Diffrence Between Exact Match and Broad Match

[DanishWadhwa]

Which one is better  for SEO keywords in keywords difficulty tools,and why ,

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Whenever I do KW research, I also use exact match. For SEO purposes, you're trying to gauge search volumes for specific terms. (Of course, these numbers are way off in the AdWords tool, and certainly can't be trusted as precise numbers.) You want to know how many times people searched for buy batman comics in a month. When looking at the data for this term, or any term, broad match numbers will be drastically higher than exact match, because they'll include search volume for many other terms and not just the one term you are looking for.

Remember, it's important to always have in the back of your mind not to trust the numbers. And don't think you'll get 1000 visits a month for a term if you rank #1 and that's the search volume. According to the latest CTR studies (most recent one was published by Slingshot SEO and there was a post about it here on the Moz blog as well as their own detailed writeup), the top organic spot gets 18.2% of search volume.

You can also check out Bing's new Keyword research tool, built specifically in their webmaster tools suite to provide you with information about organic searches. Granted that Bing's user base is much smaller, it can still be a good additional resource to have in your KW research arsenal.

[NakulGoyal]

When targeting for SEO, always look at both the exact match and broad match. Here's why: Exact match tells you how many exact match searches are there for let's say "Cheap Widgets". When you look at Broad match, it will show other keywords like Cheap Blue Widgets. So it's important to look at exact match to figure out your primary keywords and broad match to identify any secondary / variant keywords that might have been missed. I hope that helps.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi Nakul,

I agree that broad match can help you with keyword discovery, but the Adwords tool will also give you other suggestions when you search just with exact match. And It's important to know what you're looking at - with excel downloads, people sometimes get a bit mixed up at the source and nature of the data.

For KW discovery, there are lots of other great resources -  I'd start with the engines themselves, with the related searches, with tools that mash up that data, like soovle or ubersuggest, and then branch out from there.