The topic of the previous blog post was how to find relevant keywords but relevant keywords without the ideal search volume is not of much use. If the search volume is too high then the competition is likely to be intense making it difficult to appear on the first page of search results. On the flipside, if the search volume is too low then you are unlikely to get enough visitors that turn into prospects and clients.

So what is the ideal monthly search volume?

Good question but there in no straightforward answer as it depends on the type of business among other factors. In my opinion, for a local business anything above 1,000 in monthly search volume is a good keyword to target. Let’s take the example of the Singapore plumber (from the previous article) further where the terms ‘plumber’ and ‘plumbers’ got approximately 6,600 and 1,300 monthly local searches in Singapore. This makes both the keywords ideal candidates to be short-listed provided the competition is not very high. I’ll cover competition in the next post.

Google Keyword Tool Settings

Breaking Down The Numbers

Let’s just consider the term ‘plumbers’ which had 1,300 local searches. Research from Enquiro shows that 75% of searchers click the organic listings (as opposed to paid links on Google) which means about 975 clicks for organic results.

A related research from iProspect shows that the number 1 listing for any search query gets roughly 42% of the traffic and the first page captures over 89% of traffic for any given search term. The numbers are quite straightforward:

Total Monthly Searches = 1,300 approximately
Organic Search Clicks = 975 approximately
First Page Results Clicks = 870 approximately
Number One Listing Clicks = 365 approximately

Note: The number of clicks between number 2 and number 10 of the search results page will not be evenly distributed. The higher ranked pages will obviously get more clicks.

You can work out roughly what kind of traffic you’ll be getting for a particular term based on the search volume as well as your ranking. Let’s say you rank number 1 for the term ‘plumbers’ in Singapore which translates into 365 visits to your website. If your average rate of visitor to lead conversion is 10% then you will be getting about 36 leads per month from this search term alone.

This is one way you can choose which keywords to target based on monthly search volume. Next up, I’ll write about keyword competition. As always, please leave a comment if you have questions or additional comments.