SEO is an exact Match Science
For years, SEO has suffered by the absence of exact-match organic search big data. Google used to release this data publicly pre 2013 but hasn’t released it since. Keyword tools only provide either;
- Aggregated PPC advertising data. or
- Their own interpretation of historical search volumes based on proprietary algorithms
But needs must and in the absence of a better initial alternative, there’s still a role for them. Having said that, do not rely on them. Use other sources including competitor analysis, industry reports and other collateral – and absolutely use the old reliables – a dictionary and thesaurus.
“If vacuuming-up large volumes of medium and long tail language variants is your intent, knowing what they are individually is not much help. There are separate ways to target ranking against primary keyword targets and their language variants. SEO is not one size fits all.”
– Bruce Clay
Google Search Console is Gold
There is a solution to this, but it’s not always available to you. It’s not big-data, but it’s data that is specific to your website and that’s extremely useful in the right hands – yours! That solution is Google Search Console, but . . .
- It’s only useful if you are already “in the SEO ball park”
- It’s limited to the previous 1,000 organic searches for which your website generated impressions, and
- You need to know how to analyse and use the data you are seeing there.
That’s not for now, but if you’re interested, check out our next “Advanced SEO Course”. For now, Google Search Console lets you see your top performing pages (URLs) and the individual exact-match search queries which generated organic clicks and impressions for each of those pages. Equipped with that data, you can step-up your SEO by significantly improving the accuracy of the keywords and search behaviours you are targeting.

So, take a look at your Google Search Console. Find your page performance report by selecting the middle “Pages” tab, sort on clicks or impressions for different views, and then select any page URL.
Queries by Page – take a 7-Day View
Once you select a page URL, Google Search Console will automatically switch to the “Queries” tab which will list all the actual exact-match searches which brought clicks or impressions to that page. Adjust your top-of-page filter down to a 7-day view to ensure data recency and give you a better picture of “Average Search Position”. There’s a lot more to see here, but that should get you started!
Enjoy! Visit the SME SEO Mentoring page or the Small Business SEO Mentoring page if you would like to see how we can help.
Two minutes on effective keyword targeting strategies for SMEs.
The video uses the term “semantic alignment” meaning the content on the page that addresses the “problem” implied by a search query, i.e. aligned to the intent of the searcher.