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It does look like a broad vs exact match issue in numbers.

The easiest way I can think of is to go into the rankings section in a campaign for which you have already added all the keywords then export the rankings report as a CSV. Once you open the CSV in Excel or similar you can copy the keywords column and paste them in bulk into the "manage keywords" section for your new campaign. Sadly the total keyword limit is 300 for the Pro account - it is restrictive, but on the other hand you can look at it as an opportunity to prioritise your keywords and make sure you are monitoring the most important ones.

When you are doing your link building target the following things: Both terms in varied anchor texts Target on page content to target both terms Target internal link building for each term. You can mix up techniques to achieve many positives

When you perform the search for "rapid drug detox" what do you see? More specifically, what would compel any user to click on your search result? there are 3 google ads and 2 organic listings before your listing the results are full of other sites: 8 additional adds on the page to the right of your listing. If you consider the total list you are 1 of 21 listings on the page. The results above you have almost the same title so there is no reason not to click the first results. You want to offer a compelling reason to skip the #1 and 2 ranked site and click your link. Some things to try: Change your title to "Rapid Drug Detox" and nothing else to see if it helps you gain the #1 ranking. Change your title to "Rapid Drug Detox - Top Safety Record!" or something similar and appropriate for your business. Other possibilities are "Rapid Drug Detox - Top Success Rates", "Rapid Drug Detox - 5 star rated", etc. Change your meta description. Your current description is ok, but try others. Since your title begins with "Rapid Drug Detox" the description does not have to as well. You can summarize and say "all narcotic detox" rather then listing them all out and add other helpful info instead. To be clear, your current title and descriptions are not necessary bad, but you are in a competitive environment and testing is required to see what changes can be made to improve your results. Try changing once a month and measuring the results. Make sure to not start counting the change until after Google captures it. Last point, consider some changes to your site so you can improve your rankings: your footer has a list of 50 states. Remove the list. It looks spammy. your copyright date shows 2010, update it to 2011 your main testimonial only shares the bad part. The point of a testimonial is to share what a positive difference your company has made. Your current testimonial basically says "A week ago I was hooked on drugs" and that's it. Where is the happy ending? You need to complete it with "...and now thanks to MDS Rapid Drug Detox program I am finally free". There should be a link to a testimonials page on your site. Examine the #1 ranked site and notice where they provide a better appearance. They have more trust symbols such as TRUSTe and other badges, for example. The bottom line is you want more traffic. You can improve your rankings and improve your SERP listing to get better CTR. Even when that happens, you want the best possible site so you can convert that traffic into sales.

Google makes semantic level query assumptions by default now- that's part of the function that allows google to suggest queries as you type.  To address your question more directly, it depends on the individual terms and whether or not Google is giving complete, partial, or no equivalence to those terms.  Non-profit and nonprofit are treated nearly the same in organic ranking- the top results are identical and the remaining results have more variance. You can experiment with this idea and you'll see some of this phenomena. As for "concrete evidence"- you aren't going to get it.  You should study the results of your individual terms' rankings because that's exactly what Google did to weight potential results... at least, it's a part of what they did.  They have a vast army of "raters" that look into the relevance of query/results and assign a value to the search engine's success/lack of success.  In the end, a load of data is collected in various categorically-structured groups of search terms. Are they using the data attached to these unique categories to craft a more relevant set of results?  I don't know if they are, but I find it hard to believe they flush all of that expensive data down the drain just to use an umbrella algorithm to spit out all query results. In the end, I think you'll find that worrying about the minor difference between the two is wasted time if you're looking for a concrete answer.  To avoid the pitfall, stick to a single convention on each individual page, but vary the convention from page to page.  When you search one or the other, watch how Google bolds the alternate terms in the list of results..  Compare the 1st page results of the two alternate terms..  are you seeing a pattern? With the other components of SEO on-track, it effectively won't matter at all.

Sounds great. Thank you so much! You are truly a master.

Yes it's a good article, although as ryan pointed out some of the info is old and incorrect (about inlinks not hurting) the maiin concept about page rank still holds true.

positive thinking ? But ya... I think Egol is right. What are his objectives?

That's a 28 character domain (including periods) which is a bit long. Also, a four word phrase is fairly long. I agree with John in trying to find a shorter name. Also, exact match domains won't always have a boost, so you want something that's brandable and easy to use after an update changes the boosting.

Well the term I'm trying to rank for is "Lack of sleep." My website: http://www.lackofsleephq.com I've built a lot of no follow links via blog comments mostly. I'm trying to develop more web 2.0 strategies and find ways to get more dofollow links as well. But currently, my website is in position 200 or so per google webmaster tools.

I'm surprised to see that SEOmoz doesn't have a keyword research tool like Trellian software or wordtracker! I would definitely recommend Trellian's "Keyword Discovery" tool - and I actually canceled my subscription with them when I started with SEOmoz, thinking that there would be a keyword research tool that digs into historical and global data for keywords and gives all related keywords that you can then export into a CSV file. I'm impressed with SEOmoz for sure and just surprised there isn't a keyword tool like this...unless I just haven't found it yet!

Good points, we don't doe Adwords so I can knock that out of the equation but we do have some redirects going to some of our main pages so that could very well be the reason. I'll definitely review the other points you made to see if they fit in this equation.

I am from Germany. Having said that, I use the following to track down search volume over time: Searchmetrics Essentials and SEODiver (I hope I am allowed to mention "competitors" here). Both provide great insight on when a certain search query is most popular. And provided that these graphs/diagrams are right, they provide great recommendations on when to focus on which type of products. For the industries I'm preferrably working in, the results are absolutely correct as they're reflected in the inquiries we get from customers. Addition: SEODiver and Searchmetrics show the volume relative to most popular month and SEODiver also gives the number of searches of the strongest month which provides you with an estimate amount for the others periods. Neither tool is free, but worth the money. And obviously, these tools have made me neglect the Google Trends offering - when did they change the layout like that? And how can I "zoom in" to only see a period of 1 year for example?  mixed up Trends and Insights, my bad

Hi Phil Are you using exact match or broad match for the keywords?  Phrase or exact might give you a more realistic search volume.  Also, the CTR can be very low for Adwords.  Is that zero for estimated daily clicks?  It sounds like you'd only be getting 50-100 impressions a day. -Dan

Yep! As Mark answered, check out our Keyword Difficulty tool: http://www.seomoz.org/keyword-difficulty - Although it only shows the top 10. But you get lots of data on those top ten sites ranking. Hope this helps!

Hi irvingw, Thanks for your response.  We have been targeting these keywords, which is a good thing I guess. I was just thinking along the lines of 3-5 words long phrases that we could target. There may not be a way of doing it. Thanks for your help. mik

Message received Emailing you now - and a huge congrats sir! Thrilled to have you here.

Thank you Sha "I'm sure you know already that you dodged a bullet by losing that client Lee :)" Agreed, I had a bad feeling about them at the initial meeting, the second meeting merely convinced me they were a bad lot. Thought they were very controlling, inflexible and negative towards new concepts or embracing social. So yeah in hindsight I'm glad I lost the contract, but I did learn from the experience which is a plus :))