Traffic potential shows the sum of organic traffic that the #1 ranking page for your target keyword receives from all the keywords that it ranks for.
For example, the keyword “submit website to search engines” has a traffic potential of 6,200, even though it only has a volume of 500.
When a page reaches the #1 ranking page for a particular keyword, it very often ranks for hundreds of other keywords too, and get traffic for all of them. Therefore, traffic potential is often a better metric to consider than search volume alone.
See this metric as the potential traffic you could get, if you were to overtake the #1 ranking page for that keyword. You can also check if there’s a more popular topic (traffic-wise) that you could prioritise instead.