The Truth About Competing Pages – SEO Gurus Are Liars

Posted in Keyword Research on Aug 19th, 2010 | 4 comments

You’ve seen it time and time again. Google SERPs screenshots with red handwritten font and hand drawn looking circles showing off the millions of competing pages a certain keyword has and the site the person was able to rank #1 in “just 28 days!” On the surface, it looks impressive. I mean, damn, 25 million results for that keyword? #1? That person must know their shit, right?

I’ve literally never seen a guru advertise a product with a screenshot like this that showed a legitimate, challenging ranking that they earned. Nearly every single time, the person is blowing smoke up your ass, for a variety of reasons that I’m going to try and explain here.

Let’s Get Started

Anyone who tells you that SEO is easy and fast and is trying to 1) get you to buy their software/ebook/service or 2) trying to get you to opt-in to their list and are hands down not telling you the truth and probably don’t know the first thing about SEO, link building, or anything else. They most likely grew up in Warrior Forum and have learned that it’s more important to launch a product than actually learn a single fucking thing about what they are actually trying to sell. It’s a self perpetuating mess that has left the SEO space full of shitty products, shitty guides, and shitty advice. (more…)

The Difference Between Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match Search Volume Data

Posted in Keyword Research on May 7th, 2010 | 2 comments

This will be a quick post, no real need to go into deep detail. This is something that’s important and a lot of people ask me about so I want to make sure everyone has a clear understanding of what’s going on.

Let’s start. There are 3 ways to check keyword search volume with Google: broad, phrase, and exact match. What the hell is the difference? And which one should you be checking search volume with?

Broad Match

Broad match is the default setting when using the Keyword Tool. What broad match means is that any time any part of the keyword shows up in a search phrase, that data gets added to the reported total searches per month. For instance, if the keyword is “sunflower seeds”, then any search with either “sunflower” or “seeds” or “sunflower seeds” in it will be added into the total volume. So the actual search terms “sunflower seeds” might only get 100 searches, while “seeds” gets 2000 searches and “fruit seeds” gets 600 searches.

So broad match search volume is an aggregate of all searches involving any combination of any of the keywords as well as other words you didn’t account for. It’s an inflated number when estimating search volume.

Phrase Match

Phrase match keyword search volume works like this: if you check phrase match search volume for “sunflower seeds” then the number returned will include all traffic for the main phrase as well as phrases like “huge sunflower seeds” and “sunflower guide for seeds”. The number returned is the aggregate of all search phrases that must include the entire set of main keywords, no matter if they are split up by other words or not. This number is definitely more accurate than broad match, but can still be slightly inflated.

Exact Match

Finally, there is exact match keyword data. The volume of searches returned when checking exact match keywords is simply for only that single keyphrase. So there are no aggregates involved, it’s only the total number of searches for just that exact phrase, typed exactly into Google, with no other words included. This is the most accurate number to reference when researching niches, as it doesn’t aggregate traffic you might not actually rank for and get. You should always check your search volumes with this setting on.

Finishing Up

The point of this post is that it is easy to be deceived by broad and phrase match data, so you should use exact match data when searching for niches. When trying to get ranked for certain keywords, you cannot guarantee that you will be able to rank for all variations and combinations of keywords, so the most realistic estimate of possible traffic is the exact match search volume data.

I’ll post more this weekend, I have some cool ideas in the works.

Til then,

D

Interpreting the Market Samurai SEO Competition Module Data

Posted in Keyword Research on Mar 28th, 2010 | 5 comments

This one is a little bit more on the basic side, but I think it’s something important that needs to be covered, so it’s a good place to start this blog at. Market Samurai is a ridiculously cool tool. It isn’t particularly doing anything secret or ahead of the curve, it just gathers a lot of data from a lot of different sources and displays it in a very clean and organized way.

Now, some of the modules in it don’t make a whole lot of sense when you first open them. Once you get used to it though, you can use it to quickly analyze the difficulty of a niche to get an idea of whether or not it’s a worth attempting to crack it for an SEO project. I’m not professing to be an expert, but I think the following pointers can help clear some things up for people who use this tool but are curious about all of the little extras in it. So here it goes…

(more…)