Deciding if (And How) to Target a Keyword

If you’re choosing keywords based on search volume alone, you’re making a mistake. You also need to consider whether the keyword makes sense for your business and whether you can realistically rank forit.

Here’s the process:

Let’s go through the steps in more detail.

People usually rely on search volumes for this, but they can be misleading.

For example, “pheasant breast recipes” gets an estimated 1.9K monthly searches in the U.S. But the top-ranking page gets far less traffic:

It’s the opposite for “backlink checker.” The top-ranking page gets an estimated 27K monthly visits despite the keyword having only 5.9K monthly searches.

Here are a few reasons why this can happen:

What’s the solution?

Use the top-ranking page’s as a proxy for traffic potential instead of search volumes.

If you’re an Ahrefs user, the Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer tells you this. You can even sort and filter keyword ideas by TP to make sure you focus on keywords that are likely to send you decent traffic.

If you’re not an Ahrefs user, plug the top-ranking page’s URL into our free traffic checker.