats there. Maybe you only rank first on certain days or in certain locals or certain devices. There's a bunch of data cleaning and work that we have to do to clean that out. But once that's done, we can say, okay, in this particular sample of keywords, the average search volume was about 97 searches a month. Now, it could have been anything.
