Confusion - Any Help is Appreciated (SEO)

Hello Kauzmo,

In my experience when using quotes in your keyword research is specifically to measure your competition properly. Using your example, I'll explain the process:

Monkey shoes

Step one: How many people are searching for this keyword
Step two: How much competition there is for the keyword

*Rule: Use keywords that get high searches but low competition*

Now of course you've been through this before but for the sake of others that want to know about this I will go through the full process.

Typing in your keyword Monkey Shoes:

You look for the global monthly searches: You want something with 2000+ (5,000 for experts)global searches.

Next you want to type that keyword into the Google search engine with the quotes "Monkey Shoes" and look at the results. There is no magic number where you want this to be but I would make sure the results are below 75,000 results.

Now when it comes the "natural" results you are mentioning remember these results are broad meaning it will pull up searches for anything with monkey shoes in the keyword. So other results (especially from authority sites) will bump your real ranking down a bit, however the more content, etc you create the better than ranking will be in addition do your best to get your content on authority sites, this helps dramatically.

There's no advantage of being on page one for a phrase (doing a search in quotes uses phrase match not exact match) match unless the broad match (search without quotes) is also on page 1.

Thanks to all who have responded! This gives me some info to digest.

There is also the issue of very low competition keywords that produce high paying ads simply because of the content that must be written about the particular keyword. I've had twelve dollar clicks on ads that were only contextually related to the keyword. I'm not at all sure how this works, but it does work.