cost per click
Also called: cpc, avg cpc, average cost per click
Cost per click (CPC) is the price an advertiser pays each time someone clicks their ad. In Google Ads, your actual CPC is the final amount charged per click, usually less than your maximum bid. In SEO, CPC is used as a proxy for a keyword's commercial value.
CPC comes from paid search, where it is sometimes called pay-per-click (PPC). Three numbers matter. Your max CPC is the highest you are willing to pay for a click. Your actual CPC is what you actually get charged, and it is often much lower than your max bid, because Google’s auction only charges what is minimally required to clear the Ad Rank thresholds and beat the advertiser ranked immediately below you. Average CPC is simply total click cost divided by total clicks.
Actual CPC can occasionally run higher than your max bid, for example when Enhanced CPC or a bid adjustment is in play. Bid alone does not set the price either. Ad Rank also folds in ad quality and context, so a stronger ad can pay less at the same position.
Why SEOs watch a metric they never pay
In organic search you never pay per click, so why track CPC at all? Because it is one of the cleanest public signals of a keyword’s commercial value. Advertisers only bid up terms that convert, so a high CPC usually points to real buyer intent. Semrush frames expensive keywords as strong opportunities “because there’s good potential for searchers to buy.” Pulling CPC alongside search volume and difficulty lets you rank a keyword list by money, not just by raw traffic.
How it affects your traffic
High-CPC keywords are the ones advertisers pay a premium to reach, which makes them the terms most worth owning organically, where every click after you rank costs nothing. The catch is that high CPC and high competition tend to travel together, so a keyword plan has to weigh commercial value against how hard a term is to rank for. That tradeoff, deciding which buyer-intent keywords to chase and in what order, is exactly the work SEO consulting is built to do, so your organic traffic pulls revenue and not just visits.
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