Search volume: how to read it (without getting it wrong)

“There are 90,000 searches a month, the market is huge!” — that's exactly the kind of sentence that gets products built that nobody buys. Search volume is the most-watched and most-misread metric in idea validation. A big number can hide a dead market; a small one, a gold mine. Here's how to read a volume to make a real decision, not an illusion.

What a volume doesn't tell you (but you think it does)

A volume figure, on its own, blends incompatible things:

• Different intents — curiosity, free info, comparison, purchase.
• Different maturity levels — someone just discovering vs someone ready to pay.
• Noise — homonyms, searches unrelated to your product.

The result: two keywords with the same volume can be worth 100× one another. Volume is raw material, not a verdict.

The golden rule: volume × intent × price

The only framework that holds. A volume only makes sense multiplied by purchase intent and by the price of your offer:

• High volume × cold × low price = lots of noise, little money.
• Low volume × hot × high price = a quiet but very profitable niche.
• High volume × hot × fair price = jackpot (and heavy competition).

Remember: you don't launch on a volume, you launch on the product of these three factors.

Spot intent markers in the queries

This is the key skill. A query's vocabulary betrays where the person is in their decision:

• Cold — “what is”, “definition”, “how does it work”.
• Warm — “how to”, “example”, “tutorial”, “ideas”.
• Hot — “best”, “price”, “pricing”, “buy”, “reviews”, “alternative to”, “software”.

Add up the volume of the “hot” bucket rather than the total volume: that's what predicts your sales.

How many searches do you really need?

The question that always comes up — and whose honest answer is “it depends on your price and recurrence”. A few ballparks for an indie project:

• Micro-SaaS at ~€5–10/month — a few thousand targeted searches can be enough if intent is good, because recurrence compounds.
• One-off, high-price product — a few hundred very hot queries can be enough.
• Free / ad-supported product — here you need big volume, since each visitor is worth cents.

Example — “invoicing software for tradespeople”. Volume: ~1,500 searches/month, looks low. But the query is hot (“software” = purchase intent), the target price is €15–25/month recurring, and the buyer is a pro who doesn't want to tinker. Even capturing a small share, recurrence makes the market largely profitable. A “small” volume worth gold.

The 3 traps that distort the reading

• Looking at total volume instead of hot volume. You overestimate the solvent market.
• Ignoring seasonality. An “average” volume can be a December spike spread over the year.
• Mistaking a fad spike for a trend. Always cross volume with the 24-month curve on Google Trends.

The shortcut: reading a search volume in 30 seconds

Breaking a volume down by intent by hand is tedious. Sondari does it for you: it aggregates the real queries, separates cold demand from hot intent, cross-references the trend, and turns it all into a demand score — so you decide on the right number, not the most flattering one.

Logical next step: how to know if an idea is profitable by crossing volume with the other signals.