Search volume is a vanity metric
If a keyword gets only 20 or 50 searches per month, should you ignore it? Usually, no.
And if another keyword gets 8,000 searches per month, should it automatically become a priority? Also no.
Search volume is useful as a rough indication of how often people search for something. The problem starts when that number is treated as a measure of how valuable a keyword is to the business. It is not.
A keyword with modest search volume can bring exactly the kind of visitor you want. A high-volume keyword can bring thousands of people who were never likely to become customers in the first place. That is why I treat search volume as supporting information, not as the main criterion for deciding what to target.
What keyword search volume actually tells you
Search volume is an estimate of how often a keyword is searched over a given period. Tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs and Semrush derive those numbers in different ways, so they will often disagree. Even Google’s own figures are estimates rather than an exact counter of how many people typed a phrase into Google.
That makes search volume useful for questions such as:
- Is there clearly demand for this topic?
- Is one phrasing much more common than another?
- Is demand seasonal?
- Is this a broad market or a very small niche?
It becomes much less useful when the question is:
Will ranking for this keyword be valuable to my business?
Search volume alone cannot answer that.
A keyword with 8,000 searches does not mean 8,000 visitors
The most obvious problem is that search volume describes searches, not traffic to your website. Search results contain ads, maps, shopping results, videos, featured results, AI-generated answers and competing organic pages. Some searches end without a click at all. Even if you rank well, you receive only a share of the available clicks.
Then there is another filter: only some of those visitors will actually be relevant to your business. Imagine you sell project-management software to medium-sized companies.
A broad search such as:
project management software
may have substantial volume.
But the people searching could include students, freelancers looking for a free tool, employees researching alternatives, consultants, journalists and companies far outside your target market.
Now compare that with:
project management software for construction companies
or:
project management software with SAP integration
The reported search volume may be far smaller. The commercial relevance may be dramatically higher. That is the part a volume number does not show.
Low search volume does not mean low value
This matters particularly for local businesses, B2B companies and specialised services. Suppose a tool reports only 30 searches per month for:
web developer Malta
Thirty looks unimpressive in an SEO report. But those searches are made by people looking for exactly the service being offered, in exactly the relevant market. If several of them become qualified enquiries, that keyword could be considerably more valuable than an informational term with thousands of searches.
The same applies to specialist B2B searches. A manufacturer does not need 10,000 people searching for a component if ten of the right companies searching for it can create meaningful revenue.
This is why I would rarely reject a relevant keyword simply because a tool reports low or even negligible volume. The question is whether the search represents a real need that the business can satisfy.
Search-volume estimates become particularly weak in small markets
Keyword tools become less helpful as the market becomes narrower. Local searches, specialist products and highly specific B2B queries may have too little data for a reliable estimate.
A tool might report:
0–10 searches
That does not necessarily mean nobody searches for the topic. It means the tool has little useful data to work with. This distinction matters if you operate in Malta, serve a small geographic market or sell something specialised. A handful of highly relevant searches can still be commercially important.
Search Console is particularly useful once the site already has some visibility, because it shows the actual queries for which Google is displaying your pages rather than relying entirely on third-party estimates.
Search intent usually matters more
When choosing SEO targets, I care much more about why somebody is searching.
Compare:
running shoes
with:
waterproof trail running shoes for wide feet
The first query describes a huge category. The second tells us much more about what the person wants. They have already made several decisions. They know the type of shoe, the use case and an important product requirement.
That usually makes the second query far easier to serve with a specific, useful page. This does not mean every long query automatically converts well. It means specificity often gives us more information about what the searcher is trying to achieve. That is far more useful than volume on its own.
You also need a realistic chance of competing
Volume becomes even less useful when the site has little chance of ranking for the keyword. A broad commercial term may be dominated by established companies, large publishers and specialist sites with years of relevant content and strong backlink profiles. That does not make the keyword impossible. It changes the investment required.
For a smaller company, twenty narrower opportunities may create useful search visibility much sooner than spending years trying to compete for one trophy keyword. This is where keyword research becomes a business decision rather than a sorting exercise in an SEO tool.
I would rather find a search with:
- clear relevance to the offer;
- useful commercial or informational intent;
- a page we can genuinely make better;
- realistic competition;
- and 100 searches per month;
than chase an unrelated 20,000-search keyword because the number looks impressive.
Search volume is still useful
Calling it a vanity metric does not mean I ignore it. The problem is using it as the objective. I still use volume to understand the rough size of a topic, compare alternative terminology, identify patterns and estimate whether an opportunity deserves further investigation. It is one input among several.
If two otherwise similar keywords have 50 and 5,000 searches respectively, that difference obviously deserves attention. But they are rarely otherwise identical. Usually the intent, competition, audience and required page are different too. Those differences are where the actual SEO decision happens.
What I look at instead
When deciding whether a search topic is worth targeting, I would normally ask several questions.
Is the search relevant to the business?
Would somebody making this search realistically need what the company provides? Traffic from people who will never become customers is still traffic, but it should not be confused with commercial opportunity.
What does the searcher want?
Are they learning about a problem, comparing possible solutions, looking for a supplier or ready to buy? All of those stages can have value, but they need different pages and should not be evaluated in the same way.
Can we satisfy the search properly?
There should be a reason for the page to exist beyond targeting a keyword. Can we provide useful information, a better product selection, original data, genuine expertise or a clearer solution than the results already available? If not, the keyword volume does not rescue the idea.
Can the site realistically compete?
Look at the existing results. Who ranks? What kind of pages are they? How established are the competing sites? Does your business have something useful to add? A lower-volume search with a realistic path to visibility is often more valuable than a huge keyword for which page one is years away.
What happens after the click?
This is the part keyword tools cannot answer. Does the visitor enquire? Buy something? Sign up? Read five more pages? Become familiar with the company? SEO becomes much easier to evaluate once search traffic is connected to what visitors actually do afterwards.
Think in topics rather than isolated keywords
Another problem with volume-driven SEO is that it encourages people to treat every query as a separate target. Real search behaviour is much messier. People phrase the same need in hundreds of ways.
A useful page can rank for many related searches that no keyword tool would have encouraged you to target individually. For larger subjects, several connected pages may make sense: a main service or category page supported by more specific guides, comparisons, questions or subcategories. The useful unit is often a topic and the needs surrounding it rather than one exact keyword.
That also makes the content more resilient. You are building useful coverage of an area instead of betting everything on the reported volume of one phrase.
What about AI search?
AI-generated search results make exact keyword volume even less useful as an objective. People can ask the same underlying question in increasingly varied and conversational ways, and systems can combine information from several sources into one answer. I do not think that requires an entirely new kind of SEO. It strengthens the case for clear, specific and genuinely useful information.
If a company explains its products, expertise, services and subject matter well, that information has a better chance of being useful wherever people search for it. I would be sceptical of replacing keyword-volume obsession with an equally artificial set of “GEO” metrics. The underlying question is still whether the site provides information worth finding.
So how much search volume is enough?
There is no useful minimum. For a media site earning money from advertising, 50 searches per month may be irrelevant. For a specialist consultancy where one new client is worth €20,000, those same 50 searches could be extremely attractive. For a local service business, a keyword with almost no measurable volume may still produce some of its best leads.
Search volume only makes sense in the context of:
relevance × likelihood of ranking × likely traffic × business value
You do not need to calculate that as a literal formula. But that is much closer to the decision you are actually trying to make.
The problem with SEO reports
Search volume remains popular partly because it makes SEO easy to present.
We are targeting keywords with a combined search volume of 150,000 per month.
That sounds impressive. It says very little about whether any of those people will ever become customers. A less glamorous strategy might target dozens of highly specific searches whose combined reported volume is only a few thousand.
If those searches closely match what the company sells, the second strategy can produce far more useful traffic. That is why I call search volume a vanity metric. Not because the number is worthless. Because it becomes misleading when the number itself becomes the goal.
For SEO work, I would rather measure whether the right pages are becoming visible for the right searches, whether qualified organic traffic is growing, and whether that traffic does something useful once it reaches the site. That is much closer to what the business wanted from SEO in the first place.
