Thanks for the response. Kind of what I already guessed, but very good to get confirmed. Just had a friend showing me a phrase match traffic estimation he was using for traffic planning and it is 16 times as large as the exact traffic.

Could I suggest you include this part in your document? It currently talks about keyword research but doesn't mention at that step, that people should look at exact traffic.

Thanks, Bora

Ed and I used to "discuss" that back in the day… there's really nothing horribly wrong with what he's saying, as such, but the variations that make up the long tail aren't going to show up (you won't appear in the long tail search results) unless you actually dig into the variations, add modifiers to your pages, etc.

Looking at a phrase match count can give you an idea of how much "traffic" potential there is, but you also need to assess how relevant and well-targeted the traffic will be. You can't do that until you dig into it and do the work, examining the relevance of each variation, with exact match data.

Doing that work also helps you understand how relevant the traffic from the main search term would be.

Anyway… I'd rather underestimate the value of the traffic from a search term by a small amount, than overestimate by a lot, which can happen.

I am a big fan and superb book I recommend to many.

But I was shocked that there is no mentioning in keyword strategy about difference broad vs. phrase vs. exact match when trying to figure out the volume of traffic one can expect.

As I understand you always use exact match for selecting your keywords. Ed Dale suggests Phrase match as he says it gives you an estimate of the long tail traffic you might get from ranking well on the keyword.

What are your thoughts on this?

Thanks, Bora

I have read the ebook and am very pleased about the well structured information. Thank you for the valuable resource.

However, I already struggle with this first step, the keyword strategy.

My site is computer related and have several themes, lets say burning software, photo processing software, home networks and laptop reviews. Can I consider these being the Major Keywords? Or are these already the Core Terms?

Assuming I consider them the Major Keywords, my Core Terms would be phrases like 'burning cd dvd' 'copy dvds' 'cd burner software', 'computers for gaming' and so on. What will then be the clusters?

I guess, the major keywords should be more generic, like "hardware review, software review, home network", then my current major keywords become core terms and my current core terms become clusters? Right?

I might be a little bit dumb about this and I would appreciate any help on this matter.

Regards, Steve

The majority of title tags, description tags and content scraped from web pages without description tags will NOT have caringgrandparents without a space. That is the reason for more in the SERP's with a space.

Note: Bold descriptions and highlighted titles after you do a search.

Either way, there isn't a market for the keyword caringgrandparents OR caring grandparents. You will have to search "grandparents" and other related terms that have search volume. Of course, you will have to see how strong the competition is in the SERP's.

To check keyword volume, Google "free keyword tool" and use the top 2.

Good luck!

Jeff