I still don't understand Visits/Yr.

Keyword volume for a single search phrase is only useful in regards to Google Ads. This data is free to all via the Google Ads API. Because it is free and because many people using keyword research tools are using them for advertising research, the other keyword research tools use this very basic data.

For bloggers, you want to be looking at the total traffic you will get from Google based upon your most likely ranking. This is what RankIQ gives you for the estimated traffic.

Here's an example. The keyword is: contract to hire pros and cons

The monthly volume for this keyword is (from Google Ads API): 150

If you only look at search volume for the single phrase, then your best possible traffic at a #3 ranking would be 18% (avg CTR for #3) of 150, which would be 27 visitors a month. At 27 visitors a month, most bloggers would pass on this word.

Advanced SEO'ers know that you ignore the keyword volume of a single phrase. They look at URLs ranking for "contract to hire pros and cons" and find out how many variations of the target keyword these URLs are ranking for.

The top 3 ranking URLs for "contract to hire pros and cons" rank for between 100 to 1000 separate keyword variations. From there you can use the search volume of each of these keyword variations multiplied by the CTR of their rankings to find out what the estimated traffic is. That is what RankIQ does to determine the estimated visitors per year.

The actual monthly visitors of a #3 ranking for "contract to hire pros and cons" is right around 700. That is 2592% higher than if you just looked at the search volume for the single phrase.