How to Judge a Keyword: A Real-World Case Study

Never trust your gut when deciding whether a keyword deserves a website. Work through three dimensions in order: optimization difficulty, real search volume, and the traffic ceiling of the sites already ranking. If any one of them fails, switch to another keyword. The method below is reusable for any keyword you are considering.

(Figures and case details in this article are as reported in the source material and have not been independently verified.)

Step 1: Narrow the demand

A broad term like “UUID” is too vague to build on. Start with Google’s autocomplete and “related searches” to narrow it into concrete, tool-shaped long-tail keywords. In the reported case, a friend asked about building an online UUID-tools site, and the narrowing produced “uuid generator” and “uuid online” — which turn out to be the same underlying need: an online UUID generator. You cannot evaluate a keyword until you know exactly which demand it represents.

Step 2: Check the difficulty

Use Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty checker (ahrefs.com/keyword-difficulty) on each candidate and look at the concrete metric that matters: how many websites’ backlinks it takes to reach Google’s top 10. It helps to compare against a hot reference word like “GPTs” for calibration. In the case, both candidate words skewed difficult — even the easier one, “uuid online”, reportedly needed about 71 backlinking sites to crack the top 10. That is already a heavy lift for a new site.

Step 3: Verify the real search volume

Check relative heat with Google Trends by comparing your candidates against “GPTs”, then get absolute numbers from Semrush. The case was sobering: one candidate’s trend heat was reportedly under half of GPTs, the other only about one-tenth — genuinely small search volume. A useful discipline from the method: when search volume is measured, trust Google Trends over Semrush, because Semrush data lags (it was notably off for a new word like GPTs). For competition difficulty, the reverse applies — trust Ahrefs.

Step 4: Measure the traffic ceiling

Look at the monthly visits of the sites currently ranking, and decide what the revenue ceiling is if you actually win. Reported figures for the top three were roughly 430,000, just over 30,000, and about 130,000 visits per month. Even in the best scenario, the traffic is modest — while the cost of entry (71+ backlinking sites for the top 10, more for the top 3) is high.

The verdict: high difficulty plus low traffic means walk away

The conclusion of the case was a clear no: high difficulty combined with low traffic equals poor return on effort. The same energy spent on a different keyword — one with a kinder difficulty curve and a higher ceiling — would buy a much better website. The habit to build: judge every keyword through difficulty, real volume, and ceiling, in that order, before writing a single line of code.

Series: Overseas Website Building