Quotes vs. No Quotes
One of the biggest "games" that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies play with their unsuspecting clients is what I call the quotes vs. no quotes game. Since most companies are focused on their core business and cannot keep up with the always changing SEO world, it is understandable that most companies would not understand this "slight of hand" trick that they play, but I wanted to expose this once and for all.
Basically, when you do a search on Google, you will always see results 1-10 out of _______. And the "______" is the amount of pages that returned as a MATCH to what you were searching for. For instructional purposes, let's use the example keyword of "car insurance in pittsburgh pa" without the quotes.
This means for the keyword "car insurance in pittsburgh pa" (WITHOUT THE QUOTES) Google has returned 721,000 matching PAGES (not to be confused with websites) in the results. This means that, in order to achieve the #1 ranking for the keyword "car insurance in pittsburgh pa" you would need to beat out 721,000 other pages for the top relevancy on this keyword right?
WRONG.
Although this is what almost all SEO's will show you, as it looks incredible to be able to get the #1 spot out of 55,400,000 competing pages doesn't it?
But, things are not always as they appear.
In reality, you really want to determine the true competition for how many pages are competing for a certain phrase by using quotes.
So, when you apply this to "car insurance in pittsburgh pa", you get an entirely different picture of the TRUE competitiveness of this phrase! Only 8 competitors? If indeed there are consumers doing a search for this phrase, it only means good things for you, if you sell car insurance in Pittsburgh, PA because finding the top 10 for low competition phrases like this is quite easy. And while still the SEO firm getting you ranked for phrases like this is a valuable service, understand it's not as difficult and costly as they would like for you to believe.
There's a little "truth" delivered to you about an otherwise "dirty little secret" in the SEO business.
Hope you enjoyed it.
