Does anyone care about "phrase matches" when doing keyword research?

People want to know the number of exact matches, because that indicates the lower bound on how many searches you can capture if you hit #1 on google. (Well, 40% of people will click on result #1, so you will capture at least exactmatches*.4 searchers a month.)

People sometimes want to know the broad match, because this is a rough upper bound on the amount of traffic you can get, if you LSI the shit out of your articles and have an authority site on this keyword.

Are phrase matches useful? In what scenarios do you care about phrase matches?

Phrase matches are good to use if you want to see if there's a lot of long chain keywords that include your specific keyword instead of just containing the words.

I rarely use it to be honest.

Personally, I NEVER use broad match. Depending on the particular keyword it can include keywords and therefore search levels that you'll never rank for.

Phrase match is great. They open up an entire universe of article topics that are related to your main keyphrase. Building those is a huge step towards creating an authority site. Work your way down finer an finer and you can find all kinds of lucrative gems with little or no competition.

upl8t said:

Personally, I NEVER use broad match. Depending on the particular keyword it can include keywords and therefore search levels that you'll never rank for.

Phrase match is great. They open up an entire universe of article topics that are related to your main keyphrase. Building those is a huge step towards creating an authority site. Work your way down finer an finer and you can find all kinds of lucrative gems with little or no competition.

Click to expand...

Why do you like the keyword suggestions from phrase match better than broad match? Because broad match includes too many "broad" keywords?

But what about niche keywords that are synonyms but not in the phrase match?

Focus on Exact Match. Phrase Match is really better for adwords when you're trying to drive additional traffic to your site.

Even if you "LSI the shit out of your articles" you may gain some traffic but, you still need to build links to those articles with the LSI keywords or it won't do much. :/

There comes a time that you never care for those fake figures/numbers. You just see the niche and go for it.

And for your question, regarding my line above, phrase match may be a better approach to get an estimate of he real-like numbers of organic searches.

The wise thing when scouting a niche would be to focus on the exact match. That's more or less the worst case scenario when it comes to searches. Anything else is just gravy.

If you have market samurai, also look at the PBR. The higher the better.