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1:18 am
June 10, 2011
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QuoteIn my experience, as I do this myself, unless I'm seriously researching, when I enter a phrase, or keywords in Google, I don't bother with the quotation marks, as I usually find what I need with them.
This poses an issue when considering keywords to use in campaigns. Sure, if I do it by the book, create my brilliant keywords, place them within quotes, and check their monthly usage, volume competition etc, I find they are just what I need. BUT, take away the quote marks & they just sink into a mass of thick competition that may end up in with millions of similar hits.
The majority of people, I think, unless they are specifically intent on finding a specific thing and are dedicated and serious about the research, will be more broad, many probably aren't even aware of quote marks. This being the case, it damages the effectiveness of spending so much time crafting the best possible keyword structure.
Or does it? Any thoughts about this?
George
Cheers,
George
4:20 am
June 7, 2011
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Hey George,
The reason we are assessing the competition by searching our keywords with quotes is just that, purely to assess the competition. It has nothing to do with how people will actually perform their search. Like you, 99% of people will search without quotes. However, if you wrote an article about the keyword "Johnny Cash" and searched it without quotes you would also be getting served results for articles about (hypothetically), a guy names Johnny who needs some cash. HOWEVER, that same article would not rank very well because it's not actually related to the keyword "Johnny Cash" and Google knows this.
So... because it is only the websites that use the word "Johnny Cash" that are going to be sites that present any amount of real competition, we perform a search with quotes so that we can assess the true number of sites that are relevant to our term and thus have a more reliable assessment of the number of competing sites for a particular term.
Another way you can assess the strength of your competition is by doing an in title search. The search string would look like this (include the quotes), "intitle:john oszajca". When I perform a search for my name without the quotes I get 789,000 results. When I put it in quotes I get 697,000 (my last name being rare that number didn't drop much), but when I do the in title search it drops dramatically to a little over 6000. I don't have enough experience using the in title search to give you any reliable criteria, but it tells you a lot about how stiff your competition is because theoretically, it is going to be pretty easy to beat a page in the search engines that doesn't use your keyword in the title of the content.
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1:53 pm
June 9, 2011
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On John's point… and to try to further clarify this…
People pretty much never search with the quotes on… and neither will your target audience.
However, there is an old saying about the search engines and that saying is "Every website ranks for something".
The real trick is choosing what you rank for instead of accidentally ranking for things.
When you are doing keyword research, using the quotes will weed out a large number of crappy sites who tripped and accidentally landed on the search engine.
They aren't your competitors, so their very presence simply inflates numbers and nothing more.
The ones that are going for the "money" keywords will strategically show up when you search with the quotes on because they intended to be there (or that they didn't care and are truly an authority site).
Now there will be times that you'll still accidentally rank for things you didn't intend to rank for, but when you approach this properly, those accidents are happy ones instead of just "Why do I rank for that?" ones.
Your job with this is nothing more than getting a good ranking. The real measure of your competitiveness is how well you get people to take the appropriate action (filling a form, visiting your squeeze page), by using you super ninja direct response skills.
You may never get the top ranking, but that doesn't matter if you are getting all of the sign-ups/ sales.
Does that make sense?
5:22 am
June 10, 2011
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Thanks John & Steve, appreciated !
2:59 pm
August 27, 2011
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Google is cagy.
Often times the results numbers are a little 'overblown' as well. You'll can potentially get millions of pages of results but if you actually scroll to the very last page in the search results and times it by 10 (the number of results per page) you'll get a much smaller number.
Example:
I just searched for the term inner ear infection (without quotes)
Google tells me that there are 1.2 million results
However, there are only 82 full pages (82 x 10 = 820) plus 3 listings on the last page.
Grand total of pages indexed = 823 out of 1.2 million
I'm sharing this only to illustrate that even if it appears to be a ton of competition against you...it's not as bad as it may seem.
However, on the flip side the only real competition are the sites occupying the top ten (top 4 if you really want to get down to brass tacks). If they're all ranking for the exact keyword you're targeting, they all have aged domains (or at least older than yours), they have more links than you and they have a page rank of 6+ - chances are you'll never outrank them or it would not be worth the effort to attempt to do so, even if you only had 10 competitors.
4:42 pm
June 9, 2011
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All really good points. Especially about the page rank.
Again, getting down to brass tacks, this where copy makes the difference. It's fine being the 5th spot if your title and description are compelling enough.
Thanks for sharing this, Mike
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