Newbie question about Google Keyword tool

[uncle randy 71]

I really appreciate this forum and all of the help people seem so willing to offer. I just stumbled across the thread "Follow me to $100 a day in Adsense" by Steve Crooks and was wondering if someone could clarify one point for me. Here is part of the post.
Can someone explain the part that I highlighted in red? It is very confusing.:

Quote "As a believer in trying as far as we can to create a site about something we might be remotely interested in, I will pick travel and tourism as my starting point.

It is now time to dig into the travel & tourism topic to find a niche that satisfies my other criteria and that I can be interested in creating content for.

I then go to kwbrowse.com and do a number of searches starting with travel and then tourism. On the right pane of kwbrowse after each search is a list of related topics to your main one. I click on some of the topics that kwbrowse shows up and copy paste the results into notepad. At the end I have a long list of travel and tourism related keywords.

Time to open up google keyword tool.. I then paste this list of keywords into the keyword tool and click on "use synonyms". When the results are returned, I sort by "Estimated Avg. CPC" from high to low. I then look down the list looking for four things.

1. High CPC
2. High Searches per month
3. Consistent searches through the year
4. Could I create content for that niche?

I also make sure that my "match type" is set to "exact". This should give an accurate result for each particular phrase.

In my case, I dug down into the cruise vacation niche and was presented with a few possible candidates which fit my criteria laid out. I then made another list with my possible niches on.

The next step is to find out the level of competition for each niche. I do this by typing into google each niche keyword phrase in inverted commas. I then made a note on my list of the number of search results returned. I am looking for anything that has competition of less than 500,000 because I reckon I can nail a page 1 position on google with that level." End Quote

[jakesellers]

Think he means "each keyword phrase in double quotes" <-like that

Inverted commas is an esoteric way of referring to quotation marks

[Ewan Cormack]

It's quite simple really.
1. Google greek pleasure cruises
2. Now google "greek pleasure cruises"

The second one will get less results because you are searching for the phrase "greek pleasure cruises". That means that google will only return pages with those words, in that order.

This second result gives a much better idea of the amount of competition around for that particular niche.

[uncle randy 71]

Oh man, now I feel dumb. Thank you both for the quick responses. And thanks for the lesson on the different results with and without the quotation marks.

[Kunle Olomofe]

Hi uncle randy

What the part you highlighted means is that you go to google.com, then enter a specific keyword phrase for example "Cruise Vacation Tips" into the search box exactly as I've done and highlighted i.e. using quotation marks so that google knows to ONLY show you sites that are using that EXACT phrase.

When google brings up its search results showcasing the number of sites with that precise phrase showing up on them, you should get a rough idea of how much competition you have to contend with in that niche.

If you were to type in Cruise Vacation Tips without the quotes google will bring back quite a few unrelated sites in the search results just so long as those sites contain ANY of those keywords and not necessarily in that order or even used together. You might even get sites that talk about vacations in general and not specifically cruise vacations, and this would skew the results of your research.

So to get a more accurate picture of how many directly competing sites there are, make sure to add quotes when you search for a phrase.

Hope that helps to answer your question.

Cheers

Kunle Olomofe

[uncle randy 71]

That does indeed help, Kunle, thanks for the information.

[Steve Diamond]

There's another technique that's even more accurate for gauging true SEO competition. Use Google's intitle: operator plus the exact phrase. That will return only those web pages that have the phrase in the page title, which is a much better measure of the real competition compared to those pages that simply use the phrase somewhere in the text (where it may not be the main topic of the page at all).

To use the previous example, the search cruise vacation tips currently returns about 20,000,000 results; the search "cruise vacation tips" currently returns about 2,000,000 results; and the search intitle:"cruise vacation tips" currently returns fewer than 8,000 results. IMO those 8,000 pages are the true competition when it comes to ranking for this phrase.

[Paid Surveys]

I love steve crooks tips on Google i find his advice very good. But i would disagree with him use inverted commas as you will get less results which means that you may have more competition than you thought.

[uncle randy 71]

Thank you Steve and Paid Surveys, I appreciate your contribution to my education.