Estibot.com Blog

This is a response to the Domain Name Wire post ‘Remember, no one searches with quotes’

In the post, the reader is reminded that while we often cite term frequency as the number of results we get from Google when searching for a term in quotes, most people do not use quotes when searching.

I agree that domainers and SEO people should keep this fact in mind, especially when they want to get long-tail search traffic beyond their main optimized terms, but quotes still rule for domain name and keyword research.

For preliminary estimation of potential type-in traffic, the SERP number with quotes is important. Reversed terms generally do not get type-in traffic.

Also, for SEO, the combination of the perfect domain name (correct word order) plus optimization for that exact term is powerful. Quotes are needed to research this. The huge optimization advantage provided by the domain name is lost if the page is optimized for anything other than the exact term in the exact order represented by the second level domain itself.

While it is true that most “lay” people don’t use quotes when searching, Google still considers the word order in ranking the sites, even when you don’t use quotes when searching. Different sites will rank high in the SERPs depending on whether you search for football game or game football, without quotes. This is one of the reasons why term frequency as represented by number of search results for the term in quotes (=phrase match) is much more meaningful than the term frequency without quotes (=broad match).

Broad match has its uses in research – e.g. it can be used as a variable in complex keyword analysis – but should not be used alone as indicator of term frequency or search popularity.

Finally, it’s worth noting that one should not mix term frequency (number of results in a Google search) with search popularity. Both can be given as phrase match or broad match and the significance of that distinction is different depending on whether you’re talking about term frequency or search popularity, which are both needed for complete keyword/domain name analysis, but they are two completely different things.