The Importance of Match Type in Keyword Research

Let’s talk about keyword research for it’s the first most important step in most Internet marketing projects. How do we understand keyword research? Many beginners think it’s a simple process of discovering targeted keyword phrases and checking two numbers – traffic and competition. Some others also know about different types of competition.

But most marketers miss the keyword match types which are crucial to understand and evaluate. Any one of Internet marketing tools shows three different match types – broad, phrase and exact. Many beginners make a mistake of checking the traffic for broad match, which is far from real traffic you can ever get from that keyword in SEO.

Some more knowledgeable marketers check the phrase match, some others go as far as exact match, but very few understand that relationship between the two and what it means not only for traffic, but also for the intent of the searchers. Let me give you an example.

Take a keyword “laptop” for example. You can check the number for exact match and conclude that this is the most conservative amount of traffic to be expected. But it has a very different phrase match traffic level. What does that mean? In this case you can also notice such related phrases as “laptop bettery” or “laptop bag”, which clearly show that those who search for “laptop” may actually be looking for accessories. If your website is only about laptops and have no accessories, you’re wasting a lot of traffic.

While this example may seem straightforward and probably anyone running a laptop website will include accessories too, it may not be so obvious in other niches.