[question]
Why do you Google the your keywords “in quotes” to get their competition?
[/question]
[answer]
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.
[/answer]
