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Note that what I’m talking about aims to go beyond the niche marketing grind. That grind being: you pay someone to create mediocre content based around a set of keywords, throw that content on a site, then pay someone to create some junky spun content and use that to build tons of backlinks from wherever you can. The grind still works, but if you’re looking to go further than that and looking to get more traffic, traffic that sticks and returns and looking to “future proof” your sites, then I think what I talk about in the above video is highly relevant.

I think that especially in the IM niche, there’s too much emphasis on the “factory produced” type of 800-word-keyword-rich-article content and there may just be huge potential for traffic and profit if you consider some alternatives.

Leave a comment below to let me know what you think.

2. Ezinearticles reacted. Or perhaps I should say they over-reacted?

Why Care About EZA?

Ezinearticles have been a pretty reliable traffic source for affiliate marketers for a long time. In fact, they’ve been such a staple in Internet marketing, it’s almost impossible for you to be in this field for more than a few days before you learn about them.

So, what happened? If you want to get all the details, you can read up on them in this post about Ezinearticle’s reaction to the Google slap.

Here are the cliff-notes:

Basically, EZA’s reaciont to the change is to make EZA a much less attractive place to submit articles. Increase minimum character count, lower maximum allowed keyword density, disallow people from posting the same article to their website and to Ezinearticles (does that also mean EZA articles will no longer be open for syndication? not sure), more rejected articles, potentially longer review process…

Pretty much everything that would put people off of submitting articles in the first place. They also announced that they would nofollow all links, including the ones in the resource boxes. After much protesting, they seem to be reconsidering this position, though.

The goal is, of course, to increase the quality of the articles on EZA and hopefully regain their lost rankings in Google.

The Death of…?

Ezinearticles got hit hard and now their firing on all cylinders to try and recover, which is understandable. The problem is that they’re pointing the wrong way.

Their proposed solution is to increase the quality of articles submitted to EZA. Guess what? Google can’t detect the quality of an article.

Which brings me to the reason for writing this post in the first place. On the one hand, it’s interesting to see this happening. And who knows, maybe we can soon all finally write a “the death of…” article and not mean it ironically.

More importantly, there’s an SEO lesson in this. Yes, high quality, relevant content is the best kind of content to create, SEO-wise. Why? Because that’s what search engines want to deliver to their end-users. They can’t truly separate good from bad content yet, but that’s the ultimate goal. So by creating awesome content, you’re ahead of the curve, in a sense.

But awesome content does not equal SEO. And just because Google has made a change doesn’t mean SEO has changed.

SEO is this: Figure out what signals Google is looking for when placing pages at the top for desirable search terms and send those signals deliberately.

Martyrdom is not going to cut it. Google will not reward you for working extra hard and neither will it reward Ezinearticles for punishing it’s authors extra hard (unless they make adjustments specifically for EZA, which is possible but unlikely). I’m all for good content. But the bare essence of SEO still lies in finding the right tweak and has little to do with (human, subjective, elusive) “quality”.

What are the new tweaks? I don’t know yet. For now, just keep building those links.

Cheers,

On the other hand, us online marketers are often the people who own such sites and make money from them…

Slap: The Second Coming

It’s not too long ago that Google deindexed thousands of “MFA” (made for AdSense) websites and closed AdSense accounts of webmasters who were essentially spamming the search results with extremely low-quality sites, targeted at very specific, long-tail keywords. This might have cleaned up the search results to a certain extent, but it didn’t entirely solve the problem, of course. As indicated by the “search engine spam” blog post mentioned earlier, that first slap was only the beginning.

By now, the second slap has already happened (or is, perhaps, still happening) and once again there are many stories of de-indexed sites and decreased rankings circulating IM forums and blogs.

No one knows exactly what happened, although Dan’s post about the micro-site business model and Ben’s post on how not to make money online provide some useful insights. From talking to many fellow marketers about this and from asking my newsletter subscribers about it, I learned that this most recent slap seems to have affected far fewer sites than one might initially think, looking at all the buzz around the topic. It’s clear that whatever Google did, it didn’t affect thin, low-quality affiliate sites in general. Too many of those remain un-affected. For the record: I also have a few remarkably thin, low-quality and non-unique sites in my portfolio and none of them have suffered a slap.

My suspicion is that AdSense sites were the main target and the reason for that is simple: Google has lots of data on AdSense sites. In fact, any changes made to remove crappy sites from the SERP are most likely to affect sites linked up to AdSense, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, before any other sites, simply because Google has the inside scoop on sites using their services. My second suspicion is a point that Ben also brought up in his post: having too many sites in your AdSense account puts them all at risk. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that one webmaster is unlikely to own 200 websites and fill all of them with quality, unique, relevant content, after all.

Niche Marketing is Dead (and all that…)

So, is this the end of AdSense sites? Is it the end of niche marketing or affiliate marketing all together? Of course not, despite the panic that tends to spread whenever Google makes any significant change.

Google’s main objective (apart from making bucketloads of cash) is to show the most relevant, useful results possible to it’s users. For example, for many search terms for physical products and product names, Google shows shopping results:

This doesn’t make owners of affiliate marketing sites for physical products particularly happy, but it is a great way for Google to serve it’s users better and connect them more directly to what they are looking to find.

Building small sites targeting long-tail keywords still works. Building all manner of spammy backlinks to these sites also still works for getting them ranked in the top spots. Basically, everything you already know about niche marketing still works. But, I believe that building thin sites is a short-term strategy, no matter how you look at it.

The Long-Term View

The long-term strategy is to build sites that provide the best, most relevant result for the keywords you are targeting.

This may mean that you have to go a bit further than grabbing some generic PLR and using it to fill five pages on a micro-site, as little more than a vessel containing your affiliate links. But it also means more earnings potential per site.

And let’s take an even-longer-term view: Building micro-sites and SEO’ing them is a low-leverage activity. It’s grunt work. It’s a fantastic way to get started, in my opinion. It’s a priceless way of learning some of the fundamentals of online marketing and of generating a good bit of income. In fact, it’s a great way to break away from a 9-to-5 existence and become financially independent (disclaimer: you’ll probably be working longer hours than at a day job to achieve this, but that’s not the point).

However, it’s not something you want to keep doing indefinitely. Sooner or later, you’ll be looking for ways to grow your business further. This could mean hiring some people to do the site building and SEO for you. Or it could mean building out bigger and better sites and services online and using your SEO and marketing experience to get them noticed.

What if you created a website that become a central hub of activity in your niche, because it provides real, unique value and doesn’t just act as a bridge-page to get the visitor to a product via your affiliate link? What if you offered a service that people in your niche just can’t live without? Do you think that will ever get slapped by Google? And if it did, how much of a difference would it make?

Understand that I’m still talking about niche marketing here. You don’t have to try and create the next facebook or the next zappos. If you can provide something real and unique to even the tiniest of niche-markets, that could be enough to build a very profitable business on. You know how they say that 1000 true fans are all you need to have a successful business? From my experience, I’d say that, if anything, that number is too high.

How are your niche-sites faring, since the latest Google slap? And what’s your long-term view for your online business? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

Whenever you see high PageRank backlink building services or link packets and aren’t sure whether they can be trusted, the video below is what you need to know about. When it comes to high-PR backlinks, much of what you read is misleading. Some of that is deception-for-the-sake-of-marketing, some of it is ignorance and some of it is just due to habit and convention of how we talk about links (i.e. we use the wrong expressions out of habit, even though we’d know better).

The video below should clear up some of the confusion caused by all this:

Let me know if you have any follow up questions or comments!

Cheers,

I’ve decided to take some of the SEO related questions I get in my inbox and make video replies to publish, so that more people can benefit from the Q&A.

Here’s the first video in the series, which is about transferring PageRank and search rankings from one existing site to a new site:

Quite interesting that I received this question right around the time I was moving from RichQuickReview to IM Impact.

All the best,

What Google Instant does is display search results as you are typing your query. It’s basically the next step up from the auto-suggestions box. Now, instead of only auto-suggesting possible keywords, it actually displays the full search results for the top listed auto-suggest keyword, even before you hit “enter”.

And with a change such as this, there is, of course, lots of wailing about how this is the end of SEO and how Google hates affiliates and so on and so forth.

Is there really a reason to panic? Is this the end of SEO or will it at least mean significant changes in the way we do SEO? Well, I don’t know, but below are some things you need to consider…

The End of Long-Tail Keywords?

The primary concern for many online marketers is that this change might kill the traffic that long-tail searches are getting. On a side-note, Google Instant might have something to do with the recent drop in search volume numbers, although I believe we haven’t seen the last of that.

Concerning long-tail keywords, here’s what has people worried: When you start typing a query, Instant tends to start displaying authority sites, which are ranking for single-word keywords, in the results. There’s really no other option, when you think about it. For most queries, it’s impossible for Google to make an intelligent guess as to what multi-word query you’re looking for, when it only has the first few letters to go by. It can make something of a guess about what single word you’re in the process of typing, but beyond that, results would be completely random.

This means that as you start typing, it’s likely you’ll see sites such as Amazon, Wikipedia and Wal-mart show up in the results. And most likely, for some one-word term which is not the keyword you’re actually looking for.

But does this mean that we can no longer build small sites, optimized for specific long-tail keywords, because everyone will end up clicking through to these authority sites before finishing their search?

It all comes down to user behaviour and user adaptation to this new search feature.

Actual Search Behaviour

A question few people seem to be asking is: How many people will actually be interrupted in their search and pick one of the early results displayed by instant?

I think there are two distinct scenarios we need to consider: Some searchers know exactly what they are looking for and know how to search for it effectively (i.e. they know how to ask Google a question in such a way that they will get a good answer) and on the other hand there are searchers who either don’t have a very specific search in mind or don’t know how to use search properly. Let’s just call them “Search Savvy” and “Search Ignorant”.

In this example, Instant is likely not to make a real difference for the searchers. Certainly, the search savvy user will not change their mind and click on a result for “windows media player” or “window cleaners” instead of completing the query.

The search ignorant user might find a slightly more relevant result in the auto-suggestions while they’re typing and go for that one instead of the originally intended query. They are still unlikely to find a very suitable result for their problem, though.

Let’s look at a different (also hypothetical) example:

Once again, the search savvy user is unlikely to get distracted by Instant, since the suggestions are almost certainly going to be less specific than the intended query.

However, the search ignorant user might find the Instant suggestions useful. Since they only have a vague idea of what they’re looking for or how to “ask” a search engine for it, they may get sidetracked by the Instant results. In this scenario, they may actually end up going for a longer-tail search than they originally intended. For example, if they start typing and results for “build muscle fast” start showing, they might go for that (building muscles fast is better than just building muscles, after all).

This could go either way, though. Someone intending to search for “build muscle fast” may get sidetracked and click on a result for “build muscle” before they’re done with typing.

Am I confusing you yet? What I want to emphasize here is that it all depends on the user, the intended search query and the type of search query. Certainly, there are certain keywords where the searcher is more likely to get distracted and others where they’re very unlikely to get distracted.

Utilization of Auto-Suggest

Another important question is: Will more users make use of the auto-suggestions with Instant Search?

Auto-suggest has been around for a while now and it certainly had some kind of impact on search behaviour and SEO (not one that many of us felt, I wager). But now that the results appear instantly, will this lead to more people making use of the feature?

If it does, that might have a significant impact on search volumes and SEO.

What we need to realize is that the vast majority of search engine users are basically clueless as to how a search engine works and are very bad at using one. Auto-suggest is an attempt to help people make more useful searches, by making them more specific. Before you disagree, think about this: When you have a specific query in mind, will you pick a less-specific one, just because it gets displayed? Of course not! If you have a vague query in mind, will you pick a more relevant one, if it gets displayed and seems more relevant to your situation? Yes, probably.

So, auto-suggestions will tend to produce longer-tail searches, not shorter ones. Perhaps Instant is an attempt to condition users to utilize the auto-suggestions. If this is the case, we might see more three to four word searches and fewer single-word searches, which is good. We’ll also have to look into scraping and analyzing the auto-suggestions for our keyword research.

Finally, we might need to start considering demographics and geo-targeting for keyword research, since the auto-suggest features are personalized to a certain extent.

But What About Those Single Word Searches?

Not that many of us are likely to be pursuing rankings for single-word terms, but there’s a significance for Google Instant in this. Many people use Google to navigate to their favorite websites. In fact, many people aren’t all that clear about the difference between the three available boxes in a standard browser view (URL box at the top, quick-search box in the top right and search box on the Google homepage). They’ll type “facebook” to get to the facebook homepage, for instance.

Here, Google Instant could be a curse or a blessing, depending on where you want to go. Judging by this thread, it seems to be a problem for most people. This could impact search if it proves annoying many people (which would change their search behaviour).

Too Slow/Too Fast?

Here are some more “real world” implications that could make or break Google Instant:

• Think about your family and friends. How many among them are very slow typers and need to look at the keyboard while they’re typing? Probably quite a few, right? While this hardly applies to younger generations, there are currently still a lot of users who are not accustomed to computers and are super-slow typers. Some of them might not even notice Google Instant…
• What about the other extreme: In the thread linked above, there are also several people complaining about the lag created when Google tries to display a ton of different results as they are quickly typing their queries.
• For that matter, what’s this like for people with slow connections? Especially when maps, images and videos populate the search results, I imagine Google Instant isn’t much fun on a slow connection.

At least one of the above issues could be addressed if Google held back with the results if it detects that someone is typing fast (high probability that they know what they want, anyway).

Targeting Partial Words?

One idea that popped up very quickly in SEO circles is that of targeting unfinished words or even single letters.

Is it possible to get a top ranking for “lose weight” by targeting “lose wei” and getting listed in Instant, as searchers are typing? The advantage would be that there’d be practically no competition for these unfinished words (at least, for the time being).

This is very unlikely to work, though. Google Instant displays the results for the top-listed auto-suggested keyword, not the unfinished keyword that the user is typing.

Conclusion

For now, it’s no use fearing that the sky is falling. Keep doing what you’ve been doing so far, in terms of creating website content and promoting that content.

Keep an eye on your traffic and particularly on what keywords you’re getting Google traffic from.

Is this the end of SEO? Nope.

Will we need to adapt and change a few things about our approach? Probably.

What do you think about the recent changes? Let me know in the comments below!

The change affects all search volume numbers. The ones we’re interested in for SEO purposes are generally the exact match volumes, though. In some cases, the drop in search volume is dramatic, with numbers being only fractions of what they were just a few hours or days ago and in other cases the changes are less dramatic. From the quick scan I had through my keywords list, it seemes that all of the search volume numbers dropped by at least 50%.

So, what’s going on, here?

Well, it’s been known for a long time that the search volume numbers presented in the keyword tool tend to be inaccurate. More precisely, they tend to be inaccurate on the side of exaggaration. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone getting surprisingly more visitors than expected when hitting the number one spot for a targeted keyword. On the other hand, I’ve often heard of disappointingly low traffic coming to the number one spot of a sought-after keyword.

There’s a thread here on the Warrior Forum and another one on the topic here on Backlinks Forum. From the developing discussion on both of these threads, it seems like the numbers are now more accurate, overall. So, the simple explanation for what happened with the keyword research tool is this: It was inaccurate before and now it’s fixed.

But what are the implications? So far, there hasn’t been an official statement by Google, so we don’t know what was changed or why. Did they simply improve the filtering for automated, non-human queries? If so, does that mean that there are far more non-human queries to Google than there are actual searches done by human users?

And what does this mean for niche marketers and SEO’ers? Will the change in numbers impact what kind of keywords they go after or even change/invalidate entire strategies? Also: Is that part of the reason for the change?

And for some more unpleasant implications: What does the change mean for Google itself? Is it actually getting only a fraction of the traffic we formerly believed? Have they been deceiving advertisers with grossly inflated search numbers?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not predicting the end of SEO, here (as I’m sure many will…). Traffic volumes themselves haven’t changed, only the search volume estimates have. Still, it will be interesting to see what develops of this. Also: Prepare for some epic moaning and complaining as well as apocaliptic forum threads (particularly the Warrior Forum is a favourite for those).

What’s happened to your keywords? Will you change anything, now that the numbers are different? Let me know in the comments.

Cheers,

Omission From Search Listings

There is something that frequently happens in Google search results, that perhaps could be misinterpreted as some sort of penalty. As an example, I just did a quick search on Google for the name of this blog and “Best Spinner”. The reason I did this is because I know that I have referenced to the program called The Best Spinner in several posts already, so there’s bound to be a whole bunch of listings – some of them from posts, at least one of them on the homepage (at the time of this writing) and so on.

Here is what Google returned:

As you can see, there’s a double listing of results on this domain. After that, however, results from other places around the web are displayed. As I’ve marked with the arrow, there’s a “Show more results from richquickreview.com” option. Let’s see what happens when I click it:

Now, I get seven listings and there’s a new option at the bottom for showing all of the listings on richquickreview, for this search term.

Oh no! All of my Best Spinner posts, save for two, have been penalized by Google and they aren’t showing up in the search results! Time to PANIC!

Of course, what’s going on here is not a penalty of any kind. Google generally don’t show more than two results for one and the same domain. And they generally don’t show more than two results from different domains, if the content is identical.

If you write an article and submit it to a dozen different article directories, unchanged, you’ll get a similar result when you do a search for it: The results will typically list your article on one or two directories, followed by the option to show more of the results that are hidden, because they are identical.

The important point here is that this is not a penalty. The omitted pages are all indexed by Google, they are all flowing pagerank and no one is getting their sites “sandboxed” because of duplicate content.

Obviously, the pages won’t all get listed in the results, because who would want to find several pages of the same article as a result for a search query?

Chasing (Long) Tail

This is where article spinning comes in. The point of spinning articles is not to “avoid the duplicate content penalty” as way too many sales-pitches for spinning tools would have you believe, the point is to grab more long-tail traffic. If you write an article, spin it’s content and then distribute it to a few dozen or even a few hundred online properties, it’s a bit like casting a wide net out into unknown waters: You don’t know where the fish are, but by pure chance you’re bound to catch a few.

All of your spun articles will consist of different sequences of words and every time someone “out there” on the Internet happens to search for a string of words that are present in one of your article variations, it’s likely that that variation will show up in the search results. And thus, you catch another fish.

I hope this clarifies the whole dupe-content subject a bit. If you have any further questions, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Cheers,

Here it finally is: My extensive Google Sniper review. If you are already involved in Internet marketing, then you have very likely heard of Google Sniper. There is a lot of hype surrounding this program and it was promoted and discussed by many in the make money online business. I have been testing this system for about two months now and in this review, you will get the complete run-down of every feature, every strength and every weakness in Google Sniper.

Overview

The Google Sniper package consists of one main, 99 page manual, eight training videos as well as a document with process maps laid out for you, so you can easily follow the system step-by-step. There’s also a short introduction ebooklet, but it’s pure fluff. You can just ignore it and get started with the manual right away.

The premise of the system is as follows: George Brown says he can teach you how to build simple, small WordPress websites in just a few hours and get them ranked on page one in Google without having to build any backlinks.

So, the idea is that you can do some keyword research, build a site like this in a very short time and then move right on to the next site because you don’t need to do any article writing, backlink building, social bookmarking or anything else like that, once the site is built. A pretty bold claim, to say the least. Of course, these sites ranking on page one for their keywords can then be easily monetized by promoting some kind of affiliate program.

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Hard Selling

Let me get one thing right out of the way: GSniper is very sales-heavy. Right after the purchase, you’ll encounter two upsells, the first one for $97 and the second one for $77. As per my reviewing guidelines, I didn’t buy or test either, but especially the first one looks really scammy to me. The reason being that it’s a “niche marketing course” that will teach you how to make lots of money online. This begs the question: Isn’t that what the product I just bought is supposed to be?

In addition to this, you are signed up to a $37 monthly membership when you purchase GSniper. If you don’t want to be part of this membership site, you have to opt out of it after the fact. To be fair, the first month is free, which is a good thing. But I’d still rather opt in to something like this than have to opt out of it.
I was only a member for about six weeks, but in that time, I didn’t see anything in the membership section that warranted $37 a month.

Finally, the keyword research tool Keyword Elite 2 is promoted/recommended within the Google Sniper course and the membership and download areas contain advertisements and affiliate-promotions.

In short, there will be a lot of product pushed your way once you sign up for Google Sniper.

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What’s it About?

As already outlined above, the system will teach you how to build a WordPress powered site in a very specific manner. The final site will only consist of around 5 to 10 pages of content and all of it will be focused on one keyword that you pick beforehand. The site will be promoting one product and one product only (no Adsense ads or multiple products) and the goal is to get this site to rank on page one in the Google results for the targeted keyword and convince as many visitors as possible to buy the promoted product through your affiliate link.

The system covers a wide range of topics starting from how to set up the website and what kind of content to add, how to find the right kind of keywords to target and walking you all the way through the process until you have one completed GSniper site. The detail in the instructions is usually very good and easy to follow. The videos support what’s written in the manual quite well, although some of them are pretty redundant after having read the text.

I particularly liked how much emphasis was put on how to create content, how and where to place affiliate links within your site, and how to test for optimal conversions.

Something I noticed is that the manual often contains a piece of advice followed by something along the lines of “…this is only a guess” or “…not sure but it works for me”. It would have been nice of George Brown had actually run some tests instead of including a bit of guessing and unfounded claims in the ebook. On the other hand, I think it’s great that he is honest about the things he doesn’t know and didn’t test instead of just pretending like they’re all rock-solid facts.

–

Pros and Cons

Google Sniper does many things right and gets some things wrong. Here, I want to lay it all out for you, so you can decide whether this product is worth your money or not.

One thing that needs to be mentioned is this: Yes, it really works.
You can get a simple little WordPress blog listed on page one, getting free traffic and making sales. So, fundamentally, the system works and you can and will make money if you follow through on it.

The greatest strength of the course lies in how the creation of the website is laid out. The manual and the videos give you a very clear idea of what the final website should look like and what it should contain. There’s also a lot of thought put into what kind of theme you should use and what kind of story you should tell about yourself on the website, all carefully tailored towards getting more sales.

One part where George completely drops the ball, however, is when it comes to choosing a product to promote. There is no really useful information about what criteria to choose products by and the video on this subject consist of George browsing CBengine, seemingly at random, and basically saying: Pick a ClickBank product with high gravity. I bet you couldn’t have guessed that by yourself.

Another little issues comes up with the keyword research component: Finding the right keyword is absolutely essential for making this system work. You have to find a very particular kind of keyword if you want to stand any chance at all of getting a page ranked for it without any backlinks.

Google Sniper contains detailed information on what kind of traffic volume, number of competing pages and criteria in the pages already ranking for the keyword to look for. You will also be presented with three suggestions for picking keywords:

1. Find a keyword using the free Google Keyword tool and spreadsheets.
   This method is free but requires quite a bit of work with copying data into spreadsheets and manually sorting and filtering it.
2. Find a keyword using Keyword Elite 2.
   Makes it a lot easier to find good keywords, filter them and analyze the competition for each one of them, but the program is quite costly.
3. Simply use the product name as your keyword.

The third method, using the product’s name as your keyword, is presented as the quickest and easiest way to pick a good keyword. It’s true that a product name is generally a good keyword since people who search of a product name already know what they want and are quite likely to buy.

But, and this is a big BUT, in combination with the product selection advice from before, this becomes absolutely terrible advice for Google Sniper sites. Why? Because you can bet that for any ClickBank product with a high gravity, there will be tons of marketers out there, targeting the product name and building search engine optimized sites, creating backlinks to them, bookmarking them and so on. In this kind of environment, a Sniper site with zero backlinks doesn’t stand a chance to get a permanent listing on page one.

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What You Need to Know

I realize that I’ve been very critical of this product so far. It remains, however, that the system fundamentally works and that you can make money using it. I don’t mean to bash this product or George Brown in any way.

There are two things you absolutely need to know if you decide to try Google Sniper and these things are:

1. Finding the right keyword is the most important part.
   Needless to say, you won’t be able to rank for highly competitive keywords with a zero-backlink site. Therefore, it’s absolutely essential that you find the right kind of keyword: A keyword that gets a good amount of traffic, consisting of potential buyers, but that has the kind of profile that will still enable a Sniper site to be listed in the top spots in a Google search.
   Since using product names won’t work for very popular products, you either need a way to find ClickBank products (or other products) that can get good sales, but that you can still compete for, or you need to do the keyword research. And be warned: Finding a keyword that matches all the criteria outlined in the course can be very difficult. Even using a tool like Keyword Elite or Market Samurai, you can easily spend an afternoon sifting through results before you find a usable keyword.
   –
2. It’s a numbers-game.
   If you start with the GSniper system, plan to build at least five sites before drawing any conclusions. Some will work, some won’t and you can’t always tell beforehand whether a site will stick or not. Google moves in mysterious ways, after all.
   If you stick to the system and build five sites according to it, you will definitely have at least one or two winners in there. And for the sites that don’t quite make it to page one, it’s worth considering biting the bullet and building some good old-fashioned backlinks to them anyway.

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Conclusion

There is some fluff in Google Sniper, but it isn’t rampant. Apart from the completely useless introduction manual (clearly just padding to make the feature list a bit longer) and the almost non-existent advice about selecting products to promote, the course is quite action-oriented, though. The system is laid out quite well and the process maps are a good addition.

Two instant “one-time-only” upsells that seem to devalue the purchase just made and a thin, paid monthly membership that you are signed up for without any real choice and have to opt out of if you aren’t interested certainly get the scammy-and-crappy alarm ringing. That, plus the advertisement and promotions in the member section are really too much. Overall, the excessive product-pushing significantly devalues this product.

Overall, I can’t really recommend Google Sniper. The prodct isn’t downright bad, but it certainly lacks polish and the aforementioned product-pushing just leaves a bad taste. It could have been a lot better and more newbie-friendly if some blunders in regards to keyword research and product selection would have been avoided. I also feel that the content and delivery of the videos could and should be a lot better.

Today’s post features the most simple, easy to understand and straight-forward explanation of Broad Match, Phrase Match and Exact Match you’ll ever find. Plus, it’s presented in text as well as in a video. This post will clear up any questions about this important subject you may have.

Throughout the text, I will be using “blue vintage car” as an example for a search term. I picked this at random and you can choose any search term if you want to follow along and experiment with some Google searches. I recommend using a search term with three or four words to get results that best illustrate what the match types are all about.

Broad Match

The broad match is the most common type of search result. It is what you get when you type in a search term into Google as you normally would.

What does it do?
Broad match results are any websites that contain the words you typed in, in any order and any distribution.

So, while a site that contains the exact sequence of words “blue vintage car” is likely to show up in the results, other possibilities include:

• Vintage car: blue
• Vintage car with blue leather interior
• Blue skies, vintage comics and car models.

Of course, a page featuring the words in the exact order you typed them in is likely to show up first in the results. If you take a look at pages ten and beyond in the results, you’ll see the words you typed spread ever further apart on the resulting pages. Here’s an example:

As you can see, the words are not in sequence and neither are they next to each other in this resulting page. But since all the words are present on the page, it’s still a broad match result.

Phrase Match

To see phrase match results, type in your search term in quotes:

What does this one do?
Phrase match results display websites that feature those exact words you typed, in the order you typed them in. As you can see on the picture above, this returns drastically fewer results than the broad search (almost 5 million results broad and fewer than 30’000 results phrase).

There can still be punctuation marks or symbols like brackets or slashes in between the words in the results-pages. Here’s an example result:

As you can see, even though there is a hyphen before the word “blue” and a comma afterwards, this is still a valid phrase match result for our search term.

One great use for typing your search term in quotes is when you remember part of a text but you can’t remember where you read it. If you can remember the exact sequence of five or more words you read on that page, a phrase match search will very likely return the page you are looking for.

Keyword Research/Advertiser Perspective

Here’s where most people seem to get confused with the whole match-type thing: The meaning of the match types differs depending on whether you are looking at them from the perspective of a regular search engine user or that of a keyword researcher or AdWords advertiser.

In this next section, let’s look at the significance of the match types have to you as an Internet marketer.

To follow along, fire up Google’s keyword research tool.
A very crucial factor in keyword research (and online marketing in general) is how often your chosen keyword is actually searched for. After all, it’s not much use to rank well for a term no one ever looks for. This is where the keyword tool can help us out. Let’s take a look at the search volume we get for our example term “blue vintage car” as well as the more popular term “vintage car”:

As we can see, there are roughly 320 broad searches for “blue vintage car” and over 200’000 monthly searches for “vintage car”.

Now, these are broad match results. This means that among those 320 searches could be examples like:

• bright blue vintage car
• vintage model car, blue
• where to buy vintage models of a blue car

In other words, any search containing the three words “blue”, “vintage” and “car” is included in this count.

Now, let’s look at the phrase match results for the searches:

As you can see, there are now significantly less results listed. This is because the phrase match count only includes searches that contain the exact sequence of words typed in. There can still be additional words in a search, however. The following example searches would be included in the phrase match count:

• buy blue vintage car
• blue vintage car picture
• more information about a blue vintage car

Finally, we have the option to search for exact matches:

Now, the numbers have shrunk even further. The reason is that the exact match only counts searches that are exactly, word for word, what you signify. So, in the above example, 18’100 is an estimate of the amount of times the exact words “vintage car” are typed into Google, each month. If someone types the words in a different order or ads another word (e.g. “bright blue vintage car”) that search is not counted.

As an advertiser, this can be very significant, since you might want your ads to display only when very specific terms are searched for. I don’t want to get into the whole AdWords research thing in this article.

Instead, I want to clarify a very common cause for confusion when it comes to keyword research:

Evaluating Competition Strength

I’m sure you’ve seen this as a simple piece of advice on how to find out how much competition you are up against: Type the keyword you want to target in quotation marks, i.e. do a phrase match search for it. This will return a number of results pages that is significantly lower than for the broad match term (see above).

“But,” the argument goes, “nobody searches for anything with quotes!”
True. Most searches are broad searches with the search term just typed in without any quotes or brackets. However, looking at the number phrase match results really is an indicator of competition strength. Why? Because the pages excluded from the phrase match results will be very, very easy to outrank with an optimized page.

If you make a page that features “blue vintage car” in the title and that exact combination again in the text, you’re already outranking all of those pages that have the three words spread all over the place.

That’s it. There’s the explanation for the whole “why phrase match?” question.

Having said that, the argument can be made that it doesn’t bloody well matter how many pages are listed in the results. What really matters is how strong the actual pages showing up on the first page for a broad search are. Lest I digress, I will write about this in a separate article.

For all your audio-visual learners, here’s a short video where I explain the concept of using phrase match for competition evaluation: