The last year and a half has been a fun ride for us. Our user base continues to grow at a great pace, this has enabled us to start thinking bigger with the features we can add and the data we can provide. As we continue to increase our capacities and add a lot of these new additions into Keysearch we figured it was a good time to start having fun with some of this data in a new blog series we’re calling “Data Insights”.
One of the first additions to our new “big data” thinking is the huge Keysearch Keyword Database. Currently, the database contains well over 1 Billion keywords spread out over 42 different country-specific databases.
Our biggest database by far is our US (United States) keyword database. When writing this our US database had 353,121,457 keywords in it and is growing by millions every day. Since we are a US-based company and the majority of our users are from the United States, this database is, of course, going to be bigger than the rest. This makes it the best candidate to get some fun data insights.
What Are We Looking For?
When doing keyword research the hope is always to find some hidden gem keywords with great search volume and low competition. Search volume can range from zero all the way into hundreds of millions if not billions of searches per month.
What we wanted to find out was how many keywords actually fall into the different ranges of search volume? Are there endless amounts of high search volume keywords out there that we just need to uncover? Or should we be tempering our exceptions on what search volumes we should be targeting in our niches?
Diving Into Search Volume
So we are starting out with 353,121,457 in our US database. The first thing we did was remove all keywords that had no search volume. Although we save these keywords in our database, we don’t use these as keyword suggestions in our tool since they just don’t have enough searches.
This was a huge amount of keywords, 213,938,452 to be exact. This wasn’t much of a surprise to us since we collect everything. There are so many keywords out there that just don’t get searched much at all. Google itself has said that 15% of searches being done are completely unique. So these won’t have any search volume.
You’ll also notice many times when you use our “Google Suggest” option, a good portion of those keywords have no search volume either. The “Google Suggest” option is showing keywords that Google itself is actively suggesting, and even many of those keywords don’t have enough search volume to qualify as 10 searches per month (the lowest amount of searches needed for Google to show the search volume for a keyword).
Search Volume 10 – 20 Per Month
Now that we’ve removed those keywords we are left with 139,183,005 with a search volume of 10 or more, not too shabby! So next we checked how many of those keywords had a search volume of 10 – 20 searches per month.
42,946,192
Wow! That’s almost 1/3rd of all keywords that actually have any search volume basically fall into the lowest amount of search volume you can have to qualify for even having any search volume! This was a big surprise to us. We knew that there would be more keywords with low search volume than keywords with high search volume. But we didn’t expect 1/3 of all keywords to be between 10-20. This is a very interesting find.
Search Volume 21 – 50 Per Month
Next, we checked all keywords with a search volume ranging from 21 – 50 searches per month.
46,367,048
Another big shock here! We’ve just chewed through over half the keywords in the database and that’s just keywords with a search volume of 50 or less. We definitely didn’t expect this!
Search Volume 51 – 100 Per Month
Our original plan was to then run 51 – 1000 but we modified that since we saw how many keywords were falling into those other small ranges. So instead we just did 51 – 100.
30,520,578
That brings the tally to 119,833,818 keywords out of 139,183,005 that have a search volume of 100 or less. That’s 86% of keywords have a search volume of 100 or less.
Search Volume 101 – 1000 Per Month
Now we are getting into more substantial search volumes so we ran all keywords between 101 – 1000. This returned:
17,177,241
That brings the current total to 137,011,059 keywords with a search volume of 1000 or less. That’s over 98% of all keywords.
Search Volume 1001 – 10000 Per Month
This is the search volume range that most people look to find hidden gem keywords in.
1,929,928
As you can see this search volume range is much bigger than what we were searching earlier and it only returned 1,929,928 keywords that fall into this range.
Search Volume 10001 – 50000 Per Month
This search volume range is always super competitive but let’s take a look at how many of these keywords actually exist.
192,651
That really isn’t much! It shows why ranking for keywords in this volume range is very very difficult!
Search Volume 50001 – 1000000 Per Month
Now that we see the numbers are dwindling so much we decided to just do everything from 50,001 to 1,000,000.
48,197
This search volume range is usually in the “don’t even think about it” level and you can see why. There are just so few keywords out there.
Search Volume 1000000+ Per Month
Now we ran all keywords with a search volume of 1,000,000 or more.
1170
I would say it’s a safe bet that none of you reading this rank for any keywords with this much search volume. If you did you’d be reading this on your yacht and I’d be wondering why you are wasting your time reading this blog! 🙂
Recap
As you can see from the chart we couldn’t even fit any bars for the last 2 search volume ranges as they were so small compared to the others.
- Started with 353,121,457
- Removed 213,938,452 that had no search volume according to Google
- Left with 139,183,005 keywords with search volume
- Keywords with search volume between 10 – 20 per month: 42,946,192
- Keywords with search volume between 21 – 50 per month: 46,367,048
- Keywords with search volume between 51 – 100 per month: 30,520,578
- Keywords with search volume between 101 – 1000 per month: 17,177,241
- Keywords with search volume between 1001 – 10000 per month: 1,929,928
- Keywords with search volume between 10001 – 50000 per month: 192,651
- Keywords with search volume between 50001 -1000000 per month: 48,197
- Keywords with search volume between 1000000+ per month: 1170
What Does it all Mean?!
The main thing I took out of this data is that there are vastly more opportunities to rank for lower volume keywords than higher volume keywords. Most of us when doing keyword research are trying to find keywords in the 1000+ searches per month range. As you can see though there just aren’t that many of those to go around. Instead, you may want to focus on ranking for a lot of keywords under 100 searches per month. Not only will these be easier to rank for but it also leaves you not putting all of your eggs in 1 basket.
This also shows the power of long-tail keywords. Ranking for hundreds of these longer tail keywords with lower search volume is just as good as ranking for 1 or 2 high search volume keywords. It also may require much less effort, time, and resources!
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