Search volume is the average number of times a month people search for a keyword in your project’s country. RankDots takes it from Google Keyword Planner, so it is Google’s own estimate of demand - not a count of real searches.
Where you’ll see it
- Keywords screen: the Search volume column, one figure per keyword. You can sort and filter by it.
- Pages screen: the Search volume column, and Volume in a page’s details, with a chart of the last twelve months.
- Topic clusters screen: Volume on each cluster card.
A page’s or a cluster’s volume is the sum of the volumes of all the keywords inside it.
How to read it
It measures demand, not your share of it. A high figure means many people ask the question. It says nothing about whether you can rank or how many of those people would reach you.
It is a yearly average. A seasonal keyword’s busiest month can be far above its figure, and its quiet months far below. The chart in a page’s details shows how the year actually runs.
Identical figures for different phrasings are expected. Keyword Planner folds close variants of one search into a single figure, so several wordings of the same request can show exactly the same number. That is one demand counted once, not a coincidence.
N/A means Keyword Planner returned no figure for that keyword. It is a gap in Google’s data, not a zero.
How we calculate it
We don’t calculate it. RankDots takes search volume from Google Keyword Planner, Google’s advertising tool, for your project’s country. The figures are fixed when your project is created and are not updated afterwards.
Google describes the figure as the average number of times people search for a keyword and similar terms, averaged over a twelve-month period. Both halves matter: it is an average, and it groups similar terms together.
For a page or a cluster, RankDots adds up the volumes of its keywords.
That makes search volume an estimate, not a measurement. The searches in which your site actually appeared are counted separately, by Google Search Console, as impressions. What is measured and what is estimated explains the difference.
What it doesn’t tell you
- How many visits you would get. That depends on who already ranks. Potential traffic estimates it.
- Whether you can rank. Weak spots and keyword difficulty answer that.
- What happens in a given month. A yearly average hides seasonal peaks and dips.
- How demand has moved since you created the project. The figures are fixed at creation and do not update.
- Exactly how many different searches a page or cluster covers. Its volume is a plain sum. When several of its keywords are close variants that share one Keyword Planner figure, the same demand is added more than once.
- Searches outside your project’s country. The figure is for the country your project targets.
- Why another tool shows a different number. Tools use different sources and models; none of them counts every search.
What next
- What is potential traffic?
- Why our numbers differ from other tools [link is coming]