Good Monday morning to everyone. The last week of October is here and fall has kicked into gear. Living in Noth Carolina has many advantages, the great weather, low pollution, affordable housing, low stress, etc. But one thing I didn’t expect was the creative and humorous ways local ministers used to get more members for their congregations – or at least more attention. Check this sign out:

Creative Ways to Get Attention

Classic.

Let’s use “the spoken word” as an example in understanding keyword competition, because it is still greatly misunderstood and many business owners are making key mistakes by testing for keywords which are getting far less traffic than they think.

For this exercise, we’ll use Google’s Keyword Tool and we’ll do a search for “spoken word.”

Broad Match

Notice how the search volume displays 135,000 searches and the Match Type in the upper right corner is set to “Broad”. This will return all searches with the word “spoken” and “word” but not necessarily together. This is the default setting and can throw you off.

Instead, use “Exact Match” as it will give you the real search numbers:

Exact Match

As you can see, the search numbers drop to 40,000. That is less than one-third of the Broad Match number – which is a huge difference.

So, when you do your keyword research ALWAYS use Exact Match so you have a more clear understanding of the estimated number of searches.