Search volume
Also called monthly search volume, MSV
The number of times a keyword is searched in a given market over a month, reported as a rolling average rather than a live count. It is an estimate from a data provider, not a measurement of your own traffic.
Search volume is the first number anyone looks at and the easiest one to over-read. Three things are worth knowing about it.
It is an average, not a count. Most providers report a rolling twelve-month average, which means a term with sharp seasonality reports a number it is almost never actually at. A keyword averaging 2,000 a month might be 8,000 in November and 300 in June.
It is market-specific. The same keyword has a different volume in every country and language pair. A project in netweft carries its own market, so the volume you see is the volume for the market that project is about.
It says nothing about value. Volume without intent and difficulty is a number you cannot act on. A 200-a-month term with buying intent and no established competitor is usually worth more than a 20,000-a-month informational term you would rank eleventh for.
netweft’s keyword research stores twelve months of volume history per keyword, so a seasonal term reads as seasonal instead of reading as one flat average in a table.
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