My take on keyword research

Very informative post. Thanks you for sharing.

Good points.

Also, the adwords tool google offers has 3 settings:

a. broad
b. exact
c. phrase

if you try to figure out the inventory on phrases based on broad, you may be improperly estimating the "true" amount of traffic that's going to come to a website for that phrase. You'll sometimes see huge differences between "broad" and "exact." I like the latter frankly. It will help you truly understand what is more "possible" in terms of people coming to your site if you achieve #1 thru 3 positions in a SERP. Whereas, someone might wonder, "Why am I only getting 15 hits from 'xyz' search phrase" when google says there's 890 searches monthly? It's possibly because there's only actually 20 searches "exactly" a month.

This post is going to cover a subject that I get asked about quite a lot. I apologize if there are other posts on this subject here already (I imagine there are) I just didn’t find any right off to post a response to.

Using quotation marks in keyword research

Many people online are confused when it comes to keyword research and using quotation marks, actually I was one of them when I first started. I get asked about this literally every day and usually the question is phrased something like – “Why should I search for keywords in quotation marks when nobody uses them while searching”.

This is actually a great question, and something I had a very hard time understanding myself when I first started. The answer is, they are only there for you, to help you with your own research.

Let me explain. The quotation marks allow you to view your competition, and see exactly who it is you are up against for a certain keyword. This is what no one explains and what exactly took me so long to understand.

When you conduct a Google search with the quotes, you are getting the results for that exact keyword, in that order. When you do a search without quotes you get the results for those words in any number, and if your keyword is long-tail enough, perhaps some sites that only have a few of the words in the title or content.

This can be hard to understand at first, but once you do, your keyword research abilities will skyrocket as will your rankings for your particular keyword.

Let’s go over an example to help clarify if you still need some help.

Let’s look at the keyword “The best hotels in New York City” let’s pretend like the results are something like 767,000 searches without quotes - and 1,000 with quotes. This would be something you may want to use, because with this exact keyword, you are only competing with 1,000 sites instead of 767,000.

If you get this great! However it literally took me weeks to understand the difference and to maximize my potential in my keyword research abilities.

One final thing to consider with keyword research.

You are only competing with those sights on the first page! I have been asked by many individuals “hey this site on page 3 is from the same article directory, surely I can outrank them” yes, I’m sure you can, however don’t concern yourself with page 3 results.

Just remember this golden rule when it comes to keyword research and your competition. “You are only competing with the sites on page 1” obviously if you can outrank them, you will be on page 1, which I assume is your ultimate goal in your article or blogging campaigns.

I hope this has helped with your keyword research.

Happy Holidays,

Steven Smith

Valuable post here.

Thanks for sharing wonderful post and hope it would be helpful for me in keyword research .

Good points.

Also, the adwords tool google offers has 3 settings:

a. broad
b. exact
c. phrase

if you try to figure out the inventory on phrases based on broad, you may be improperly estimating the "true" amount of traffic that's going to come to a website for that phrase. You'll sometimes see huge differences between "broad" and "exact." I like the latter frankly. It will help you truly understand what is more "possible" in terms of people coming to your site if you achieve #1 thru 3 positions in a SERP. Whereas, someone might wonder, "Why am I only getting 15 hits from 'xyz' search phrase" when google says there's 890 searches monthly? It's possibly because there's only actually 20 searches "exactly" a month.

Great work :) ...

Nice post, but you forgot to mention that you should take some research on PR of top 10 search results and number of backlinks to ranked pages.

Thanks for sharing your experience, it was really very helpful to me also.

Very informative for me I just "brain-storm" any related keyword to my niche and then use adwords to search for monthly search result but i think it's a bit old-fashioned hehe. i also use google keyword tool to check the competition against the keyword