Predict Your Traffic Volumes with Keyword Traffic Estimator

SEMrush Blog

May 21, 20132 min read
Predict Your Traffic Volumes

If you want to get more relevant visitors to your website, you should seriously consider search engines as a source for a traffic increase. In order to get more relevant visitors from organic searches, you need to improve your positions for particular keywords that are relevant to your business. But it’s not enough to find keywords that precisely describe your business; it is even more important to determine keywords that will bring traffic to your project.

Before optimizing your website for specific keywords, you should check their potential for future traffic. How can you check in advance whether a keyword will be able to generate traffic? You can easily do it with any keyword traffic estimator. It will help you find the most valuable keywords for your online business and prioritize your search marketing activities.

There are a lot of online tools and services that provide traffic volume estimations for keywords. They differ in many aspects — different solutions have different interfaces with different additional options available. They also use different data sources. Therefore, the best option would be to check your keywords with several solutions and compare the results. If you have no time for that — you should select the most reliable source for your estimates and stick to it.

One of the most reliable and precise solutions for traffic volume estimates is increase adwords CTR Keyword Tool. Despite its name, it suits well — not only for planning your AdWords campaigns — but also for estimating your potential organic search traffic. There is a Google keyword estimator called Traffic Estimator. But this solution is more suitable for AdWords campaigns and will hardly help to estimate possible search traffic.

There are several important notes for correct usage of any website traffic estimator tool. Some tools provide data for global monthly search volumes only (i.e. how many users have used a search query worldwide). If you have a local business targeted to a geographic region, this data won’t be useful for you. That is why Google AdWords Keyword Tool provides global monthly search volume as well as local monthly search volume for a specific geographic region that can be specified by a user.

Besides that, some keyword tools do not distinguish between broad matches and exact matches for a keyword. The exact match option provides more precise data for real volumes of search traffic; you should pay attention to these parameters when using a keyword estimation tool. If you use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool — it is highly recommended to choose the “Exact match” option for estimating keyword traffic potential.

Even when you have figures for your concrete geographic region in exact match — it doesn’t mean that you will have exactly the same number of visitors to your site. There are several more factors that affect traffic volume that cannot be predicted with any keyword traffic estimator.

First of all, these estimates do not take into account click distribution between different TOP positions. Even if you are ranked TOP 1 for some particular keywords, you won’t gather 100% of the traffic. Some part of the traffic will go to Google Local Business. And one more thing that cannot be predicted in advance: any keyword traffic estimator gives data about how much time a particular keyword was entered into the search field, but it cannot tell between real users and automated SEO tools that check positions of a particular website for a particular keyword.

Since 100% reliable data for keyword traffic can be obtained only empirically, it is always better to base your promotion strategy at least on some related data from online keyword estimation tools.

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