Watch That Broad Match, Man

Writing by Pay Per Click Journal on Sunday, February 22, 2009 Comments Off

New advertisers often get stuck and call for help because they don’t quite understand how to choose between broad, phrase, and exact match. I admit, it’s a challenge. Even the pros sometimes make a mistake. But the biggest mistake – or one of the biggest – for new advertisers is often choosing broad match for their strongest keywords when phrase or exact match would best target the market they are after.

Understand that broad match is the least targeted keyword matching method available to pay per click advertisers. This is where you use the broadest form of a keyword with no limiting factors. For instance, if you are an SEO company and you target the keyword “seo”. That’s broad match.

Phrase match would be where you target a phrase that searchers would search for but your targeting isn’t so narrow that it’s focused only on that phrase. For instance, “ethical seo” is the format for phrase match where you want to target the phrase ethical seo. When a searcher uses the phrase in their search query, even if other words appear before or after, then your targeted phrase will trigger your ad to be shown for that search query.

The most targeted keyword matching criteria is the exact match. By putting brackets around [ethical seo] you are telling the search engine to show your ad only for that phrase and nothing else. In other words, if a searcher queries affordable ethical seo then your ad will not show for exact match, but it would for phrase match.

New advertisers often think that if they target the broadest search term for their business then they’ll get more clicks. That is quite often the case, but those clicks are just as often untargeted clicks. If you want targeted clicks – that is, you want to reach the people who are looking for your product or service – then you need to narrow your keyword matches. And that takes skill.

Comments Off                      Category: Keyword Match Types                      

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