Exact Match in Google Search (Not Adwords)

[Zippy-Bungle]

I was going throught the list of keywords that have sent traffic to my site over the last 7 years and cam across one "A516 grade 70" that had hundreds of variants.

Now in a lot of cases search volumes were different as were SERPS. We've tested a few variants with reworked pages (70% similar to original but optimised for variant keyword)  and see good SERPS and traffic results.

Theres obviously some diminishing returns here for us but the interesting question is when to these variants become an exact match and when not? In some cases the variants are unique because of the spacig, periods and hyphens used. there isn't a clear correlation with exact matc though.

Insight appreciated.

(Sorry for spelling errors. Form doesn't play nicely with iPad)

[Maayboli]

How are you sure those are "hundreds of variants"?

I faced similar question as I am also seeing several variants of same phrase in Moz. Some can be easily distinguished (hyphan, extra spacing etc) but many look exactly same.   Then I found that in GWT, those variants are not reported as variants. So in other words GWT is only reporting "real" unique keywords while Moz is not able to somehow combine/distinguish what is unique. At least the GWT data  (as seen directly from GWT UI) is clean.

How you are getting your data? It is possible you and Moz may be using some API to get this from Google and there is an issue where several duplicate keywords are getting reported as variants and you left to wonder why they are not exact phrases.

Can you confirm your observation, directly going inside Google webmaster tools?