This tool accurately forecasts your traffic

Using search volume metrics to forecast your traffic is wildly inaccurate.

There, I said it. Go ahead and throw your monitor out the window in a fit of rage. Curse my name and unfollow me.?

Here's the problem: Content doesn't rank for just one keyword.?

And, when you do keyword research you're only forecasting based on one keyword.?

Content can rank for thousands of keywords

But how?

The number of keywords your content ranks for depends on two factors:

1. The number of variant keywords that people are searching for your topic.
2. How in-depth you have written your piece of content.

Let's unpack both of these so that they make sense.

There are some topics that people will search for in many different ways. They will use a very wide variety of keywords that ultimately have the same exact intention.

Take the keyword "Is eczema lifelong?" as an example. The top ranking URL is ranking for 4,307 keywords!

That means that you can search all 4,307 keywords and this page will show up somewhere in Google for each one of them.

Let's take a look at some of the keywords this page ranks for:

That's a TON of search volume, no?

And when you factor in each keyword's ranking position, you'll have be able to estimate the amount of traffic driven to that page via that keyword.

Via each of these 4,307 keywords, Ahrefs estimates that page drives over 55,000 sessions per month!

But how does this happen?

For starters, Google is making a guess about a searcher's intent.

It understands that someone who searches "is eczema lifelong" probably wants to learn about causes, types, cures, etc. It's assuming that these sub-topics will be of interest to that searcher.

Second, if you write a piece of content that is sufficiently thorough - meaning you do a great job of covering all the sub-topics someone would care about, like causes, types, and cures - you'll rank for your target keyword along with these variant keywords.

But here's a crazy kicker, the keyword "Is eczema lifelong" is only searched 50 times per month.

So if you were doing keyword research and landed on a keyword with a search volume of 50, you might immediately discard it!

But in reality, this topic has a potential of tens of thousands of visitors per month!

So how do I forecast traffic?

You should first thing of "keywords" more along the lines of "topics."

"Keyword" implies something singular and finite. In reality you should be creating content that completely dives headfirst into a topic and fully supports it with as many sub-topics and detail as possible.

Then, when you use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs , enter a keyword and take a look at the estimated traffic for the first page of results and create an average.

Let's go through an example together.

If we enter the keyword, "How to cure eczema"... Read the rest of this super useful article instantly ->