using quotes and low competition KW's

[Moneyland]

Hi there,

When using ezines articles,I know the best way is to target keywords in "quotes" that are as low competition as possible. Does this mean the visitor has to search for this KW in quotes or is it just that one would use quotes for researching purposes? I am asking as my articles have shown when I type the keywords in quotes but not without so I am just wondering what the visitor has to type in to find my articles.

Hope I have made sense!
Thanks if you can answer this.

[michaelmac]

Hi,

The quotes you refer to actually mean that this is an exact term. IOW's the searcher has to be searching for that exact term to actually come across your site/article etc.

This is good because you are getting more targetted traffic as they are looking for your kw and hence product. Also, there is less competition for exact searches.

The figure you are talking about actually refers to the number of sites you will be competing against for this kw. You need to ensure that you have checked how often this is searched per month. The best way if you are starting off is to refer to Google's Adword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Enter the niche you are interested in and then enter the captcha. Once you get your list of kw's, look at the tab along the top on the right-hand side Global Monthly Search Volume press this once to get the kw's in numerical order. Look at the drop down box to the right of this and select exact...watch the values drop significantly!

Once you have the selected kw's, check each one in quotes in Google browser and it will give you your competing number of sites. The quotes are used for research purposes.

There is obviously more involved to get your site on page 1, backlinking being a major part. Just enter this into the search box for plenty of great information that will have you up and going in no time.

Good luck with your endeavors,

Michael

[Nicolaas Theron]

I think the only people who search with quotes are internet marketers doing keyword research. Searching with quotes simply gives you a rough idea of how many sites contain that exact phrase.

If you want to take it a step further, type this in Google:

site:ezinearticles.com intitle:"your keyword phrase"

That will tell you if there are in fact articles at EZA targeting that phrase in their title. Once you've established that there are, you can now do the normal search for your keyword phrase (without quotes) and see where the first EZA article is ranking. If there are EZA articles with that keyword in the title, but they're not within the first 30 or so results, it may indicate that it will be difficult to rank an article in the top 10 for that keyword without building backlinks to it.

That's a rough figure because there are lots of variables, like how well the other articles are optimized for that keyword (sometimes people use the keyword in the title but not even once in the body), the mystery of Google (it's not uncommon to find 20+ articles on a given keyword at EZA but only 1 will rank in the top 50), etc.

However, this will give you a better idea than a simple quotes search of how viable a top ranking for an article at EZA on your given keyword without any backlinks would be. It's not perfect of course, but nothing in this business is.

I get a pretty good top 10 hit rate by using this method to determine what keywords to write on.

[MarkAndrews IMCopywriting]

The search function is your friend.

Only reason why it is placed in quotes, on Google for example, is to find out the number of competing websites going after any particular keyword or *long tailed keyword.

Let's say that you find a keyword / *LTK, which has 3000 searches during the last month and 9000 global broad searches. You think to yourself, "Hey! I'd like to use this keyword, this one looks promising."

You go to Google or another major search engine, you type in that keyword with the quotes, for example "widgets for sale" - and you can see from that that this long tail keyword has 800,000 competing websites, all vying to use that keyword. This number is not competitive, if you're new to SEO, in this case, it's likely not worth it.

On the other hand, if that number was below 200,000 - great! Go for it.

If it's under 50,000 even better.

If it's under 30,000 - Brilliant!

You want that number ideally to be as low as possible and the number of monthly searches to be as high as possible OK, anything over 500 searches, bare minimum.

Obviously, you want to increase your chances as much as possible getting to that all important #1 Google position, where 95% of the organic traffic is, for obvious reasons.

Now if someone goes to Google.com and they type in...

widgets for sale

And your site is in the top position, they're very highly likely to click on the link that will take them to your website.

Of course, they'll usually type in the search query without the quotes.

It's usually for SEO purposes that you will type in the keyword / LTK with the quotes.

Hope this helps.


Mark

[Moneyland]

Cheers guys, you all made alot of sense and this is alot clearer now.

Still one thing.....I do get the vistor will usually type in the search query without the quotes so how come with quite a few of my articles I see them show up in google when I put the KW in quotes but sometimes and most times they do not show up when I type in the exact KW phrase without quotes. I could be the vistor typing this in!!!

Any clues??

Cheers again!

[Zeus66]

Because with quotation marks means Google is returning pages with that phrase in exact word order. So only pages with dog obedience training will show up if you search for "dog obedience training." If you search for the phrase without quotation marks, you get a list of all pages Google has that contain that phrase in any word order. So, obedience dog training, training dog obedience, etc. In fact, the words in the phrase do not even have to appear next to each other when you search without quotation marks.

In other words, with quotation marks tells you (very roughly) how many competitors you have out there who have also optimized their pages for that exact phrase. Some say the higher that number, the less chance you have of getting a high ranking. I say only worry about how tough the Top 10 look to be to beat, but others will argue the point.

John