Keyword volume checker

The tool takes up to twenty exact terms, one a line, and asks for the average monthly searches of each over the last twelve months in the market you choose. The figures come from Google's keyword data as the provider reads it, rounded the way Google rounds them. Terms with fewer than ten searches a month come back with no figure. The table is sorted by demand, the total is shown, and the whole thing copies as CSV.

It measures the exact term. "invoice app" and "invoicing app" are two rows with two figures; so are the singular and the plural. That is a feature: the wording people actually type is the wording the page's title should carry.

A list of twenty page ideas with no figures is a list of guesses. With the monthly searches beside each, it becomes an order: the two that carry most of the demand, the ten that carry almost none, and the surprise in the middle that nobody on the team would have named. The figure is an estimate, and a page written for one term takes its neighbours too, so the sum of a cluster matters more than any row.

Volume alone misleads in two ways. A large figure can belong to a search held by ten platforms that a small site will not take; a small figure can belong to a buyer's exact question that converts one visit in five. Read it with the results page and with intent, and it is the most useful single number in search.

• The top row's share says whether the list has one head term and a tail, or is evenly spread. A head term of 60 % or more is the page; the rest are its headings.
• No figure means under ten searches a month. Keep the term if it is what your buyer types; drop it as a page of its own.
• Round figures (1,300, 2,900, 5,400) are Google's buckets, not counts. Two terms in the same bucket are the same size.
• The total across a cluster is the demand a single well-made page can address; compare clusters, not rows.

Example: yourproduct.com pastes twelve terms around invoicing. "invoicing software" carries 8,100 a month, "invoice app for freelancers" 390, "how to invoice a client" 1,600, and seven others show nothing. Two pages come out of it: a product page for the head term and a guide for the question, with the 390 as a section of the product page.

1. 1

   Paste the terms as people type them

   Short, lowercase, no punctuation. The way a search box sees them.

2. 2

   Pick the market that pays

   The same term has different demand in the United States and the United Kingdom, and a different language in France and Germany.

3. 3

   Group the rows into pages

   Terms that would be answered by one page belong together; the SERP checker shows whether Google agrees by returning the same results for two terms.

4. 4

   Copy the CSV into the plan

   One row per term, one column of demand, and the pages decided from it.

Twenty terms a call, twenty calls an hour from one address, three hundred a day in all, because each lookup is paid for on your behalf. The figure is a twelve-month average and hides seasons; a term that peaks in December shows a twelfth of its peak. Six markets are offered. Brand terms of small products often show no figure even when the product is searched: Google's data starts at ten a month.

Each run is a keyword lookup that costs a few cents at a provider, so the tool runs for a signed-in account only: a free account, no card, five paid checks a day and forty a month across the paid tools, counted per account. The same input asked twice in a day is answered from memory and is not counted. The free check on the home page is not counted either. A day's budget for the tool as a whole is capped as well, so a busy day ends with a plain message rather than a bill.