The three golden rules of internet marketing are

Are the keywords you are trying to rank for being searched for by customers?

Are people the people doing these searches people who are going to buy?

Can you compete in this market?

So the first question to ask is are the keywords you are hoping to rank for attracting the right number of visitors.

Visitors are different from searches as it has been estimated that 50% of the searches made by people do not result in a click to a website, think about how you search for a company, you might use a broad term such as search engine optimisation, when you get back 25 million results you may think that is too many to sort through and decide that you wish to discuss your SEO and on-line marketing with someone in your area so you add the word Salisbury to the search to research for the term search engine optimisation Salisbury, this brings up a smaller more focused list.

So if you are using a keyword tool and looking at the number of searches you should half that number and consider that if you hold the top position in Google for that term you should expect to get just 40% of the total number of searches.

Once you know this you can use this figure to predict your visitor numbers to your site, using the other two golden rules of Internet marketing along side this one will increase your chances of success dramatically.