One question that I am asked many times is why, when doing a competition search, do we wrap the search term in quotes?
I will try and explain.
What we’re trying to achieve here is to estimate how many pages we are competing against for a certain term. To do that we only want to see in the results the web pages that have been targeted for the phrase.
We’re not interested at this stage with any pages that may have the individual words within the phrase somewhere on the page, but those that are specifically targeting the actual phrase as we have typed it.
Of course when people actually search for that term, most of the time they will not enclose it in quotes, but that’s not the point. The search engine will look at the term as you have entered it and try to match it’s results for relevance and there are 3 basic ways web masters try and ensure that the search engine thinks the web page is relevant for the term:
- Make sure the term is actually on the web page somewhere.
- Make sure the term is actually in the title.
- Make sure the term is in the anchor text of links pointing back to the page.
By enclosing our term in quotes we are asking the search engine to return just the pages where the phrase appears just as we have typed it. This effectively is our competition.
Now many keyword researchers would argue that in fact, as we all know that the most important place to put our phrase on the webpage is in the title, then if we search for that, then this would give us a far more targeted view of our competition.
It’s a valid point, but I still prefer to use the ‘in quotes’ method which captures it whether it’s on the page or in the title. In our Niche Data Packs, we use this to give us our competition data and of course it means that if it’s a fairly low competition phrase when searched for with quotes then it’s going to be even less competiton when searched for ‘in title’.
By the way, if you want to search for the phrase just in the title use the following format (on Google, may differ on others):
intitle:"keyword phrase"
You could take this one step further to really zero in on your competition by searching for those pages with the phrase as anchor text in incoming links as well, using the following:
inanchor:"keyword phrase"
They’re all valid methods of researching competition and ultimately the choice is yours, but for now, we will stick to the ‘in quotes’ method for our data packs.
