Why exact instread of phrase keyword search?

3 replies
Seems like finding the phrase would be just as valuable as the exact. Are they almost the same? Is this just finding someone late in the buyer cycle? What do you guys do when you look for keywords? Only exact? Phrase? thanks.
#exact #instread #keyword #phrase #search
  • Profile picture of the author UMS
    In general, the longer your keyword phrase, the closer the exact and phrase match figures will be.

    The reason you need to look at the exact match figures is that it will give you a much more realistic idea of the amount of organic traffic you can receive.

    Let's take the keyword SEO

    This gets:

    823,000 exact match searches
    7,480,000 phrase match searches

    The reason for the big difference is that phrase match includes things like:

    negative SEO
    onpage SEO
    cheap SEO campaigns.
    etc

    Your site/page wouldn't be targeting all possible combinations of those phrase matches, hence the reason why it's phrase match search volume is not the best figure to look at.
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  • Profile picture of the author dpinero
    I think this is PPC question, not SEO, right?

    If you include "music software" in phrase, you'll ad could appear for searches like "cheap music software" or "music software 2012" (with words before or after your keyword, unless you insert those word in the negatives group).

    If you use [music software] between brackets, your ad will only appear for that exact term: "music software", and nothing else.

    I recommend using exact match in more advanced stages of your PPC campaign, for those simple words that were broad and helped you to get information about possible variations done by users. So at this point, you know where your traffic is heading to. I assume that, at this point, you have a very solid negative keywords group. So you could have terms like "free music software", "latest music software", etc. in phrase, and [music software] in exact (of course, you'll have to check if this word is giving you quality traffic, like for every other keyword).

    Using exact match is not really worth it for long tail terms.
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  • Profile picture of the author nvs74191
    I use the exact and phrase match difference to find hidden long tail keywords.
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    Swaminathan

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