Should you target high-volume keywords?
The head term has the traffic. It also has every competitor, and you cannot tell whether chasing it is ambition or waste.
Volume is the prize, not the probability
A query with a hundred thousand searches you will never rank for is worth nothing. A query with five hundred searches you can hold at position three is worth about fifteen visits a month, forever, with no further work. Multiply that by sixty and you have a business.
Head terms are held by people whose business model requires them
The results for a category head term are occupied by companies whose entire funnel depends on that position. They will outspend you and out-link you indefinitely, because losing it costs them more than winning it gains you.
And you may not keep it even if you win
This site did rank for its category head term. It returned 45 clicks in seven months at position 13.49, then fell to 5 clicks at position 35.76 eight days later with no change to the page. A ranking you cannot hold is a loan, not an asset.
What the head term actually returned here
This site chased its most obvious high-volume term for months. Across 224 days that term produced 45 clicks in total. After the whole effort, it sat at 5 clicks at position 35.76. Meanwhile the specific, unglamorous, low-volume queries produced the bulk of 42,320 clicks. The volume number was real. It was just never available to us.
Volume is a ceiling, not a forecast
A 50,000-per-month keyword you rank 30th for is worth nothing. A 200-per-month keyword you rank 2nd for is worth roughly 60 clicks a month, forever, with no further work. Multiply volume by the click-through rate you can realistically achieve at the position you can realistically reach, and most head terms collapse to zero. Do that arithmetic before you commit a quarter.
Measured, not asserted
75.4% of all clicks on this site came from 5 pages out of 160, and not one of them targets the category head term.
Free tool for this: Position Value Calculator. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 4 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.