Match Types Explained – Broad Match, Phrase Match, Exact Match

Match types are very important for any kind of keyword research. I see many questions regarding the different match types in the forums I frequent and I have even seen some seasoned Internet marketers offer confusing or plain misleading explanations of what the match types mean.

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:

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