KW Research - Search in Quotes ?

Hi,

Well if you consider that with those stats you have 24000 people optimising for that particular keyword.....you stand a better chance of moving up the rankings quickly if you do your SEO the right way. Thats the Theory anyways.......

Hope that helps a bit.

It depends how you look at it.

To me, the number of competing sites isn't actually relevant.

I'm competing with only the top 5 of them. If I can't reasonably foresee getting a site in the top half of the first page, I won't compete.

So all that matters to me is the quality of the SEO of those top few sites. Those are my only real competitors.

I'd rather compete with 50,000,000 others of whom the top 5 sites include "nothing special" and "article directory articles" and so on, than compete with 50,000 sites of which the whole of the first page (as can happen) comprises age-old, high-PR authority sites each with hundreds of thousands of backlinks from other high-quality, well-ranked sites, because I've no chance against that.

In short, I'm competing with about 5 sites, either way, and it makes absolutely no difference to me whether there are 49,995 more sites after them, or 49,999,995 more.

Just my perspective.

First of all you can pretty much ignore whether there are 24,000 or 24 gazillion competing pages for a keyword phrase. It is largely irrelevant and does not tell you anything much about the level of competition. You should simply look at the top 10 on Google for your keyword phrase. In fact, top 3 is even more appropriate.

As for quotes or no quotes, the best way to describe this is to go back to basics.. People generally search for keywords without quotes, therefore it follows that you should be analyzing the top 3 to 10 pages on Google for your target keyword without quotes. However, you should use quotes to get a realistic search volume associated with your keyword phrase.

To summarise, use quotes when looking at number of searches and no quotes when analyzing the top 10 pages on Google (your competition)..

Agree with Alexa.

I don't even look at the search volume in quote when doing keyword research.

Just what the strength is on the first page of Google is all that matters to me.

Q1: Customers don't use quoted searches that much, so you want to try the following tricks:
1. Go to Google and search for "keyword".
This tells me how many websites have this exact phrase.

2. Go to Google and search for allintitle:KEYWORD.
This tells me how many websites have this exact phrase in their title.

3. Go to Google and search for allinurl:KEYWORD.
This tells me how many websites have this exact phrase in their url.

Make your decision based on these results, not only the quoted one.

My advice is that when doing your keyword research, do not just use the Google search facility rather use the Google Adwords tool too.
You should use both of these hand in hand to know exactly how many local searches your keyword is getting, spy a little on the competition, etc.

Well, if I were you I wouldnt go for the small red widgets idea. I think theres lots of competition measuring by the number of results with or without quotes.

My advice is you target microniches: Am talking of a city specific keyword like "breast implant los angeles"

Anything that gets more than 2500 searches a month of the Google Adwords keywords tool is good.

I think anything between 2500 and 30,000 is a good range to give you a green light to venture.

Now, according to me your keyword is not very targeted and even if you got some traffic I dont suppose anyone would make a purchase for anything related to small red widgets.
Always go for a more desperate and more targeted audience.

Pick a long tail keyword whose searches and visitors are guaranteed to bring results.

One last thing to remember when doing your keyword research is that you want to get the keyword that is searched many times and the one that has least competition.

My example above is not just a long tail keyword but a keyword that has little competition and one that is targeting a very desperate needy audience.

Just my 2 cents!

As everyone else in here has said, just look at the first page without quotes. That is your only competition because it's how nearly everyone searches. The very few searchers that do use modifiers and quotes also know how to dig deep, and they've probably already ignored the general search results.

Try this phrase "how to lose weight for kids" with and without quotes and allintitle:

If you were going after this keyword phrase then the modifiers would actually be hiding your competition, not revealing it.