Only about a third of these keywords, slightly over a third of these keywords had a total number of clicks that were similar to the search volume, 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. Basically what this means is that just knowing about volume doesn’t mean you actually know about clicks, any more at least.
So this is a bit of a problem when we’re using search volume as a metric. We kind of have to use, but there are maybe some issues.
Click-through rate
So how can we get around that? So, 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, 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.
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.
Keyword difficulty
The last metric I want to talk about that you can use with these is difficulty.
So keyword difficulty is a metric we have in Moz. Some other tools have similar things. 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 table stakes are for this competition. Then we also look at the click-through rate, the total click-through rate of that query, like I was just talking about.