The Affiliate Journey

This will be a really quick post, but I wanted to go over something I believe a lot of beginner affiliates, whether doing PPC or SEO, get wrong. That is the difference of keyword matches when using the Google Keyword tool.

FIRST: If you’re not using the Google Keyword tool for all your keyword research I suggest you start. I personally have ZERO paid keyword research tools except for Keyword Spy, but that’s for another post.

OK back to the Google Keyword Tool. I’m going to walk you through a simple example keyword research exercise to explain this. I’m going to use some Golf keywords as they tend to be my favorite for using as examples.

If you’re not familiar with where the tool is you can check it out here: Google Keyword Research Tool

Here’s what the blank screen should look like before you get started.

Screen Shot of Google Keyword Tool

Alright, let’s get started. Let’s do a search for “golf swing dvd”.

Just enter the keywords without the quotes around them, and also ensure the small box below is checked for Use Synonyms. This basically will use Googles intelligence to find similar words to Golf Swing DVD that we might be interested in using.

Ok, enter the captcha and let’s see what it found for us!

So above you can see that it found some keywords, golf swing dvd being the first in the list. This is showing us the estimated monthly searches as well as the number from last month. Notice also at the very bottom of this there is a related keywords section. This is a list of other related keywords that are likely not directly related to “golf swing dvd” but are in the same market.

Ok, so here’s the interesting thing you may or may not know about. See the 2900 searches, that’s the BROAD number. See in the top right corner of this screen shot there’s a grey box. That box drops down and you can select other types of matches. Let’s try the PHRASE MATCH and see what happens.

Note how the number of searches went down for “golf swing dvd”. This is because we’re only looking at the number of searches where “golf swing dvd” appeared in that exact instance with possibly other keywords before or after it.

Let’s go one step further and look at the EXACT MATCH.

Notice how much the search numbers for “golf swing dvd” have gone down compared to the first screen shot. How ever this is a real number of searches for that term.

When you’re doing PPC or SEO you want to look at this EXACT MATCH because it’s real data. If you’re going to SEO for a term you want to know how much potential traffic you can get if you had the top ranking for that keyword. If you only went on the 2900 you may get excited and go gang busters to get the ranking and then realize WOW no traffic really up here.

Using the EXACT MATCH for keyword research allows you to get a better picture of what’s really going on and choose your keywords better.

I hope this post sheds some light on the idea of keyword research and the different keyword matches that exist using Googles Keyword Tool.