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Keyword Research – To Quote or Not To Quote, That is The Question

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Posted by San in Keyword Research

You know I could cry now when I think of all the time I wasted trying to figure out keyword research. All those experts telling me how to do it and how once I figured it out, I’d be able to make a killing on the search engines. Only it never happened for me the way it did for them.

I watched the videos over and over again. I bought the courses. I hung on their every word. And yet, I couldn’t for the life of me find a keyword that I could rank for, on the first page of Google, that would bring me enough visitors so that I might actually be in with a chance of converting some of them into paying customers.

And whenever I doubted what they were saying, up they’d pop with yet another video showing me in great detail how ‘proper’ keyword research was done. Or another expert would pop up with yet another little trick up their sleeve that promised to show me how easy it was.

Pfft.

The thing was, I could never quite get my head around why they all insisted I typed the keyword into Google in quotes? Surely, ordinary folks, (the ones who I wanted to actually find my stuff) wouldn’t do that. After all, until I started trying to earn money online, I didn’t even know you could do that.  And I’m betting you didn’t either!

So why would I do that? Oh yes, to find out the competition. Because if I didn’t know how strong the competition was I wouldn’t be able to figure out if the keyword was worth going after. And of course ‘competition’ was defined as whoever else was targeting that particular keyword.

Being fairly new to the game, I kept my mouth shut and my head down and just tried to make it work. After all, they were the experts, they’d been doing it for so much longer than me and they were making gazillions of money so why wouldn’t I listen to them?

Eventually, I just got sick of it all and more from laziness than anything else, I quit doing it their way. (Yeah, it’d be nice to tell you I just accidentally stumbled upon it but that would be lying). I decided that if I was going to get people to actually find my content then I had to go after the keywords that they were typing in to the search engines. And I had to go after the ‘exact match’ of what they were typing in. Which, of course, meant leaving out the quotes.

You see, competition is nothing to do with who’s targeting what keyword. It’s all to do with who’s ranking for them. And I mean ranking without quotes.

First page of Google, with no quotes, whether the page is targeted to the keyword or not, is your competition. If you can beat them you can beat the rest of the silly buggers who are targeting it in quotes.

You can check out the video below to see the difference between the two methods. And yes, I know there’s a lot of folks out there who are going to disagree with me. You can scream and yell all you please. It won’t change anything. Searchers don’t use quotes. Marketers use quotes. Who would you rather viewed your content?


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