[I know that Google ranking is a bit of a mystery but I need to find out if I’ve done something wrong here. I found a term that originally came up with 40,500 global monthly searches. I know this for a fact because I saved the Google Keyword search as a CSV file to use with Stealth Keyword Competition Analyser. I can’t remember if I saved the search as ‘exact match’ or ‘broad match’. However, when I repeated the search recently, it came up as a 2,400 ‘broad match’. Now even if I had only recorded the original search as a broad match (not as per the instructions for SKCA) this is a humongous drop.
Does this happen or have I made a mistake somewhere in the process?]
I can only guess as to what actually happened, and my best guess would be that you viewed the CSV file in a spreadsheet program and sorted one of the columns separately from one or more of the other columns. After that sort, the data in one column no longer lined up with the correct data in another column.
Why would you be looking at “broad match” data? That data includes an unknown number of keywords, many of which may not even be relevant for your niche. How in the world would that be useful for the type of keyword research you are performing?
