Understanding Traffic Estimates | Broad, Exact and Phrase matching
September 25, 2009 – 3:12 pm
I have often made use of the Google adwords external keyword tool in my keyword research for quite some time. One of the things I like about it is that it can help you identify higher paying search phrases (although the number it cites is the cost YOU would incur if you were paying for a top SEARCH ad placement.) You might guess that 35% or so of the CPC is what a content publisher MIGHT receive (some a bit more, some a bit less.) But, it’s greater importance for me has been trying to find keywords and keyword phrases which are higher traffic phrases. However there’s one VERY important point that you need to know to be able to use this.
If you read the forums you see EVERYONE has their tips for how to choose keywords. They’ll say search for your phrase in quotes and see how many if it’s more than so many results don’t bother, etc. Then you’ll invariably see someone say, “but hardly anyone searches with quotes”. True….
When people suggest that you search for your target keyphrase in quotes they’re wanting you to scope out the competition. how many pages are out there optimized for THIS exact phrase? That’s what your searching for, literally a phrase match. “round blue widgets” matches only bits of text that include that phrase. So, a page on round pink and blue widgets likely wouldn’t match unless somewhere on the page they just talk about round blue widgets.
Personally I don’t care how many pages there are on a topic, just how well the top results are optimized. Do they have a lot of direct backlinks with that anchor text for instance? That gives a better measure of how easy it may be to crack the top page of search results.
But, let’s get back to the keyword external tool. This tool gives you broad match of the search phrase you’re looking for by default. So… let’s say you’re looking at ideas for round blue widgets and broad match says there are 1,000,000,000 searches a month – WOOT this is a high volume search term right? Well, you switch to exact and see that it only gets 100 searches a month. What? Which should you believe. Both… with a grain of salt.
First the grain of salt…. these averages are less than perfect, but can be relatively close to the search volume you’ll see at the top of these results. Now…. onto the real meat of this:
Broad match for round blue widgets means you’ll get searches for round pink and blue widgets, where can I buy round blue widgets, what is a round blue widget, has anyone written a round about blue can openers and widgets…. in other words broad match will match any and all searches that contain those words. So, if you’re targeting a specific search phrase and want to know how many searches there are for round blue widgets each month you’re better off using the exact search. In fact you may think of those brackets [round blue widgets] as the search box. Phrase match is when people use quotes so if people are typing in “round blue widgets” in the searchbox then you’ll see on average how many a month do so.
At one point in time I was really excited to be so clos to the top result for a high volume web search. I got to the top three and saw next to no traffic as I wondered why I stumbled upon my mistake. I had based my high volume traffic hopes on the broad match when in fact the exact match of the search term received less than 30 searches a month. DOH!
I’m sure that many internet marketers have this realization at some point.
The grain of salt that I mentioned above is that Google is not always right. If you REALLY want to know what kind of volume a search phrase gets – run an ad for that exact match and see how many impressions it receives. (Make sure you bid high enough to be on top.) It can be a more expensive way to test, but maybe less expensive than the time you invest to get to the top only to find that no one is there.
Popularity: 25% [?]
You must be logged in to post a comment.