Mike, go by the global monthly search volume..

And ya, match type = exact

I generally like to go with keywords that hare higher than 4.4k exact, although there are several times when I go with 2.9k or 3.6k if the keyword is a targeted one. Don’t discount the 2.9 and 3.6’s…

Once I find a kw though, I check to see if the domain is available via namecheap as a com/org or net. If so, then I do a search for “keyword” in quotes to see the competition. After seeing the competition(preferably 15-30k ish) I then do a search on the keyword without the quotes to see the REAL first page competition I’ll be up against…

From there, I check the PR of all the pages, and sometimes the Yahoo backlinks (use SEO for Firefox to get this info)..

-Mike

Sorry to keep bugging you! I’m a bit confused about the keyword research process when using Google adwords.

1) When the Adwords Tool search results come back I can see 2 columns: Local Search Volume and Global Monthly Search Volume. Often one hits the criteria but the other does not. Which do you use?

2) For Match Type the drop down should is set to Exact. Is this correct?

3) If the monthly exact searches are above 4.4K+ then you said you move on to look at the competition. Do you look at the Phrase competition in the Google search page i.e. “keyword keyword” in quotes? Or do you look for exact for this as well?

Thanks Mike.

Hey Clefty,

cool man :> Thanks for the info..6 days would be a bit slow for me, I need to get things done quick, I need a full time income like yesterday!…Human Rewriter get back to you in 24-36 hours.. you can also get a discount on the $3.50..20% off if you order a lot of credits which would bring it down to $2.80.

I’ll talk about this more in the next update :>

Hey, I use exact match. When it’s particularly difficult to find keywords where exact match is 4.4k +, only then do I look at phrase match.

So if all I can find are keywords that are around 3k exact, I will judge my ability to rank for variations of that keyword by looking at the phrase match. If the keyword searches jump from say 3k exact match to 12k phrase match, it’s a good sign…if it only jumps to 4.4k phrase match, I might skip over that and look for better keywords.

But ya, 95% of the time I look at exact match..I never look at broad match..

-Mike

Do you use phrase match or exact match when determining whether a keyword is worth building a sniper site for? And do you ever look at broad match to measure the competition?

Thanks so much.

Hey Rob, ya I remember those times, back in 1996-97 I used to manage 3 different websites on my ISP’s bandwith :>

As far as targeting keywords that have 1,000 exact searches, it’s a waste of your time….that’s not enough traffic to generate sales out of. You need to be looking in the range of 4.4 or 5.4 – 14.4k exact searches…3k exact at the bare minimum if it’s a good keyword.

For Hubpages I’ve been going after keywords that have 300+ searches..usually 300-3k, sometimes higher though. The competition for high CPC keywords is a lot tougher…I’m still new to Hubs so I’ll see how that works out.

Now google is smarter (remember how traffic equalizer worked), trademark laws are being enforced among other advertising laws, and powerful free tools are available to everyone.

I put some seed keywords into google, got about 35 domains with 5k+ exact searchs, and every com/net/org domain name was taken. After adding dashes, numbers, or prefix/suffix stuff, I found a few that made sense. However, they would be competing against several authority and established sites, some of which didn’t even used obvious keywords in the domain, but were in the url and/or content somewhere.

So I can totally empathize with you on researching. I was trying to hit up a few other niches that are getting 100K+ exact searches on the two and three word phrases, but dwindle to less than 5k+ very quickly. The competition is rather lite once you get past the main keywords, but so are the searches.

So the phrase “widget trees” is like 500k exact, but “grow your own widget trees” is like 1k exact, and every variation that would make sense is also about 1k.

Would you just drop this as a niche for a sniper site? Even when widget trees is extremely popular? Would you try to compete on the main keywords for hubpages?

Thanks again for this blog.