Researching Niches and search volume

I am in the process of researching Niches and have run into a problem.

When doing the search volume research should quotes be used? for example blue widgets returns 5,000,000 results but "blue widget" returns 500,000 results

Since this drastically affects the #searchs/pages ratio I am not sure what way is the more correct way to be going about it. I have found that without using the quotes very few of the niches that I am interested in, general or otherwise, looking to be sufficient.

 

I am interested in hearing something on this too. For instance, with Web hosting, there are so many possible variations. How do you know which key phrases/words to focus on?

 

I would say for non-technical terms the average person doesn't use quotes when searching. Like if I'm doing a search for a specific microsoft error code I'll use quotes. If I'm looking for Widget X I'll just do a search with no quotes.

 

That was what I was afraid of.

However say for example I did a very good job at targeting blue widget would I be higher in the SERPS than say a page that was heavy on widgets and mentioned blue in passing?

I suppose that this is an SEO question, but it does affect the way that I am going to figure out what is the best route for me to take.

 

My opinion is that you have to treat the unquoted and the quoted keywords as separate entities.

 

Although people don't use quotes when searching intitle and quotes could maybe give some better guess are those keywords competetive.

 

The serps themselves should be able to tell you actually. If the top 200 of the 'unquoted' serps are all highly relevant, you have a lot of good competition. If the top 200 of the quoted serps are relevant (and the top 200 of the unquoted aren't), your competition can probably be beaten as they aren't well optimized.

 

I didn't even think about looking at it that way.....

Thanks, I will have to go back to the topics I threw away and re-check them

 

What I usually do is check the top 20. If they are optimized for the keyword or keyword-phrase, I would have to have a really trusted site, or lots of backlinks to that page to beat that.
So I check:
- keywords in title. If the top 20 don't in the majority have that, they can be easily beaten.
This is really the basis. But if the top 20 does have that and you still want to try look at their backlinks through either msn or yahoo siteexplorer. I prefer MSN for this. http://www.katinkahesselink.net/internet/link-search-google.html
With backlinks it's not so much the quantity (though if nothing shows up that obviously means something), but the quality.

In general: with keywords too - it's not about quantity, but quality. There can easily be 100000 pages that turn up for a specific query and still be easily beaten - if only a few of those are targeted.

The difference between quotes and no-quotes isn't something I usually use. Most people won't search with quotes anyhow. I mean, I do (when necessary), but I'm not exactly representative. Nor are you.