I was recently helping a friend put together an occupational therapy schools directory when I asked her how many monthly visitors she was expecting to her new site.  She excitedly told me how she had done extensive keyword research and expected over 33,000 monthly visitors just for her main keyword alone.  Although I knew that occupational therapy is an increasingly popular career field, the idea of over 33,000 searches simply for “occupational therapy program” seemed a bit far-fetched, so I asked her to sit down and show me her research.

Unfortunately, my suspicions were confirmed when I saw her pull up the Google Keyword Tool and conduct her keyword research.  She typed in “occupational therapy program” and left the dreaded “Broad” keyword match on.  It’s a mistake I made many times in the past when starting with SEO.

You see, there are three match types:

broad: key phrase appears anywhere in the search (e.g., “that school might have a program for occupational therapy students”)  (this is what she looked at with 33,100 searches/month)

exact: key phrase is the only thing typed in the search (e.g., “occupational therapy program”)

phrase: key phrase is in the search phrase in that order (e.g., “my favorite occupational therapy program”)

The only one you really want to look at is exact because you want to appear for the exact key phrase.  Unfortunately, in my friend’s case, “occupational therapy program” in an exact match case only receives 260 searches a month — a far cry from the 33,100 she was expecting.

One of the things I always tell people when they start working on websites is that the most important thing is keyword research.  You can have the best SEO in the world, but if you didn’t pick the right keywords, your project is destined to fail from the beginning.  It may seem like a waste of time to spend hours (or even days) researching keywords, but if you pick winning keywords from the start, your website will be much more likely to succeed.