Volume, CPC, difficulty and intent: what each number is for
Volume says how often a term is searched, the twelve-month history says when, cost per click says what a visit is worth to advertisers, difficulty estimates how hard the first page is to reach, and intent says what the searcher wants. None of them says whether your page can rank: that is what a rank check is for.
Every keyword netweft saves carries the same set of figures. They come from the data provider behind the provider port, cost 1.2 credits per keyword plus a fee per request to fetch, and are stored against the project and its market, so reading them again later costs nothing.
Each figure answers one question well and gets misused for another.
Search volume
The average number of monthly searches for the term in the project’s market. It answers “how many people could arrive”. It does not answer “how many will”: that depends on where you rank and how the results page is laid out, which is what the click-through rate describes.
Twelve months of history
The volume, month by month. This is the figure people skip and should not. A term that averages 1,000 searches can be 3,000 in November and 200 in May, and a page published in May for that term will look like it failed for six months.
Read the shape before the average: flat, seasonal, rising or falling.
Cost per click
What advertisers pay for a click on the term. It is the closest thing the data has to a price on a visit. A high cost per click with modest volume is often worth more than a high-volume term nobody bids on, because somebody has already measured that those visits convert.
Competition
How contested the paid results are, from 0 to 1. It describes advertisers, not organic results, so read it beside cost per click rather than as a measure of how hard the term is to rank for.
Keyword difficulty
A 0 to 100 estimate of how hard the first page of organic results is to reach, computed by the data provider from the strength of the pages already there. It is a comparison tool: useful for ranking a list of candidates against each other, much less useful as an absolute verdict. See the glossary entry for what goes into it.
Intent
What the searcher is trying to do: learn something, find a particular site, compare options, or buy. Search intent decides what kind of page can rank at all. A product page will not rank for an informational query however strong it is, because it is the wrong answer.
What no metric answers
Whether your page can rank. Every figure above describes the term and the market, not your site. The only measurement of your site against the term is a rank check, and its result is stored as an observation with a date on it.
Two prices worth knowing
Fetching metrics for a list of keywords costs 120 credits for the request plus 1.2 a keyword, so one refresh of the whole saved list is cheaper than many small ones. Asking for keyword ideas from a seed holds up to 360 credits per request and settles for less when fewer ideas come back.
In the 49 countries the provider’s keyword dataset does not reach, the lookup falls back to the Google Ads endpoints, which are priced per request: 900 credits whether you ask about one keyword or a thousand. Batch those requests.