One Searches with Quotes — Remember, No

Phrase searches are an notable metric, but have their limitations.

When domainers try to determine the popularity of keywords in their domain names, they usually find the number of phrase match results at Google. To find this, you just search with “quotes around your keywords”. That tells Google to return results with the actual phrase inside your quotes, in the actual order.

This matters for domains since order matters. Consider the domain name GameFootball.com. You could say this term has 60 million results on Google, but that’s when you search without quotes since Google doesn’t care regarding the order of your search terms. Using quotes, you get less than a million results, which is a better indicator of popularity of the term and therefore the domain (as compared to FootballGame.com, a much better domain).

But when it comes to search engine optimization, remember this truth: hardly anyone searches with quotes. I suspect many readers of Reglike do, but DNW readers are web savvy. The typical web surfer doesn’t even know regarding using quotes when searching.

Why does this matter? When you’re tracking your rankings, you ought to search without quotes. I was reminded of this today when reviewing analytics for one of my web sites. I was getting a lot of traffic from phrases and checked my rankings on Google using quotes. I couldn’t find my site — until I dropped the quotes and found myself in the first few positions.

So remember: searching with quotes has notable uses, but most searchers don’t use them.