Module 1 Day 3: Exactly Phrased Broads go Fishing for Trout #tc10

Simple stuff – Knew it all before – The Challenge 2010 covers Traffic and  Competition especially detailing the differences between exact, phrase and broad matches in Google. Then of course I thought about it and realised I didn’t understand it as well as I thought.

Dr. Anthony Fernando goes through how to judge traffic estimates and web page rankings over time, why the broad match is use for traffic and phrase match for competion.

Now I know the most effective people in the world take instruction and run with it. Sometimes I wish I was one of those people but I have to admit it to myself, whenever I have the time to learn something in depth, I have got to do it.

The subject of broad, phrase and exact keywords is one of those things.

I had a fair understanding of it before, but I found when I looked deeper it seemed to change, just like studying quantum physics, really!!, it is exactly the same process of thought.

So what was causing the confusion? Phrase and Exact matching – What on earth were the results I saw in Google. Were they, as I originally thought exact phrases when I put quotes round them or were they phrase matches. When you look in the Google Advanced Search form it tells me it is an exact search I am performing after all, but it was described as a phrase search in the video.

Then the obvious hit me – of course it’s both when you type it in using quotes!!

The exact phrase will be returned of course but it will be amongst loads of other text normally. That text will likely be all your phrase keyphrases you are looking for as well as just the exact keyphrase. Why was I being so blind to this? It’s simple but it caused me no end of confusion. That doesn’t bode well for me does it?…

But saying that the whole area does seem to be filled with mystique and dark arts. This is the one area when you can measure on average how much work you need to put into your microniche and if you search hard enough you can still find some nice ones out there.

I created a mini cheat sheet to help me remember which is which now – which can really only be understood if you watch the above video. Or inded you know it all! Like I thought I did.

Upcoming Experiment in Time (Well – effort really)

For my part in the Challenge instead of 7 ideas from yesterday I have 42 waiting to be tested in the forthcoming process. I am tempted to run an experiment on finding niches soon. What I am thinking is to gather all the niche finding ideas – and I have a personal list of almost a 100 different methods – and test each method on its ability to find Challenge affirmed niches. I will share with my team, The Challenge UK first but then if I am not able to use them myself and effort wasted I would rather posts them up here. Might be a great little project. I don’t know if anyone else wants to join in but it would need to be time boxed, for example allowing 1 hour to use the method and then testing how many Challenge microniches are green.

Some Interesting Forum Posts

• The unreliability of certain long tail results – http://challenge.co/forum/showthread.php/113-Can-really-long-tail-keywords-with-lots-of-searches-be-trusted
• The unreliability in fact of Google results – You don’t tell Google – Google Tells you!! – http://challenge.co/forum/showthread.php/906-Google-result-backwards

Fellow Challenger Blogs

• Day 9: Keyword Traffic and Competition
• Challenge: Module 1 – Days 2 & 3
• Hmm… a little behind on the blog…
• Day 3 and Trout Fishing
• The Challenge Module 1/Day 3 – KeyWords
• Checking in: Finished my The Challenge 2010, Module 01, Day 03 #TC10
• Exact Match, Phrase Match, Broad Match – Knowledge is Power!