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Broad Competion VS Exact Competition

by Matt Lee
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Now I wouldn't consider myself an SEO guru but I know the fundamental strategies for keyword research. But one thing I've always wondered about is the actual Broad VS Exact threshold.

Example:

Keyword 1 has 3M broad competition and about 30k exact competition
Keyword 2 has 26M Broad and only 300 exact competition.

I know that you can dig deeper and analyze the first page competitors for number of inbound links for these phrases, but just taking the numbers into consideration, which is the easier phrase to optimize for?

Does Broad competition matter if the exact competition is super low?
#broad #competion #competition #exact
  • Profile picture of the author dburk
    Hi Mr Marketer,

    The broad match data does not apply to anything related to organic search. It only applies to the AdWords extended broad match feature of AdWords campaigns.
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  • Profile picture of the author Matt Lee
    Hi Don,

    Thanks... So what you're saying is that the only type of competition I should pay attention to is the results in quotes(exact competition)?
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Hi Mr Marketer,

      Broad and Exact match keyword data has nothing to do with quotes used in searches. Using quotes in your search tells you the estimated number of documents that contain the exact phrase in the page title or content. This does not tell you the number of websites nor the strength of competition, therefore it is generally useless for assessing competition.

      The notable exception might be when the estimated number of documents are very few. This is a sign of weak competition.

      A better way to compare would be to use the allintitle: and inurl: operators to get a sense of how many documents are optimized for the keyword being analysed.
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  • Profile picture of the author Fraggler
    I wouldn't even look at phrase or broad results returned from the query. No matter how many results are returned, if the front page is dominated by tough authority sites you will struggle to beat them.

    What I mean is if you were doing your method of analysis and came across a keyword with only 50 results from a broad, phrase, allintitle, inurl query etc you could falsely think you are onto a winner. If the top 10 are tough it is still as competitve as the keyword that return 100,000 results.

    You are on the right track digging into the first page of results. Look for a first page dominated by low PR and low backlinks to the page.
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