True Volume / Search Volume Update
By Dan Published Updated 3 min read
Quick answer
In 2022 we released True Volume 2.0 to fix inflated search volumes caused by Google grouping close variants. It combined several data sources to estimate each keyword's own volume. For example, boil egg benefits showed 14,800 in Google but about 260 once ungrouped.
Key takeaways
- Google groups close variants and can show one inflated volume for all of them.
- True Volume 2.0 audited the whole keyword database for these variants instead of only easy cases.
- At release it covered the All Locations, US and UK databases, mostly English keywords.
- Higher-volume keywords were the most affected; under 1,000 searches a month were less affected.
Update: this post announced True Volume 2.0 in April 2022, and the details below describe it at that time.
Over the next few weeks, you may start noticing certain keywords showing drastically different search volumes than what they had shown previously. This is due to a big algorithm change we are rolling out to what we call our “True Volume” algorithm. If you are completely unfamiliar with our True Volume algorithm I suggest you give this blog article a quick glance as it explains it all in more detail.
True Volume Algorithm and Close Variants
To give a quick sum up, our main data source for search volumes was Google. Over the years Google’s search volume has become less and less accurate for certain keywords due to what they call grouping close variants. What this means is that they group the search volumes of multiple keywords together that they consider relatively the same. In theory, this isn’t terrible, if it was implemented correctly we may not get exact search volumes for each keyword, but we’d have the search volume for the overall topic.
The problem is, that it’s not done well, it’s done through AI, takes huge liberties with what keywords it considers “close” and is very often wrong. It also will group keywords together giving one inflated volume for all of them, then the next month realize it was wrong and the volumes are completely different. Needless to say, this has caused us many headaches.
A few years back we launched what we called our “True Volume” algorithm. This was the start of our quest to ungroup these close variants and get more accurate search volumes. The algorithm has been working in the background with what we call a “soft touch”. If there was an easy to spot close variant we’d ungroup it and show the “True Volume”.
True Volume 2.0
Recently we’ve realized that this approach is no longer enough. We’ve had to become more proactive and audit our entire database looking for these variants. This is what brings us to today, and what we are calling our True Volume 2.0 release. At release, the update was rolling out gradually. It worked on our All Locations (global), United States, and UK databases and mainly focused on English keywords, with plans to expand to more databases and languages.
Let’s dive in and go over an example. Here the global search volume is shown by Google for the keyword “boil egg benefits”. You’ll see it shows a search volume of 14,800.
Google is definitely grouping many keyword search volumes into this figure. If you were to rank for this keyword alone and not for the many other variants that it considers “close” you wouldn’t nearly see this high of a search volume. When our True Volume algorithm ungrouped this keyword the search volume was 260. That is a far cry from 14,800!
How it Works
Without giving away the secret sauce, basically, we are utilizing multiple data sources to figure out these instances when Google is highly inflating the search volume. Then we are combining all the data from the different sources we have (including Google) to figure out just about where the True Volume stands for the keyword. At the time, the problem was mostly with higher volume keywords. Lower volume keywords (under 1000 searches per month) aren’t as affected by these close variant groupings.
As always we are doing our best to get you the most accurate data. The release of the True Volume 2.0 algorithm is a great step forward in doing that. During the rollout of the algorithm you may notice some data inconsistencies while all of our servers sync to the new changes. This will be an on-going process. We will be consistently tweaking and fine-tuning things as we go along to keep the algorithm as accurate as possible and to hopefully stop you from ever getting fooled by these close variant keywords.
