Search volume, difficulty and competition

Every keyword tool shows numbers that look precise. They are estimates, and knowing how they are made stops you from making confident decisions on weak data.

Keyword Planner metrics

Google's Keyword Planner is part of Google Ads. Google defines its main metrics like this:

Metric	What it means
Avg. monthly searches	Average monthly searches for the keyword and its close variants, for your chosen location and network. By default it is averaged over 12 months, and the figures are rounded
Competition	How many advertisers showed ads on the keyword, relative to all keywords. Low, medium or high
Top of page bid (low and high)	Roughly the 20th and 80th percentile of what advertisers paid for top-of-page ads recently

Practitioners widely report that accounts without active ad spend see ranges such as "1K–10K" instead of exact numbers. Google does not document this threshold, so treat it as common experience rather than a rule.

Google Trends

Trends shows relative interest, not search counts. Google takes a sample of searches, divides each data point by the total searches in that place and time, and scales the result from 0 to 100. Terms with very low volume show as 0.

Use Trends to answer questions like these:

• Is interest seasonal? Air conditioners peak in summer, and ski equipment peaks in winter.
• Is the topic growing or shrinking over several years?
• Which of two phrasings is more common?

Third-party tools

Paid tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush and SE Ranking estimate volume and keyword difficulty with their own data and models. Their methods are not public in full, and they often disagree with each other.

Prioritise by relevance and value first

A practical order for deciding which keywords to pursue:

1. Relevance: would ranking for this bring people you can actually help?
2. Business value: how close is the searcher to becoming a customer? Transactional and local keywords are usually closer than informational ones.
3. Intent fit: can you create the type of page the results page shows?
4. Achievability: who ranks now? Big brands and strong sites, or small sites like yours?
5. Volume: only now, to choose between keywords that pass the first four tests.

Many good keywords show zero or "no data" in tools, especially in small markets. That does not mean nobody searches them. The next lesson deals with that directly.