[question]You suggest putting “quotes” around each term when looking up competitive data. Can you explain the reasoning behind this?
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[answer]Currently, our process for looking up competitive data (aka looking up how many webpages are competing for a specific phrase in Google) is a manual process. We have interns that will for every one of the keyword phrases in a publisher’s universe (could be anywhere from 800 to 5000) actually go to Google.com and look up the competition.
Every time you do a Google search you’ve probably noticed in the bar on the upper right thatit will tell you the number of websites that are using that phrase (e.g. Results 1 – 10 of about 1,100,000).
Well most users, when searching casually, will normally enter what’s called a broad match (not using “quotes” around their search query). This leads them to results where they could find the phrase in any order or any variation. For example, if you Google good cooking, you would get pages where the words good and cooking were on the same page but could be that good was never right in front of the word cooking. The variation on that is called an exact match, and in Google.com if you enter a search query with “quotes” around the phrase, Google will only show you the pages that have the phrase as a contiguous array of text, so that good cooking is together. And in most cases, the number of competitive pages will go way down. It’ll go from maybe a 1,000,000 down to 100,000 or even 50,000.
Now, we care about that not because many users are ever going search in Google with “quotes” around their search, but through repetition and research have discovered that pretty much 90-percent of the publishers that are going to appear on pages one, two, or three for a broad-match search will be exact match websites. Or, put another way, Google favors exact match; it very much tries to put the websites on page one, two, and three that are those that have exactly the phrase the user is looking for.
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