Phrase-to-broad match ratio has become a household term within keyword research analysis because it is now included as a filter option in specialized Internet marketing software. I know seasoned keyword researchers will gleefully brag that they’ve been using their own particular equation to manually analyze keyword strength for years, but just as the calculator nullifies the abacus, software discards brain power and they just have to get results with these specialists. software once for them to convert. Because? Simply because of the time they save. A calculation that used to take hours manually for each likely keyword is reduced to seconds with modern software. And that’s not by keyword, it’s by a whole list of keywords.

Before thinking about calculating the phrase-to-broad match ratio (PBR), the researcher will have obtained a list of long-tail keywords, filtered out many that are unrelated and unwanted, and will be faced with a list of words that seem likely. It’s likely in the sense that they may or may not entice Google to list your site on the first page of their finds. And likely in the sense that Google searchers might be drawn to visit your site.

PBR in keyword research analysis software

PBR in such software is usually found in the second window or analysis window. The above window will have generated the user their list of probable keywords, the unwanted and unrelated keywords have been removed, and the rest will now require an analysis of their usefulness. But before they do, they need to know something about the phrase-to-broad match ratio. It is, after all, a very powerful calculation. So what is it, this PBR? What does PBR mean?

Broad Match, Phrase Match, and Exact Match

To fully understand what PBR is, you need to fully understand what Broad Match, Phrase Match, and Exact Match mean and just to make it more interesting, I’ll explain them in reverse order.

exact match

Exact match is just as it says: it generates keyword analysis data using only the words as they are spelled. We don’t want permutations, thank you. We don’t want anything similar, we just want the exact words in the given order. Nothing else.

phrase agreement

Phrase Match allows a search engine to return long-tail keywords that include all the words in the given keyword phrase in the given order and the analysis software asks you to provide data using the same criteria.

Using an example of Market Samurai Videos, a search engine results list might include Beginners Market Samurai Videos, Market Samurai Videos Online, and 6 Keyword Analysis Market Samurai Videos.

It is usually within this option that marketers will find their money making keywords. Single keywords like Golf and two-word keywords like Golf Clubs will have so much competition that most internet marketers won’t be able to use them, but by allowing your list to include longer phrase matches, you can find three-word and four words that can be tested commercially. workable for your site.

broad match

Most of the searches on search engines are done under the broad match criteria and the search engine is completely ignorant of this fact. Consequently, they end up with millions of pages on the bounce list that are of no use to them and if they want statistics on which sites are using a particular keyword, they are very misinformed. If you are searching for keywords, this criteria will return a keyword phrase list that not only includes all words in the given keyword phrase in any order, but will include keyword phrases that are similar to the given keyword. Consequently, referring to our previous keyword phrase for Phrase Match, we can find keywords related to markets, samurai warriors and video games, and even supermarkets, geishas and DVD rentals. The tenuous connection between our chosen phrase and the search results should clarify why broad match searches don’t return useful keywords.

So what is Phrase Broad Match Ratio (PBR)?

PBR is the ratio of website pages returned using a phrase match search compared to a broad match search, and will give a site ranked number one on Google 42% of searchers who then visit a site .

Example

The keyword search term “buy wild horses” used in both a broad match search and a phrase match search will yield a figure of 100% when results are returned from both searches for only those words in the precise order . But where the phrase deviates, to say “buy dead wild horses”, the keyword, in both types of searches, no longer exactly matches the original given keyword phrase and therefore cannot be 100%. Fewer people will search for that phrase and there will be a different number of web pages that contain that phrase. For that reason, the phrase “buy dead wild horses” compared to “buy wild horses” may only have a 45% utility of our original 100%. Depending on other factors not covered here, better marketing results will generally be achieved using keywords closer to 100%. I know that on the first reading this can be confusing, but successive readings can help the “penny drop”.

Trying to calculate this ourselves would be a big problem, but modern software can do it in the blink of an eye. Typically, this statistic will be part of a larger report that, when taken together, is useful for a marketer to assess the commercial strength of the keyword.

Conclusion

This article introduced the Phrase to Broad Match Ratio that is used when evaluating the marketability of keywords. He dissected the components of the term and explained exact match, phrase match, and broad match when applied to both search engine searches and keyword research analysis, and suggested that the reason this term has become common is because it is used as a filter option. in modern internet marketing software that has now proven to be so fast and beneficial that manually calculating the phrase to broad match ratio is almost a thing of the past.