that matches a searcher’s query, but may not
pages of their site based upon the numbers of
rely solely upon the terms chosen by you as an
visits that they received for those terms using
advertiser. That may mean that you may get a
paid search, without realizing that the amount
lot more people clicking upon your ad in search
of traffic was for broad match advertisements
results based upon those categories than just
based upon categories rather than the exact
the exact keywords that your advertisement is
match numbers. Broad match ads might send
based upon.
1,000 visitors to their pages, but exact match
ads would likely only deliver a fraction of
On August 28th of last year, Google replaced
that amount, and so using those numbers for
the keyword suggestion tool that they offered
SEO is going to be disappointing. The Google
with The Google Keyword Planner. The
Keyword Planner does show search volumes in
Keyword Planner now shows search volumes
exact match numbers now, and is more likely
for keywords on an “exact match” basis, but
a closer reflection of the traffic that you might
the old suggestion tool used to show “broad
see if you optimize a page well for organic
match” search volumes by default, and you
search and rank highly.
had to go through a couple of steps to change
it to display “exact match” search volumes.
This led to some confusion, and I’ve worked
with more than one client who was trying to
do keyword research and had gathered search
volumes using the broad match numbers. It
was a little heartbreaking telling someone
that the search volume that they might expect
to see for a particular keyword phrase wasn’t
500+ searches a month, but rather around 12
if the keyword suggestion tool was set to exact
match instead of the default “broad match.”
The exact match numbers are closer to what
you might see in terms of search volume on
the organic search results you might see at
Google in organic results.
Since the switch over to the newer Keyword
Planner Tool, I’ve had some people tell me that
they planned keywords that they optimized