Exact Match vs Broad.

[xDennis]

Hello,
I've wondered this for sometime now. Why do people tell you to search for an exact math? When a high majority of searches are conducted, it's not likely that they search "Blud widget" in quotes.

Maybe I'm missing something?

[Brian Cook]

You can get a good explanation here...
What are keyword matching options? - AdWords Help

You'll spend alot more money running broad keywords
and your traffic won't be nearly as targeted.

Brian

[ramone_johnny]

The answer is simple.

Do you want to invest money and time into marketing a certain keyword when there maybe a HUGE descrepancy between broad and exact?

eg.

blue cool widget - broad 201,000 searches per month
blue cool widget - exact 9,000 searches per month

Make sense?

[Raphael1]

Excact show you the Excact amount of searches for the KWs that you are optimizing for. When I was new to do this I used to build SEO websites for KW that showed around 50.0000 searches / month in Google... - then my site got to Nr. 1 and I only got 10 visits per day, which sucked compared to the effort that I was investing.... - I later checked that KW with Excact and saw the number matching with my results... - learn out of this lesson ;-)

[xDennis]

I understand the functional differences between exact and broad match. And I realize that if you do an exact match search you will get a ton less responses. My question is this: How many people actually do an exact match search? What keyword tool are you using that will tell you the number between exact match searches and broad mad search. If I put "how to lose weight fast" in any keyword tool, it comes up with the same number of search volume as if I put that phrase without quotes. So my point is, you can't tell how many people are searching the exact match phrase, right?

[xDennis]

I guess what my argument is. Why do people use to search for their keywords, when in fact most people don't search exact match. So if you use that as a research method you are getting skewered results, giving you a false sense of security.

[dburk]

Hi xDennis,

You are confusing two scenarios that are unrelated. When folks advise you to use the "exact Match" setting in the AdWords Keyword Tool it's so you get data for that exact keyword and not a bunch of other keywords that would be triggered in the AdWords system with Broad or Phrase match keyword ad triggers.

None of this has anything at all to do with using quotes in the search engine queries. Those are two totally separate scenarios please don't confuse them.

Using quotes in a search query is know as an "exact phrase search" and has absolutely nothing to do with "exact match" settings for AdWords triggers. A word like "exact" can be applied to many different scenarios and it is the context which defines it's meaning.

[xDennis]

Alright, so when you are performing organic SEO and you are looking for a Niche that has a good number of search listings, and not a lot of competition should you do the exact phrase match when testing the keyword, or not? That's my question.

[lansing]

Use exact match.

Say you want to sell fish kettles. Your keyword research shows you that the broad match for "fish kettle" has a large number of searches and little competition. You optimize your site for "fish kettle" and get many visitors, but you sell no fish kettles.

If you had done exact match, you might have seen that the exact match "fish kettle" gets few searches compared to the more popular phrase "That's a fine kettle of fish" (which, unfortunately for you, would broad match "fish kettle").

[Ryan6]

Broad is a rubbish stat to go off as it just throws keyword variations at you, which will not provide a realistic picture.

The exact match should give you a pretty much spot on estimation of how much the phrase is being pumped into Google by the month, which you then split down to the day.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by xDennis

Alright, so when you are performing organic SEO and you are looking for a Niche that has a good number of search listings, and not a lot of competition should you do the exact phrase match when testing the keyword, or not? That's my question.

Hi xDennis,

If you are referring to the advice, "search your keyword in quotes to see how many competing pages", this simply reduces the responses to exclude pages that don't have the exact phrase anywhere in the title, description, content or anchor text of inbound links.

This information only indicates the scale of competition after you have reduced the scope of your research to pages that may actually produce any measurable competition.

You should consider reducing the scope of your research to pages that are actually optimized for your targeted keyword to discern scale of meaningful competition. You can achieve this by using allintitle:, inanchor:, and inurl: operators in your search query.

Ultimately, the scale of your competition is not as meaningful as your true competition which is on the first page of the SERPs of your targeted keyword. If you can outperform the relevance score of the page that occupies position #10 then you will have a first page listing. Why should you care how many competing pages there are below you? Instead focus only on those you need to surpass, and any pages listed below the first page or two of the SERP are not worth analyzing, regardless of the number.