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Why do you Google the your keywords “in quotes” to get their competition?

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Why do you Google the your keywords “in quotes” to get their competition?

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We enter each and every keyword phrase into Google.com with “quotes” around the term, which shows us, in the bar on the upper right corner of the Google results page, the number of websites that are using that phrase in an exact order (e.g. Results 1 – 10 of about 1,100,000).

Now, most users, when searching casually, will enter what’s called a broad match, not using “quotes” around their search query. This leads them to results where they could find the keyword phrase in any order on any given page.

For example, if you Google the term good cooking, without quotes around the term, you would get results where the words good and cooking were on the same page but may not appear side-by-side, in that exact order. So the word good may appear in a completely separate paragraph from the word cooking.

We Google the term in quotes to find out the exact competition for a keyword because an exact match gets higher rankings than a broad match.

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By Amanda MacArthur

Research Director & Managing Editor

Amanda is responsible for all the articles you read on the Mequoda Daily portal and every email newsletter delivered to your inbox from us. She is also our in-house social media expert and would love to chat with you over on @Mequoda. She has worked with Mequoda for almost a decade, helping to evolve the Mequoda Method through research, testing and developing new best practices in digital publishing, editorial strategy, email marketing and audience development. Amanda is a co-author of our four digital publishing handbooks.

Co-authored handbooks:

Contact Amanda:

Contact Amanda via email at amanda (at) mequoda (dot) com, @amaaanda, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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