Keyword research has been around for as long as SEO in general has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results.As the online search market became a lot larger over time, there was a clear leader that came out ahead – Google. With this new leadership came AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed businesses and organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that would would not organically.
Within Google Ads, a new tool emerged that allowed businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for practically any query. One of the de facto tools for keyword research in the industry to come about was Google Keyword Planner. Google also gave us the ability to gather even more insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided – suggested bid and competition. Even though these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, the allowed the SEO industry the ability to see how competitive a keyword was.
Industry professionals have a number of software tools and data outlets to conduct keyword research. These software companies can only improve the accuracy of their data outputs from here, but not Google, as their focus is to sell ad space, not make things easier for SEOs. They seem to have gone backwards in this situation – they’re using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity.