Keyword Match Type in SEO
Posted by admin on Monday, December 14, 2009 · 5 Comments 
It’s a given
to talk about
keyword match types
in PPC (especially
Adwords), but very
few people seem to
talk about the
meaning of keyword
match types in SEO.
I want to do exactly
that, because
it’s just as
important. In PPC,
manipulating the
match types is an
important strategy
that can save your
budget, perfect the
CTR and quality
score, and even
increase the
conversions (by
focusing on more
targeted keywords).
But what does
keyword match type
have to do with SEO?
A random
introduction to
search engine
optimization tells
us to look up the
traffic numbers in a
keyword tool
regardless of the
match type
(it’s broad by
default) and use it
as a guide. More
attention is drawn
to the competition,
however, even though
in SEO we
don’t pay per
click, we spend long
hours optimizing our
pages and building
links. That’s
an investment to be
regarded as such!
How
many times have you
followed the traffic
numbers suggested by
a keyword tool,
worked hard to get
to page one on
Google only to see
there’s
nowhere near the
traffic you’ve
expected to see?
Most of the time
this happens due to
not paying attention
to the keyword match
type you’ve
based your SEO on
(other times
it’s because
of data errors
– the tools
aren’t
perfect).You have to realize
one thing first, Google’s
Keyword Tool
(and all other tools
based on it) is made
for PPC advertisers
and therefore it is
designed to suit
their needs. The
broad match
type which you get
by default is not
what you will get
from people typing
in the keyword in
Google, it’s
the traffic from a
whole bunch of
keywords that Google
considers relevant.
That traffic is only
available to PPC
advertisers, so it
makes no sense
whatsoever to use
that data for your
SEO.
The phrase
match is closer to
what we need, but
it’s still far
from accurate. This
match will provide
the traffic from all
keywords that have
the key phrase in
them, but again,
only for PPC
advertisers. In SEO
you will have to
work on all
keywords that meet
the criteria in
order to get all the
traffic from phrase
match. Sure, you
will get a few such
keywords
automatically as you
are likely to rank
for related terms
too, but it is
impossible to tell
for how many (if at
all) of them you
will rank.
That leaves us with
the exact
match, which makes
most sense to use in
estimating SEO
traffic. It may seem
common sense, but
many marketers will
mistakenly settle
with other match
types and will be
very disappointed
when they
don’t get the
expected results.
It’s better to
be conservative and
underestimate the
results than to be
overly optimistic
and overestimate
them!
But other than the
exact match, other
match types
can’t be
useless, can they?
Of course not, and
here’s how we
can use them for our
SEO projects:
- Broad match indicates the overall market size, and it’s useful in niche research to identify the size of a niche.
- Phrase to broad match ratio tells us a little bit about how much unrelated traffic some niche keywords may have (for example, keyword “bull” will match the animal, financial term, the energy drink and so on – but only one of them may be your niche).
- Phrase to exact match ratio is perhaps the most interesting indicator. It shows us the segmentation of our target market and the intent of the searchers. In most cases, it’s common sense to know what they want if we know our target market (for example we know that the keyword “laptop” will have big phrase matches for “laptop battery”, “laptop bag” and so on), but this is the cold hard data that tells us what is important in our niche and what’s not, what categories to use and so on.
- Keyword trend is not a match type but it’s an important indicator too. Some keywords are seasonal or fad keywords which have high peeks at some point in time that skews the average data significantly. It’s a good idea to check your target keywords in Insights for Search for those cases, as well as to see where your niche is heading.
To recap, the
exact match
is the number one
thing to look at
when estimating SEO
traffic. In addition
to that, other
keyword match types
tell us a lot about
our target market
and its intent, but
they have less to do
with the actual
traffic we will get.
Finally, I’ll
end the post with
another important
aspect of keyword
traffic research.
The numbers provided
by Google Keyword
Tool are amounts of
searches per day, to
estimate the monthly
visits you can
expect from various
positions, you have
to adjust the
numbers by the
position on the
SERPs:
| Position | % of searches |
|---|---|
| 1 | 42.3% |
| 2 | 11.92% |
| 3 | 8.44% |
| 4 | 6.03% |
| 5 | 4.86% |
| 6 | 3.99% |
| 7 | 3.37% |
| 8 | 2.98% |
| 9 | 2.83% |
| 10 | 2.97% |
Source of this
table: pagetrafficblog.com
That concludes this
post, I hope you can
take something from
it with you.
April 7th, 2010 at 9:50 am
This is a great post! Where are the other comments?
April 7th, 2010 at 10:11 am
Thanks
No-one’s posted them
May 11th, 2010 at 10:54 am
Doing keyword research for my company, thought that matching types had to be important for SEO, then typed “keyword match types SEO” on google, and here I landed. Great article, will share it.
July 25th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Very good article, informative!
Thanx for sharing:)
Petter
August 13th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Great article indeed. I really don’t like it when so called “SEO Experts” use google keyword selector for selecting keywords because as you said it, it is made for PPC advertisers.