Search Volume Estimates are Worthless, Or: How I Learned To Stop Counting Made-Up Visitors and Love the Network

“What should I expect in terms of an organic traffic increase?”

Ah, well, if it isn’t The Wrong Question?. It’s good to see you again, old friend. We’ve sure shared a winding road over the years. After all this time, I still understand where you’re coming from. Every marketer wants to translate their investment into SEO to some objective target. When you’re allocating marketing resources, you want to be able to compare apples to apples; if you know $X gets you Y paid traffic, it would be awfully nice to get the same sort of understanding of what to expect from your organic content.

Of course, I couldn’t answer you with a straight face back in my agency days. I could attempt to fudge some numbers around some of the keywords we were targeting in a client’s blog content to try to build an estimate, but I knew full well that I’d never get it right. Not even close.?

Maybe that’s why before Pillar-Based Marketing (PBM), I lost all my hair.

Not my bad genes at all, was it? It was YOU, The Wrong Question?. It was knowing that with my available technology and all the best creative instincts in the world, the best I could do at predicting the impact of an organic content campaign was to convince my clients that we need to write a ton of content so that some of it—as little as 10% of it, if you trust the old Ahrefs statistic that 90.63% of all webpages get zero traffic—would rank on Page One and drive traffic.

If that sounds dramatic, by all means hop in the comments and tell me why I was a bad content marketing strategist. But I can’t tell you how many clients I worked with—some of them with very smart content strategists managing my agency’s work—who accepted this quality of SEO as just part of the game.?

Lately, you stupid question, I’ve been thinking about you again. I hadn’t given you much thought since I started formalizing PBM methodology, but now that I’m directly overseeing DemandJump’s product roadmap, I’ve been in a fair number of conversations entertaining the idea of using our technology to provide better answers to you.

First: Why have I been thinking about how to answer The Wrong Question? with my Pillar-Based Marketing platform?

The answer this question, unlike the answer to you, is actually quite simple: Because people want to know the answer to you. Providing a simple number to anyone offers comfort; it’s like saying, “Okay, customer, if you do all the things right, this is your prize.”

On paper, it does seem like PBM puts us in a better position to provide an accurate organic traffic increase estimate. Because of how we think about topics not as lists of keywords, but as quasi-organic networks of search behavior, we can better estimate now the search volume for an entire Pillar Topic (as opposed to the search volume for a list someone builds manually, which is sort of arbitrary).

In DemandJump, this happens automatically as we map a Pillar Topic network:

First, we establish how many search queries exist within a given Pillar Topic network. Creating those guardrails alone is a big step towards thinking realistically about traffic increases; we know the size of the prize this way. From there, it’s easy to extrapolate total search volume estimates for the entire network based on data directly from search engines.

If we really wanted to, we could apply some simple math to create some estimates. We’d have to make certain assumptions about how many pieces of content a customer would create, thereby understanding the number of keywords they’d target, and then grab the average search volume for that number of keywords in this particular Pillar Topic network. Then, based on prior history with PBM practitioners, assume a certain percentage of those keywords will get to first position and capture a certain amount of the search volume, then wash, rinse, and repeat.

Even knowing how I could leverage PBM principles to answer you better, however, you are still ultimately The Wrong Question?. And I believe you always will be.

Second: Why is The Wrong Question? still not worth answering?

There are two key reasons why I won’t put any further resources into answering you, The Wrong Question?. One is very simple and the other, while a bit more complex, is the real last nail in your conceptual coffin.

The simple reason: It’s actually impossible to estimate search volume for all of the important search queries contained in any Pillar Topic network because Google does not share search volume estimate data for queries that are questions. Not even Ahrefs can help you with that problem.

Take a look back at that image above, where it says that the Pillar “SaaS Content” contains 5,852 queries in its topic network. Close to 2,000 of those relevant terms are what search engines and our technology would both classify as “questions.” That’s nearly a third of the total prize that we can’t estimate any traffic around.

The more complex reason: Legacy SEO methodologies might even lead someone to ignore these questions because they appear to be “zero traffic keywords” you might hear SEO experts talking about. That’s because in the world of traditional SEO, search volume is a hugely significant metric for evaluating keywords to target with content. Probably the biggest metric.?

But in Pillar-Based Marketing, we know that questions are far more valuable than a search volume estimate might lead you to believe. That’s because we don’t evaluate keywords based on search volume at all. It barely enters into the picture.

Instead, Pillar-Based Marketing evaluates keywords to target based on their connectedness inside of a Pillar Topic’s network of search behavior.

We are looking at search queries in a completely different light than traditional SEO. The most basic elements of PBM—the Pillar Strategy structure of Pillar pages, Sub-Pillar Pages, and Supporting Blogs that borrows heavily from HubSpot’s hub and spokes model—have been used for a while, but they don’t work as well as they can without the rest of PBM. Namely, the different data collection and analysis process we use to identify which keywords to target and prioritize them.

We know when a term is “connected” or structurally important to a Pillar Topic network when it shows up again and again across different journeys. People use different starting points to begin searching for information on a topic. They then take different second steps, third steps, and so on until they find a solution they need or are satisfied with what they’ve learned.

Google itself reflects its understanding of what I like to call this “Infinite Buyer’s Journey” in the recommendations it makes for People Also Ask questions and Related Search terms according to what you’ve queried.?

We pay close attention to this to understand how likely it is that two individuals starting with two entirely different search terms related to a Pillar Topic might eventually perform the same query. The more likely it is a query gets searched, the more “connected” it is. And every time we map a network around a Pillar Topic, we find that a lot of questions are very connected. That means they get searched all the time.?

Which means they necessarily get more than zero search volume, and Google damn well knows it.

Why they won’t tell us what it is, I don’t know, but I do know this: I’m not interested in trying to make up an answer to you, The Wrong Question?, if there’s a zero percent chance that my answer is correct. As a marketer who wants to make better decisions with the data I have, it’s crucial to me that my data is bulletproof. Search volume estimates, unfortunately, are far from bulletproof as a means of evaluating the quality of a keyword to target with organic content. Likewise, any estimates for increased organic traffic that could come if someone were to target a given set of keywords are equally fragile.?

Bye, bye, The Wrong Question?. Nice to know ya.

...Okay, is it gone? Good. Let’s try this again. From the top.

“What should I expect in terms of an organic traffic increase?”

I’m sorry, but that’s The Wrong Question?. The Right Question? you, dear reader, should be asking about your organic content is one whose answer can clarify your every creative, budgetary, and reporting decision around SEO and its place in your broader marketing strategy—and it’s one I’ll explain how to answer in next week’s edition of The Pillar Column.?

But I’m not one to leave you hanging, so I’ll at least leave you with The Right Question? for organic content results according to Pillar-Based Marketing:

“How will this action increase my coverage of important queries within my Pillar Topic network?”

Tune in next week to completely change how you evaluate and understand your organic content at both a strategic and a tactical level.

Because some of you don’t know me personally and might not be familiar with my vibe, I should clarify that I do not own the trademark for either the term The Wrong Question or The Right Question. It’s a creative choice bordering on a joke. Come on. Keep up.