Narrowing Your Online Search

We would all prefer to have a more meaningful return for our search efforts so here are some things to keep in mind not only when entering search terms yourself, but when selecting and recommending keywords to clients.

There are essentially 3 ways to search: broad match, phrase match, and exact match.

The broad match means that Google will return results for each of the words in your search term. For example, if you type in article writing then the results will show sites that have article on them and those that have writing on them. This will be a very broad list of sites.

The phrase match occurs when you put quotes around the search term. So entering “article writing” will return results that have those two words on the site. This will provide significant reduction in results, but possibly more relevant than in the broad match.

The exact match search would involve putting brackets around the search term. Typing (article writing) into the search engine will return results containing that exact phrase. This is much more targeted.  If you were to type in a long tail keyword for an exact match, such as (article writing for websites) you will find a significantly reduced number of results, but they would all be exactly what you are looking for.