Why higher search volume does not guarantee qualified traffic, with Ben Pages @FeatureUpvote

Executive Conversations

“I don't think there's anything wrong with running an affiliate blog and going after high-volume keywords. It's just an understanding of what strategy you're after and how you're gonna justify going into content, then reverse engineering your strategy based on the action you want your customer to take”

Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Leader Interview Series! This time, we discuss with Ben Pages, Marketing Manager at Feature Upvote, the importance of considering search volume in context with your overall content strategy.

Search volume is highly misunderstood by both clients and SEOs, who often wrongly correlate higher search volume with higher traffic. As Maeva and Ben reveal, that’s a total myth—and you should never choose keywords based blindly on this metric (SEO tools are never 100% accurate anyway!).

Instead, focus on what you want your readers to do according to your overall content strategy and LTV, and base your keyword selection on more relevant factors, like intent, or traffic potential. Also, don’t ever disregard finding opportunities through competitor analysis, variations and semantics, and ol’ good customer research to capture the voice of the customer.

Tune in to find out why you should start looking at search volume from a very different angle to get more qualified traffic!

In this episode we talk about:

• Search volume
• Traffic
• Keyword selection

Timestamps:

00:00 - 00:58: Introducing Ben Pages at Feature Upvote

00:58 - 02:01: When Search volume is irrelevant

02:01 - 03:19: Search volume doesn’t necessarily attract more traffic

03:19 - 05:19: Was it hard to break the search volume habit?

05:19 - 07:09: When traffic isn’t the metric you’re after

07:09 - 12:09: The connection between LTV and the impact of traffic

12:17 - 14:58: The risks of misunderstanding search volume

14:58 - 17:08: An experiment with projected traffic vs actual traffic

17:08 - 23:24: Choosing keywords without focusing on search volume

23:28 - 24:50: Wrap up

About Ben Pages

Ben is the marketing manager at Feature Upvote, a lightweight tool that helps product managers organize and prioritize user feedback. He specializes in producing high-quality content—from strategy and writing to search engine optimization.

Connect with Ben on his website, Benpages.com
If you’re a Product manager, Ben suggests you check out FeatureUpvote.com