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Every keyword in Surnex carries the same set of metrics, on the research table, saved keywords, and tracked keyword cards. This page explains what each one measures — and, more usefully, what each one doesn’t.

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Volume

Average monthly searches for the keyword, in the project’s location and language. It’s an average over the preceding twelve months, so a strongly seasonal keyword shows a figure it rarely actually hits. Check the Trend sparkline before treating volume as a monthly forecast: a term averaging 1,000 might be 6,000 in December and 200 in July. Volume is per market. The same keyword has a different figure in the US and the UK, which is why changing the project locale changes the numbers.

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Trend

A sparkline of the last twelve months of search interest. Expand a row for the full-size chart. Read it for shape, not precision. Three shapes matter: steadily rising (worth investing in early), seasonal spikes (time your content), and declining (the term is losing relevance regardless of what the average says).

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Keyword difficulty (KD)

A 0–100 estimate of how hard ranking on page one would be, based on the strength of the pages currently ranking. Colour-coded throughout the interface: The thresholds are fixed. Note they’re relative to the whole web, not to you: a KD of 35 is easy for an established domain and can still be out of reach for a new one. Judge KD against your own domain authority, not in isolation.

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CPC

What advertisers pay per click on this keyword, on average, in US dollars. CPC is the best available proxy for commercial value. A keyword with modest volume and a high CPC is one people pay real money for, which usually means it converts. A high-volume keyword with a CPC near zero is informational — traffic, but rarely revenue. Expand a row for Low Bid and High Bid, the range behind that average. A wide range means advertisers disagree about what the click is worth.

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Competition

Advertiser competition — how contested the keyword is in paid search. Shown as LOW, MEDIUM, or HIGH, colour-coded green, amber, and red. Expanding a row also gives you Competition (raw), the underlying 0–1 score, and Competition Index, the same figure on a 0–100 scale.
Competition is a paid-search metric and says nothing about organic difficulty. Use KD for how hard it is to rank organically. A keyword can be LOW competition and still have a KD of 80.

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Intent

What the searcher is trying to do. Expanded rows show a Main Intent and any Foreign Intent — secondary intents the query also carries. Intent decides what you should build, and it’s the metric most often ignored: Targeting a transactional keyword with a blog post loses to a product page no matter how good the writing is. Match the format to the intent first, then worry about volume.

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SERP features

The features present in the results — featured snippets, local packs, AI Overviews, and so on. Shown on expanded saved keywords. These compete for the click. Ranking first under a featured snippet and a four-result local pack can deliver less traffic than ranking third on a clean results page.

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Reading them together

No single metric decides anything. In practice:
  • High volume, high KD, high CPC — valuable and contested. A long-term project, not a quick win.
  • Low volume, low KD, high CPC — the best opportunities on most sites. Small, winnable, and commercially real.
  • High volume, low CPC, informational — traffic that rarely converts. Fine for awareness, poor for pipeline.
  • Any volume, wrong intent — skip it. Intent mismatches don’t rank however good the page is.

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Freshness

Metrics are captured when the lookup runs and don’t refresh themselves. A saved keyword shows the figures from the day you saved it, and a research job from the day it ran. Expanded rows show a Last Updated field. Re-run the research for current numbers.