 Happy Friday moz fans and today. I'm going to be talking to you about metrics for 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's 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 and I want to talk to you about how you can sort of use these Together and where you need to be careful. 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 some well-known problems and some lesser known problems 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 and a lot of tools and I understand why you know It's in a lot of cases. It's the only practical data source to use But Google keyword planner data has some some issues 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 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 benchmark 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 local certain devices There's a bunch of data cleaning and 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 just in this particular sample. It happened to be 97 searches a month now in Moses tools I put in the same set of keywords and we got an average of 101 I'm pretty pleased with that's quite close Then in a couple of competing tools that also don't use Google keyword planner data They got a hundred fifty and hundred ninety so the same sort of order of magnitude But then the cool Google keyword planner data on average was 1800 and three so That's that doesn't even fit on the whiteboard by the way to get that chart into scale and obviously that's that's quite a big problem if you are using this in anything sort of business critical and Now your boss is saying oh Can you estimate how how much traffic this new site section might get or how much revenue? We might make and your estimates your estimate is out by a factor of 18 that is going to be a problem, right? So this is a big danger even though. This is an old problem. I was actually surprised by how impactful this could be in the real world the other problem with With keyword volume is a bit of a subtler one and it has to do with how much serps are changing over time now and the issue here is that Just knowing we're only interested in search volume right because we're interested in clicks We want people to search a keyword and we want to know how many people are searching a keyword because we think we might win their click by ranking But the trouble is these days search volume doesn't actually give you that much of an idea about how many people might click or could click So you might have Keywords with very similar volume that actually have very different numbers of clicks available This is another this is a random sample of keywords from 750 keywords from mozcast and I put these into most pros get an idea of the different click-through rates and this is the total click-through rates of the queries so this is the percentage of people that clicked on anything not just one specific result and 85 of these keywords so over 10% of these keywords They had a click a total click-through rate for all results of under 20% meaning the vast majority of people clicked on nothing and Only about a third of these keywords had slightly over a third of these keywords had a Total number of clicks that was similar to the search volume right 81 to 100% of the search volume so this is really interesting because There's a wild spread here and this varies a lot from one keyword sample to the next and basically what this means Is that just knowing about volume doesn't mean you actually know about clicks anymore at least So this is this is a bit of a problem right when we're using search volume is metric We kind of have to use but there's maybe some some issues. So how can we get around that? So one as I've just talked about one thing we can look at is click-through rate in Combination with search volume. So I just said you know in moz You can look at the total click-through rate of a query but you can also look in search console at the click-through rate just for your specific result where you've ranked now and So that can help you to have a better idea for the sort of actual Opportunity that comes with a keyword rather than just search volume, which Basically doesn't give you much of a clue about that on its own So you can use these together to get a better idea The last metric I want to talk about that you can use with these is difficulty So keyword difficulty is metric we have in Mars some other tools have similar things And what we do is we take the page authority and domain authority of the other results that are ranking for that keyword To get an idea of sort of how tough the the table stakes are for this competition And then we also look at the click-through rate the total click-through rate of that Of that query like I was just talking about so this gives you an idea of how dominated this Surf is going to be for perhaps by Google features or something like that and then together this forms our Difficulty score so this gives you an idea of of the level of opportunity here, right? So when you use all three of these together, you can say, okay I've got this many searches and this click-through rate So I know how many clicks available and then with the difficulty I know how many of these clicks I might actually be able to win so that's all Relatively quick and simple one. Hope you found that useful. Let us know on Social and I'm sure you'll have more of these coming right up. Thank you