What an opportunity is worth

Every row on the worklist carries a value, and the value is arithmetic you can check: the extra clicks a better position would be expected to win, multiplied by what an advertiser pays for one of those clicks.

Where the inputs come from

The volume and the cost per click

Both are reported by a third-party keyword provider. They are estimates of a market rather than measurements of your site, and the footer of every page here says so.

The click side

The clicks a position wins come from a published average click-through curve — what a position tends to earn across the web, rather than what it earns on your pages, in your market, for your brand. Connect Search Console and run an import, and that curve is replaced by one fitted to your own impressions and clicks, which narrows that gap and leaves the other two exactly where they were. Connecting on its own changes nothing here: the fit is written by the import, and until you run one the published curve is what prices a keyword.

So the number is useful for exactly one job: putting one keyword ahead of another. If one row is worth several times another, the ranking is telling you something real about what to write first. If two are within a few per cent, the difference is inside the error of the model and you should choose on something else — how well you can write the page, or whether you already have one.

Unknown and worthless are different answers

A keyword the provider reported no search volume for cannot be priced, so it has no value and sorts after every priced row rather than above them with a zero beside it. A keyword that can be priced and comes out worthless does get a zero, because that is a real answer about a real keyword. The worklist’s own summary says what the open rows are worth and how many of them could be priced at all, instead of printing one total that invites you to read it as the whole list.

Value waiting is a month, and only a month

The figure at the top of the worklist adds up the kinds of row that are priced as clicks a month: a gap, a keyword where a rival outranks you, and a long-tail find. A row that came from a Search Console import is priced over whatever window you imported, so it is deliberately left out — adding a window to a month gives a larger number in no unit at all, and larger reads as progress.

What the value is not

• It is not a forecast of your traffic. Your own click-through rate is a property of your title, your brand and the shape of the result page.
• It is not a forecast of your revenue. What an advertiser pays for a click is not what a visit is worth to you.
• It is not a promise that ranking is achievable. The difficulty band beside it is the nearest thing to that question, and it is a different measurement.