Overview

Overview

In this report, we give you all the in-depth SEO metrics you need to make quick and informed decisions about a keyword.

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See keyword search volumes from 200+ countries

Search volume shows the number of times a keyword is searched per month in a given country.

For example, the query “how to lose weight” gets 60,000 searches per month in the United States alone.

See global search volume for any keyword

Global search volume is the sum of searches from all countries.

If we go with the same query as before, we’ll notice it has a global search volume of ~205,000 monthly searches.

So if your customer base is global, you might want to look at global volumes rather than country-specific search volumes.

Check the Keyword Difficulty of any keyword

Keyword Difficulty estimates how hard it will be to rank in the top 10 for a given keyword. It's scored on a scale from 0-100.

For example, the query “how to lose weight” has a Keyword Difficulty score of 90.

To calculate it, we look at the number of referring domains pointing at the current top-ranking pages.

If you hover over each KD score, you’ll see the estimated number of backlinks from different websites you need to rank on the first page for this keyword.

Learn more about Keyword Difficulty here.

TIP
Keyword Difficulty isn’t meant to discourage you from ranking for a particular keyword. It’s intended to help you estimate the resources required to rank for it. If ranking for a keyword is vital for your business, you may still want to pursue it, even if the KD score is high.

Check the traffic potential for any keyword

Traffic potential shows the sum of organic traffic that the #1 ranking page for your target keyword receives from all the keywords that it ranks for.

See it as the potential traffic you could get, if you were to overtake the #1 ranking page.

For example, the keyword “submit website to search engines” has a traffic potential of 6,200, even though it only has a volume of 500.

See the number of clicks on search results for a keyword

The Clicks metric shows the average number of clicks that happen on the search results page.

For example, the query “Google founders” gets ~7,300 searches per month, but the search results are only clicked ~1,800 times.

See the cost-per-click for any keyword

The Cost-Per-Click (CPC) metric shows the average cost of a click on the paid search results for a given keyword.

For example, the query “project management software” has a CPC of $8.

See the “Parent Topic” of any keyword

Parent Topic determines if you can rank for your target keyword while targeting a more general topic instead.

To identify the Parent Topic, we take the #1 ranking page for your keyword and find the query responsible for sending the most search traffic to that page.

See more keyword ideas

Keywords Explorer runs on a vast database of ~20.4 billion keywords for Google. For any keyword you enter, we’ll show you the top five keywords from our keyword ideas reports.

This gives you some insight into other related queries people are making at a glance.

If you want more keyword ideas, you can choose from one of three different keyword ideas reports:

See the SERP position history for your target keyword

SERP (search engine results page) position history shows historic rankings for the current top-ranking pages.

This is useful for checking SERP volatility—the fluctuations in ranking positions among top-ranking pages.

See the ad history for your target keyword

Ad history chart shows the pages that were advertised on Google for your target keyword.

See SEO metrics for the top-ranking pages

The SERP Overview shows the first page of the search results for your keyword, along with the most important SEO metrics.

With it, you can see the following SEO metrics for each of the top 10 pages:

This allows you to quickly assess the top-ranking pages and understand why these pages are ranking where they are.

Compare SERPs side-by-side

Study SERPs for the same keyword on different dates to spot any ranking changes.

You can also compare two different keywords to see if Google perceives them as similar or not.

KEEP LEARNING

Read some of the articles on the Ahrefs blog: