Search Engine Keyword Analysis Pitfalls - Getting Fooled by Broad Matching
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If you use Overture or Google AdWords as your primary keyword tool, you should always keep in mind that these tools were made for pay per click advertisers and not for SEO research. Since they’re designed to support advertisers, these tools follow each PPC engine’s default matching options, and this means the engine will report keyword popularity using broad match results. That can greatly inflate your numbers.
Broad matching means that the your keyword will match search queries using either the singular and plural forms of your keyword, plus any longer queries that include your keyword.
For example, if you check the search popularity of the phrase “health care” with Google AdWords, Google will predict a very attractive 22.0 clicks per day. But this number includes broad match results for phrases like “home health care,” “mental health care” and “health care center.” These phrases may indeed be ones you want to target in your SEO work, but you probably won’t win them by optimizing for the words “health care” alone.
To get the true picture of a keyword’s popularity from Google, you need to expressly wrap the keywords in brackets. Ask Google to predict the popularity of “[health care]” (with brackets) and you’ll get an estimated 5.5 clicks per day. That’s a big difference.
Similar issues exist when using Overture to check popularity. Overture ignores differences between singular and plural forms of words. Check the popularity of “Chicago hotel” and Overture will report 73,461 searches. Check the popularity of the plural form “Chicago hotels” and Overture reports exactly the same number. Even if you expressly wrap the phrase in brackets or quotes, Overture stubbornly reports the same number.
Just as importantly, Overture jumbles the order of your search terms, which means you have little insight into word order. That’s a shame, because word order is important for maximum optimization. Ask Overture for the popularity of “downtown Chicago hotels” and it reports a single number. You’ll have to use other keyword tools to get insight here.
Ask WordTracker the same question, and it will tell you that “downtown Chicago hotels” is more than twice as popular as “Chicago downtown hotels,” and three times more popular than “hotels in downtown Chicago.” That’s much more useful data.
Next: Misreading the Competition >>
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