Google Adwords Keywords – Should You Use Broad Match or Exact Match?

The importance of deciding whether to use Broad Match or Exact Match keywords depends on whether you are using Google Adwords Keywords for a pay per click campaign, or if you are trying to decide on the keyword content of your website, blogs, or landing pages.

This question has been posed to me a couple of times just in the last few weeks, so I felt it would be beneficial to write my thoughts on this so you can make a more informed decision next time you are analyzing keywords for an upcoming SEO project.

Google Adwords Keywords

If you are considering, or currently running a Google pay per click campaign then it is not as critical of a decision as to whether you use broad match, exact match, or even phrase match. The least riskiest way to keep your budget under control and ensure that you only get the highest quality clicks for your ads would be to select exact match Google adwords keywords. If you are already running a PPC campaign and using broad match for your keywords, and you then switch to exact match, you should notice a fairly significant reduction in the amount of clicks you receive, which in turn will reduce the amount of money you spend each month.

If you decide to use, or stick with broad match or phrase match keywords then I would suggest coming up with a lot of negative keywords to add to your campaign so you do not receive thousands of clicks from unqualified potential customers.

Google Adwords Keywords tool

I always use and recommend the Google adwords keyword tool to conduct my research on behalf of clients. The main metrics you should be interested in are:

• Competition
• Global Monthly Searches
• Local Monthly Searches
• Approximate CPC (Cost per click)

In an effort to find the most valuable keywords for your website or pay per click campaign, you want to try to hone in on the keywords that have the least amount of competition and the highest amount of Global or Local traffic. If you are strictly using the Google adwords keyword tool to establish keywords for your pay per click campaign, then you also want to find those that have the lowest CPC. Unless you are OK bidding on keywords in the $4.00 – $10.00 range, then I would suggest going with more palatable approximate CPC’s of in the 25 cents to $3.00 range. Now if you are purely looking for keywords to populate your website content with, or create keyword specific landing pages, then follow the rules above, but instead of looking for a lower approximate CPC, look for ones that are $1.00 and above, because this indicates that more people are competing for these keywords in the sponsored search results on Google.

Differences between Google Adwords Broad Match and Exact Match

The main differences that you need to be concerned with are what I mentioned at the beginning of the post. What are you going to be using your keywords for? If you are going to run a pay per click campaign then follow the advice above, but if you are researching keywords for the purpose of updating, adding, or creating landing page content  for your website or blog you need to need to make sure you are looking at data that is going to be accurate and beneficial to you.

The main reason I am writing this blog post is because people I have spoken with have come unstuck as it relates to running broad match keyword searches in the Google adwords keywords tool instead of exact match. Here is the main difference and an example for you.

Broad Match Keyword result for “Glassware”

Competition: 0.71
Global Monthly Searches: 450,000
Local Monthly Searches: 49,500
Estimated Avg. CPC: $1.03

Exact Match Keyword result for “Glassware”

Competition: 0.87
Global Monthly Searches: 18,100
Local Monthly Searches: 3,600
Estimated Avg. CPC: $0.85

Since we are referring to you researching keywords that you want to add to the content of your website or blog for SEO purposes, you can see that if you ran a broad match search you would think there are potentially 450,000 people searching for your keyword each month, when in reality there are only 18,100 people per month searching for your specific keyword. Now 18,100 is still a good number, but it is still only just 4% of the visitors that a broad match showed, and there are other examples where a broad match result for a keyword will show that 3,600 people per month are searching for it, and when you do an exact match keyword search there are only 170 people per month searching for it. This means that you may not want to try and compete for this exact keyword since not too many people each month are searching for it, and the competition is still high.

In closing, a broad match keyword search for SEO purposes in deciding what keywords to use on your website or blog is not a good idea, you must run exact match searches. The broad match keyword search not only shows you a higher number of people searching for it each month, making you believe the keyword is more popular than it actually is, but the broad match term “glassware” could mean any number of keyword combinations such as:

• Glassware vases
• Glassware Plates
• Blue Glassware dishes

If you are selling actual glasses, such as wine, champagne, tumblers etc., and not plates, dishes, and vases, then you want to run an exact keyword match for your desired keywords, and the Google adwords keyword tool will be able to tell you the true number of people each month that are searching for those exact keywords you want to be found under.

If you have had a good or bad experience utilizing the Google Adwords Keywords tool for either establishing keywords for an Adwords campaign, or for the purposes of establishing the content you should be creating for your website, then please make your comments below.