If you own a blog or business website, you’ll be looking for different ways to increase traffic. For a blog, traffic is important in the sense it brings ad revenue and also increases the value of the blog. For a business website, traffic is important because it brings visitors which can be converted to customers and thus increase their sales and revenue.

Before you dwell into increasing traffic for you blog/website, you need to have good keyword research techniques so that your blog/website is popular in Google or Bing and brings in organic traffic. The foremost keyword research tips any SEO expert would be giving is to use Google Adwords Keyword tool.

Basically this tool is useful to know the “google search volume” or “traffic” for a particular keyword. This’ll also list keyword ideas. First of all after you decided on what “keyword” to target for your content, login into Google Adwords tool with your Adwords account. This prevents from repeatedly entering “captcha” code for each keyword research.

Enter the “keyword” you’re targeting in the Word or phrase text box. Leave the Website and Category text boxes empty. Next tick the check box that says “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms“.  This’ll prevent from showing unnecessary keywords which are not relevant to your competition.

On the left hand side, there are “match types” for your keywords. These are:

So what are these basically? In brief, according to webdesignfromscratch,

• Broad match = Contains all the words, may be in any order, and may include other words
• Phrase match = Contains all the words, in order, and may include other words before or after the phrase
• Exact match = Contains only these words in this order

You can visit the above site for more detailed example of each term. So, generally the search volume or traffic is more for adwords broad match compared to phrase match and exact match. While phrase match searches are more than exact match traffic.

Generally it’s advisable to do a phrase match search for predicting traffic for phrases/keywords having more than 2 words. This gives a more realistic volume than broad match search.

Another tip for keyword research strategy is to sort your results based on approximate CPC. This can be shown as a column if you click on the “Columns” button on the far right hand side and check the “Approximate CPC (Search)” option. You can also sort your results based on competition and see that only “low competition” keywords are visible first. By this way, you can target “low competition” and “high CPC” keywords.

Tags: advanced keyword research, adwords broad match, broad match, exact match, keyword research strategy, keyword research techniques, keyword research tips, phrase match