I understand the difference between broad keyword matches and exact. Are broad keywords worth targeting? If so, why? If not, why not? I have been told only to target keywords making sure that they are [exact] matches, never to even look at the broad results or search volume. Clarification needed, Thanks!
Google AdWords allows you to use 4 different types of keywords, these are Broad Match, Phrase Match, Exact Match and Negative keywords. The key to success with Google AdWords to understand why and where to apply these different types of keywords to ensure you only receive targeted visitors who are interested in your products or services. No more wasting your marketing budget on non-targeted who click on your Ad but never buy your products.
But the keyword research is not for google adwords PPC advertising, it is to see if a site can be easily ranked for a keyword. So when looking into if the site can be ranked for a specific keyword, in that circumstance.
It all depends on what you do and what your niche is. I'll use the SEO niche as an example: Let's you are a seo firm and you are established in Miami. Optimizing your website for the keyword "SEO" is very broad because a lot of things can be related to SEO. However even though it is very broad it has a huge amount of searches per month (close to 1.5million/month) so this could attract a huge traffic to your website. Now if we keep on going and you optimize your website for "SEO firm". Your searches per month just dropped significantly (about 12,000/month). Now people typing "SEO firm" as a query are most definitely people that are looking for one, so your chances of converting that traffic into sales is much bigger. You see that the more exact you get, the most traffic is lost. If we keep on going even further and you optimize for "SEO firm in Miami" the searches drop even more ( less than 500/month). From this you learn that, depending on your business niche, the more exact match you go, the more traffic you lose but the more chances you have of converting that traffic into sales.
Broad keywords are good to use with pages having broad contents, example, your homepage (example "SEO"). Exact keywords could be best used in deep pages of your site having specific contents, example "SEO terms" or "SEO" tips, and many more. Both can be used so long as you know where to place such keywords so they would work well for your site .
Broad keywords can increase your hits, but they may not necessarily increase your conversions if you're selling a product. If you happen to be running an Adwords campaign, you probably want to optimize so that you don't waste too much money targeting broad keywords which won't convert. At the same time, ignoring them completely can decrease your reach.