Somewhere in your inbox right now there is probably an SEO pitch that says something like "10,000 people search for your services every month." Ask where that number came from and the conversation usually gets vague. This post explains why we took the opposite approach — verifying every search volume, keyword difficulty score, and cost-per-click figure on this website against the Semrush US database — and how you can check our work yourself.
The SEO Industry's Quiet Numbers Problem
Search volumes are the raw material of every SEO proposal. They justify the budget, set the expectations, and decide which pages get built first. Yet they are also the easiest numbers in marketing to fabricate, because almost nobody audits them. An agency that says "charleston plumber" gets 5,000 searches a month sounds exactly as credible as one that says 1,900 — unless you pull the data yourself.
The consequences are not academic. A business that invests $2,000 a month chasing a keyword that was quoted at triple its real volume will hit its ranking targets and still miss its revenue targets — and by the time the gap is obvious, a year of budget is gone. Inflated demand estimates are not optimistic rounding; they are navigation errors that compound every month a campaign runs.
What "Verified" Means on This Website
Every keyword figure published on this site — the volumes in our homepage table, the market soundings on our service pages, the keyword sets in our case studies — comes from batch keyword reports pulled directly from the Semrush US database, the same Keyword Overview data a professional SEO team works from. We documented the entire process on our data methodology page, but the short version is a four-step discipline:
- Collect every claim. Before publishing, we inventory every keyword, volume, difficulty score, and CPC figure that appears anywhere on the site.
- Pull from Semrush, US database. Each phrase is queried in batch reports — volume, keyword difficulty (KD %), average CPC, and search intent, recorded per keyword.
- Reconcile against the page. Published figures are audited line-by-line against the export. When a number on a page disagrees with the data, the page gets corrected — never the other way around.
- Label anything unverified. Keywords Semrush can't verify don't get invented numbers. They render as plain text with no data card, or carry an explicit estimate label.
You can see the result anywhere on this site: hover over (or tap) a dotted-underline keyword like "charleston seo" and the card that opens shows the verified volume, difficulty, CPC, and intent for that exact phrase. The source line at the bottom of every card links straight back to the methodology, and the badge in the footer of every page tells you when the active dataset was last pulled.
Why We Publish the Limits Too
Honest data means admitting what the data can't do. Semrush volumes are US-national trailing averages for exact phrases — they undercount total topic demand (because close variants each carry their own volume), they lag sharp seasonal spikes by a few months, and phrases under roughly ten searches a month often return no data at all. That's why some keywords on this site have no hover card: we'd rather show you a phrase with no number than a number we made up.
Database figures are also only the starting instrument. Once a campaign is live, what matters is position tracking against your actual keyword set, Google Search Console impressions and clicks, and leads verified in analytics — which is exactly how our client reporting works. The dataset charts the market; your campaign data charts your actual voyage through it.
What This Should Change About How You Buy SEO
Whether or not you ever work with us, take this test into your next agency conversation: ask where their search volumes come from, and ask to see the export. A competent agency can produce the raw rows in minutes. An agency that stalls, generalizes, or pivots to "industry experience" just told you how the rest of the engagement will go.
If you want to see what verified data looks like for your own market — every keyword your customers actually search, with real volumes and difficulty scores attached — request a free SEO audit and we'll include the relevant rows from the raw Semrush export in your deliverable. The full verification process, metric definitions, and refresh cadence live on our data methodology page.
WRITTEN BY
Lorenz Esposito
SEO Expert & Founder, Charleston SEO Pros
Lorenz Esposito is the SEO expert behind Charleston SEO Pros. Before search marketing, he was a starting right back for three years at the College of Charleston, then turned pro in Sweden — playing for Stockholm-area club Vallentuna BK and returning in dual roles as first-team defender and assistant coach. The habits that kept him on the field abroad — studying film on every opponent, defending with discipline, and leading by example — are the same ones he brings to every Charleston SEO campaign: competitor research before tactics, technically sound execution, and every claim verified against real Semrush data.
