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keywords in quotes

by zimbizee
6 replies
Hi everyone,

probably been asked before but here goes.

When doing keyword research and looking at the competing pages in google, should one look at the keyword in or out of quotes to gauge the competion?

I have a keyword that shows 16,000 in quotes and 400,000 without quotes.
Surely the real competion will be without quotes as that is what 99% of searchers will enter. I have also noticed that the results are completly different with the keyword in quotes to that without, so would guess that if i go for that particular keyword i will be trying to beat the other sites that appear without the quotes.

Hope that makes sense.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Zimbizee
#keywords #quotes
  • Profile picture of the author garethjones
    To refine your competitor try with double quotes on, the to further filter it you can use intitle: tag and / or inachor: tag to check what are real competition are you with, copy those competitors url in excel and check which sites they are primarily getting links from...
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  • Profile picture of the author Oland
    Disclaimer: I'm by no means an SEO expert.

    I don't use the quotes to measure the competition, the number of competing webpages does not tell you if it's easy or hard to get into the top 10 of Google.

    Here is what I do to measure the competition:
    1) Check the pagerank for the top 10 results. If all 10 have a pagerank of 4 or more then you may have some work to do. You can use SEO Quake for this (free).
    2) check the number of backlinks to the top 10 results. You can use Yahoo Site Explorer for this.

    These are just the basics, you can check for a lot of other things a well.
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    • Profile picture of the author wilsonusman
      Originally Posted by Oland View Post

      Disclaimer: I'm by no means an SEO expert.

      I don't use the quotes to measure the competition, the number of competing webpages does not tell you if it's easy or hard to get into the top 10 of Google.

      Here is what I do to measure the competition:
      1) Check the pagerank for the top 10 results. If all 10 have a pagerank of 4 or more then you may have some work to do. You can use SEO Quake for this (free).
      2) check the number of backlinks to the top 10 results. You can use Yahoo Site Explorer for this.

      These are just the basics, you can check for a lot of other things a well.
      Definitely agree with this... You need to find out what those links look like, some will be impossible to beat. Well not impossible, but will take years. We definitely don't want to do that.

      Great advice.
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      • Profile picture of the author garethjones
        Well working on solely pagerank is not enough, as google already mentioned it's one of the 200 factors to they are derived results for, yahoo explorer is certainly to consider to check competitors backlinks.. you will get idea of where they are getting links from..to check some other data related to how good that backlink will be, you can try seomoz.org or say opensiteexplorer.org to get reports of various factors that will help you

        Hope this helps

        regards
        Gareth
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  • Profile picture of the author UMS
    The reason you search in quotes is that you get a much better idea of the competition.

    For example, if my keywords were "dog training" (why is that such a popular example?)

    then if I search without quotes, Google can return pages that just mention those two keywords, eg:

    I like training for the Olympic marathon with my dog

    Now that site isn't going to be relevant to your niche.

    If you fully optimise your site and build backlinks for the keywords "dog training", Google will rank that higher than the site about training for the olympics when average people are search for sites related to dog training and are searching without quotes.
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  • Profile picture of the author tbunch
    Originally Posted by zimbizee View Post

    I have a keyword that shows 16,000 in quotes and 400,000 without quotes.
    Surely the real competion will be without quotes as that is what 99% of searchers will enter. I have also noticed that the results are completly different with the keyword in quotes to that without, so would guess that if i go for that particular keyword i will be trying to beat the other sites that appear without the quotes.
    When you search, for a phrase, without quotes Google will show any site that has the words in the phrase anywhere on their pages. When you search with quotes then Google only shows pages with the words together but maybe not in the same order (ie. if you search "dog trained" it may come back as "trained dog")

    As others have said it is really ONLY THE FIRST 10 search results that you need to be concerned with.

    Hope this helps!
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