Earn Money -Difference Between Broad and Exact Searches
Trying to earn extra money from home is a full-time job. It’s hard for many (even me) to work on earning money from the internet when there is no immediate benefit. Often times I question whether my ability and hard work will pay off. One important lesson that I’ve learned so far from my short time as an Internet Marketer is that this profession requires you to adapt and “roll with the punches”.
I felt like these past four months of research about ways to earn money have been very productive for me. I have recently started to implement my knowledge and so far I’ve seen great progress in all of my websites. There are points in life where you think you “know it all” and that nothing can stop you from your objectives. Well, I THOUGHT I knew it all until yesterday.
If you haven’t heard of the Keyword Academy (no affiliate link, don’t worry), I recommend going to the site to learn about the basics of earning money from blogs. The site is directed towards people who are new to the Internet Marketing community. I’ve learned a few things from that site and I think you could benefit as well.
When watching the videos and reading the forums of the Academy, I read a post about broad vs. exact searches. I skimmed through the forum posts and ignored most of it as I thought it wasn’t relevant to my keyword research. The jist of the forum post was about a guy that found a “green” keyword (green means that there are no competitors and that it will be easy to rank in Google for that specific word) and was wondering if the search word was “too good to be true”. Another forum poster congratulated him on finding the keyword and reminded him to do an “exact” search using Google’s Adwords Tool. Later in the post, the person that found the green keyword stated that they forgot to do an exact search and realized that they keyword was not as profitable as he thought after performing the Adwords exact search.
After reading the post, I was curious about how profitable my keywords actually were. I have been performing my keyword research based on “broad” based matches instead of “exact” matches. I didn’t realize that there was a HUGE difference between the two and how it relates to your daily potential profit. My potential profit after doing an exact search for some of my keywords was quite discouraging. Instead of making hundres of dollars a day, I realized that I would be making MUCH less than that. For example, I told you in my last post that “organic shampoo” was a $36 a day keyword. Here is the data that I used to come up with that conclusion (all data is from Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool and the Market Samurai software):
Broad Based Search Results
Daily Searches: 1,627
Searches for #1 position: 683
Adwords Cost Per Click: $2.46
Adwords Click-Thru Rate: 11.43%
$38 potential daily profit or 1,140
Also, the keyword competition for this search result was not that competitive so it was deemed a “green” keyword. This is the conclusion that I came up with for this keyword.
HOWEVER
Here is the exact search using the same software:
Daily Searches: 325
Searches for #1 position: 136
Adwords Cost Per Click: $1.21
Adwords Click-Thru Rate: 1.23%
$.40 potential daily profit or $12 a month!
There’s a considerable difference, right?
The reason there’s such a big difference in profit is because the broad based and exact search are searching for the keyword terms with different parameters.
Broad based searches look for everything that has your keyword within the search. For example, a broad based search of “organic shampoo” can have many variations:
organic shampoo and conditioner
Aveeno organic shampoo
where can i buy organic shampoo
All of these searches have the term “organic shampoo” and will be categorized as a broad based match. Each broad based match for this keyword is technically it’s own keyword or a long tail version of your primary. This means that I would not be able to earn money unless I ranked high for thousands of long-tail keywords that contained the word “organic shampoo”. That’s one of the reasons why the estimated click through rate was so high for this term. People are clicking on ads that contain the search term “organic shampoo” but are not necessarily searching for that exact term.
An exact search is when someone is searching for the EXACT keyword term into Google. The way to perform an exact search is by putting brackets around the keyword term. So if I want to only search for page results that had the term “organic shampoo” and the term should be in that specific order. Usually, an exact search will narrow down the about of page results within your search as Google tries to eliminate the “fluff”.
I guess I’ve learned my lesson and I’m glad that I learned it when I did. At least I didn’t spend 6 months developing a blog and realizing that in the end it wasn’t worth anything. That’s the thing about this profession, if you’re not willing to keep learning and utilize your new knowledge, you will fall behind and not make as much as other people. The other thing is to knowing when to give up on specific niches that aren’t profitable. I realize that you can become emotionally invested in a blog, especially after you’ve worked on it for awhile, but if you know that it’s going to earn you money, then I would strongly advise dropping it* and working on a profitable blog.
LUCKILY, the other niches that I picked are still profitable and are still worth pursuing (even after performing the exact based search). My next post will continue on with my step by step approach to choosing the right keyword and learning how to earn money online.
*However, if you’ve invested a lot of time in this blog and it has good back links and PR, then you can use this blog to link to your money site.
In: keyword research · Tagged with: broad vs exact search, earn money online