Knowing Matching Types When Doing Keyword Research

af Mikael · 9 Kommentarer · August 4, 2008

When using Google’s free Keyword Tool to do your keyword research it is important that you know exactly what it is that the numbers show you. If you don’t the end result can be that you make the wrong conclusion about what keywords to target in your SEO efforts or even worse… what niche to build a business in.

I’ve done this error myself and that is why I think it is important that you are aware of the results you get when using Google’s Keyword Tool. To best explain this I want to show you an example of someone trying to target keywords related to the niche of “Minor League Baseball”.

Broad Match – Not for keyword research

The default settings of the tool will show you the “Broad Searches” which means that if any of the words “minor”, “league” or “baseball” is entered into a search that would count in the stats of “minor league baseball”.

If you didn’t know that when doing your keyword research you might mistakenly think that 135,000 people were searching for “minor league baseball” every single month (average):

But that is not even the whole story. This figure will also include (for the full explanation of the keyword tool, please visit: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6324&ctx=tltp), explained with Google’s own terms:

“relevant variations of your keyword phrases and plurals, as well as some related
keywords and phrases via our expanded keyword matching technology”

We can therefore conclude that when trying to target specific keyword phrases the “broad search” option isn’t going to give any valuable information. Instead let’s heard over to the “phrase match” option.

Phrase Match – A great keyword indicator

When changing the match type to phrase match you’ll see what searches that had all the words in them in that specific order. That means that any searches performed with the phrase “minor league baseball” in them would count. That would include terms like:

• “minor league baseball players”
• “minor league baseball team”
• “minor league baseball hats”
• “minor league baseball logos”

and many more. It would not however include a search for “baseball league for minors” as that doesn’t have the words in the right order.

Would it then be relevant to use “phrase match” when doing keyword research? Absolutely!! Now you know that about 135,000 are entering that phrase into Google every single month.

Because you are targeting the entire niche that is relevant information as it gives you a picture of the level of traffic you can expect in a month (unless you find other related keywords to target as well which would further increase traffic).

Exact Match – For SEO efforts

Now that you have the overall picture of the traffic that the niche can be expected to deliver you will need to check the individual specific keywords phrases. In order to do that you must pick the match type named “Exact”. This will show you the number of times that people have entered that exact phrase into Google. This will rule out “minor league baseball players” and all other combination of words.

This will of course reduce the amount of expected traffic significantly but the numbers will give you a much clearer picture of the kind of effort you would want to put into your SEO efforts. Spending hundreds of hours or thousands of dollars targeting a phrase that will only potentially bring in a small amount of visitors will probably not be worth the effort (even though the traffic will be highly targeted).

As you can see from the picture above the number has now been reduced to 33,100 searches on average which is about 25% of the original amount of traffic. This means that 75% of the traffic will go towards even more targeted and specific keywords like “minor league baseball players” and “minor league baseball hats”.

Depending on your business model and what you’re selling the term “minor league baseball” might not the right keyword to target. The competition and probably the effort needed to rank highly for the more specific terms will be far less than going for the overall term.

As you can see from the picture above the competition (Adwords competition, not search engine competition) is almost nonexistent.

In conclusion – Use phrase and exact match

Now I’m not going to go into how you go about testing the level of search engine competition in this article but I do hope that you now have an idea of how to use Google’s Keyword Tool for your initial keyword research.

Doing keyword research is one of the most important parts of starting up new niche websites. Forget about design, products and everything else until you have done your research. It would be an absolute waste of time and money to setup a site, craft a product and then discover that nobody is searching for it.

Remember to subscribe to my RSS feed to keep updated on future posts on doing keyword research.

/Mikael

Tags: keyword research google