ALL YOU SEO people.
I’ve been watching changes happen in my keyword discovery tools. They don’t seem to work as well, anywhere. The counting machine gods have gone haywire – then this morning:
Google Adwords https://adwords.google.com (a free tool by the way) has started showing Search counts. Real monthly numbers, plus competition for those searches in the old graph form. If you don’t have this tool, go to Google.com, create an account.
Adwords is free, but this is where you can start a PPC campaign. On the Green toolbar, click “Tools”. Under the left column “Optimize Your Ads” click “Keyword Tool”. In the box enter your phrase (like Wichita Kansas Real Estate), or multiple phrases, or it can pull from your website.
NOW pay attention here…
Click on the “Approx Avg Search Volume” and the search terms put in order of most searches. June volume is displayed, and so is the advertiser competition.
After the keywords pop up, on the Right side note the drop down box that has “Broad” in it. This pull down box tells us how the term is broken up, and can pull a lot of data. Change that box to “Phrase”, and the volume changes drastically. EXAMPLE: Broad search – “homes for sale Wichita ks” is #1 with 22,200 searches (average). Phrase – “Wichita ks homes” is #1 with 18,100 searches. Exact – “Wichita Kansas real estate” is first with 2,900 monthly searches (6,600 in June).
What’s the difference?
Broad Match means your words can appear anywhere, any order in a search. Phrase means the exact phrase appears somewhere in the search, exact match means ONLY the words, in the order listed were searched for.
Why is this important?
If you don’t know what people are looking for, and how they arrange terms, you can’t make your site found by Google (and other search engines too)!
Comments(20)