Word Tracker

is one of the most popular and well-known keyword research tools on the internet. As they themselves mention, Wordtracker was developed to answer the question:

“What are people searching for on the Web?”

How does Wordtracker work?

Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, are bombarded every day by non-human search queries, whether it’s ranking monitors, bid optimizers, or one of the other various online research tools.

Therefore in order to obtain the cleanest data, the data which reflects what people are searching for, Wordtracker gets its data straight from the metacrawlers. These metacrawlers search all the major search engines from one screen, with Wordtracker having an exclusive partnership with two of them – Dogpile and Metacrawler – and the fact that these metacrawlers compile the results means that they tend to only receive human visitors. Research tools are always looking for search engine specific results.

The problem of course if that the number of users that search on these two search engines is comparatively small. Therefore Wordtracker data is not completely representative of the entire online search industry and it does tend to produce figures which are on the conservative side.

Having said that it does still have a database of over 300 million searches so the data is certainly useful.

Why use Wordtracker?

There are three main reasons why Wordtracke may be useful:

1. Research Online Markets – if you’re researching an online market with a view to identifying a profitable niche keyword data is extremely valuable. Through Wordtracker you can identify what keywords are being searched for frequently and easily assess the competition that currently exists.

2. Optimise your existing content – targeting and successfully optimising your site for popular one or two word keyword phrases takes a lot of hard work in terms of getting incoming links to your website and other optimisation techniques, but one quick way to increase your traffic is to research long tail keywords which are fairly popular and add these phrases to your existing content.

3. Develop keyword-targeted content – if you’re yet to write your website’s content keyword research can be highly valuable. It enables you to identify popular long tail keywords which have little competition, meaning that you can write your content with these target keyword phrases in mind.

How is Wordtracker used in practice?

When starting all keyword research you should begin with a seed list. This is a list of words which can trigger deeper research. If you start with only a couple of words in your seed list then all your subsequent keyword research will be limited.

Wordtracker has two products – Keyword Universe and Keyword Researcher. Keyword Universe is the tool to use to help create your seed list.

Let’s say that you have a website where the broad topic is chocolate. Using Keyword Universe you can put in chocolate and view a huge number of related keywords, bringing up keywords such as ‘cocao’, ‘recipes’, ‘truffles’ and ‘gourmet chocolate’.
Now you’ll want to dig a little deeper. Click on chocolate and an equally large number of keyword phrases containing the word chocolate will be displayed. Examples of these keywords include ‘hot chocolate’, ‘chocolate cake’ and ‘chocolate chip cookies’.
Similarly, if you were to click on dark chocolate then a table of keywords with the phrase dark chocolate will be displayed.

For each set of results you can also dig deeper – click on chocolate chip cookies and all keywords containing that phrase will be displayed. Next to each keyword phrase is a ‘Predict’ statistic, which shows the estimated number of searches for that specific keyword phrase within the next 24 hours. This is very useful to assess the potential value of targeting that term.

You can add keywords to your basket as you go along, which can later be exported or emailed to yourself.

Wordtracker also goes one step further. It ranks all the keywords in what they term a Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) – a ranking which is based on the number of searches and the amount of competition that exists for that term. This is especially useful for affiliate marketers as it enables them to identify high frequency terms which have limited competition.
When first starting out with Wordtracker the Keyword Universe tool is likely to be the one which you spend most of your time on.

However, for more advanced users Keyword Researcher can be extremely useful. It can be used to see how people are using your keywords in longer search terms and also used to re-order your keyword phrases in order to expand your keyword list.

There are certainly limitations to Wordtracker in its restricted data set but it’s certainly a highly useful tool for researching what people are searching for online.

By Jay Stockwell
Software Type: Desktop Software (PC)
Cost: $ 176.00
Keyword Elite attracted some pretty high profile attention recently. I was intrigued by the promotion surrounding this piece of software by one of the biggest names in Internet marketing, John Reese. I had seen it before, but due to other commitments didn’t have a chance to look more closely at it. I knew it must be good if someone with such a high profile was promoting it. But I kept thinking… Yeah but how good?
Here is what I found when I took at look at it.
Note: Keyword Elite has been one of the fastest developing keyword research tools on the market. While I have updated my review to include this new information.
My Experience
First thing I noticed about Keyword Elite was that it was a very nice interface. I don’t mind using software that is ugly, just so long as it works well and has good usability. It is always a bonus when the software looks good too.
Once I received my software I quickly set to work. Immediately after Keyword Elite requested my license verification it popped up a box to ask me how I wanted to set up my new project.
It gave me 5 options.
1. Analyze Pay Per Click Listings
2. Create a Keyword List
3. Select a Keyword List
4. Analyze Keyword Competition
5. Spy on AdWords Competition

I liked how the software adapted to the style of keyword research about to be completed. For example, the data I am chasing will be very different if I am looking to generate a large keyword list, compared to say when looking for AdSense niches. Keyword Elite sets itself up differently based on this assumption. Good start.
I worked my way through each of the 5 project types which represent the 5 different function sets the software offers. Here is a breakdown of each function and my experience using it.

1) Analyze Pay Per Click Listings

The first project type available to me from Keyword Elite was the “Analyze Pay Per Click Listings” set-up. With this project type I could configure several different options before it swings into gear.
For example I could choose to mine data from either Google, Yahoo (formally Overture), Miva, and/or Enhance. I could then set the special criteria that could be researched and displayed under the reports tab. These special criteria included KEI, top bids, title results, Google broad match, Google phrase match, and Google exact match. I then set how many keywords I wanted the software to pull from Overture (from between 0 and 100).
Recently they added the ability to add data from Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker if you have a subscription with either of these tools. This is a must for any serious keyword researcher as the Overture data really just doesn’t cut it.
Once in action, there are two tabs available on the top window showing either the threads of data coming in live, or the end result of that data mining. The information given in this reports section is fantastic. It gives you:
o Results (competition).
o Search volume (from the Yahoo Keyword Suggestion Tool).
o R/S Ratio.
o KEI.
o AdWords CPC for broad, phrase, and exact matching (cost range for position 1 – 3).
o Number of AdWords Clicks for broad, phrase and exact matching.
o Number of AdWords campaigns.
o Number of Yahoo campaigns.
o Number of Miva campaigns.
o Number of Enhance campaigns
o Miva Top Bid
o Enhance Top Bid
o See the actual site URL’s of who you are competing against.
It is pretty much exactly the type of information you want when you are looking for PPC traffic.

2) Create a Keyword List

I then jumped in and created a “Create a Keyword List” project. After just a couple of practice tests, the functionality of this project type got me quite excited. Its main focus is to generate a huge list of keywords using a variety of sources. It builds it from Overture, Ask.com, Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, Yahoo!, Meta Tags (so spies on related sites’ meta-tags), as well as misspellings. The other fantastic feature is that it integrates directly into Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. This is one of the few tools that provides good integration with these two fantastic data sources.
You also can specify how many keywords you are looking for. Right up to 10,000 keywords!
Here’s a tip. Unless you have lots of time, don’t set the misspelling option. It gives you lots of keywords, but gets a bit unwieldy. I suppose it could be good if you are generating AdSense spam sites… but who wants more of those on the Internet!
I set in my usual fly fishing example and set it to work.
Man, it went to work alright! I soon found that the slider to limit how many keywords you wanted didn’t seem to work. Even though I set it to find 500 keywords, it actually delivered me 2196. Oh well… the more the merrier I suppose.
If you have a look at the bottom of the lower window you can see that there are several tabs. Using these tabs you can drill down to see specifically where the keyword source came from. There were certainly lots to choose from and they were generally pretty well focused.
One thing I liked a lot was that you could have the ability to edit the list under the edit tab. Here you could remove phrases containing certain words, as well as limit the list to phrases that contained certain words. You could also limit the number of words in the phrases, as well as remove certain characters from them.
One nice feature of Keyword Elite was that it gave you the ability to append extra words to the front and rear of the keywords in your list. That is one of the more advanced aspects of keyword research that you can do to expand your keyword lists. For example you could add the words “latest” on the front of the words, or “review” tacked onto the end of them.
It didn’t quite work how I would have liked however. It would have been better if I could have added multiple words to append at once. Unfortunately I could only do it one at a time, and it would not create new words, but modify the existing one. A tweak there in the software would make it much more useful.

3) Select a Keyword List

My next step was to check out the “Select a Keyword List” project type. Now this was a section that I had a little trouble understanding at first. I had to hit the help manual to see what the heck was going on here. I quickly discovered that this searches over 40,000 pre-built lists (with over 2 million phrases) on loads of different topics. Nice one!
I once again ran my fly fishing example and it found me 156 keyword phrases. I could then wrap those in brackets or quotes or both for use in AdWords if I chose to. Other than that, there wasn’t a lot else I could do with them.

4) Analyze Keyword Competition

Once I had had enough of the “Select a Keyword List” section I moved onto the “Analyze Keyword Competition” project type. This feature was interesting I guess from a research point of view. I generally don’t focus too much on my competition other than to make an initial assessment of a niche. This is where this function fits in nicely. Using this function of Keyword Elite I could look at how hot the competition is for a given keyword.
I entered my usual “fly fishing” phrase in the input box. I could also specify how many keywords were looked up, and how many sites were returned per keyword. I was interested in seeing the top 30 keyword phrases, and the top 10 sites for each. Once these details were input I set the software to work.
What Keyword Elite brought back was pretty cool. For each keyword it went and found the top sites that appear organically in the search engines for that term (I am assuming it was Google).
Then for each one of those websites it actually gives you decent data to analyze competition on. As you know, I personally think that KEI is practically worthless even though many people harp on about its merits.
There are lots of other more useful methods for analyzing the fierceness of the competition. For each of the sites in the top 10 results for any given keyword here is what Keyword Elite gave me:
o Search volume for that keyword
o How many actual sites you are competing against (minor consideration)
o Page Rank of those sites
o Does the site have that keyword in:
- H1 tags
- Title tag
- B tags
- Image alt text
- First 25 words
There are a bunch of other factors you might like to know like incoming links, Alexa ranking, and site age among other things. But this is a pretty good start.
It gives you pretty good way of seeing how difficult it will be to crack the top 10 for that keyword.

5) Spy on AdWords Competition

This is an interesting feature of Keyword Elite, and one that I was not expecting. It took me about 10 minutes to fully get what was going on here.
Basically the gist of this section is that you can create individual spy projects. For each project you can input your competitors’ URL’s, and sets of keywords. The software will go and see if these sites are advertising on Google, and if so, bring you back their ad details. You can also schedule this to do it automatically which is useful.
This is a pretty nice feature. However once again there was no continuity between the different sections of the software. I wanted to plug the sites that I found in the “Competition Spy” project type into here automatically. Instead I found that I couldn’t import those sites I found out of that project type. What the heck!
So you have to manually do this. It would be better if this aspect was automated to actually go out and find your competition, and then keep an eye on them that way. Call me lazy if you want to, but I don’t want to think if I don’t have to!

The Verdict?
So what is the verdict I hear you say! Well conceptually I love it, and while no keyword research tool is perfect, this one is pretty darn close.
So should you buy it? Well I would say yes! Go Get it!

Review by Mark Stockton
Keyword Discovery is a rival to the well-established WordTracker keyword research tool. As Wordtracker is so well entrenched among the webmaster community, KeywordDiscovery has taken a while to establish itself as the search engine keyword research service of choice.
However, it does have a number of features that set it apart from WordTracker and, as a professional search engine optimiser, it is the keyword research tool I use most frequently.

With unique features like 12 months historical data and a far bigger database, it’s hard to justify staying with WordTracker.
Here’s a few of the differences that make KeywordDiscovery worthy of your time & money :
• 32 Billion Searches Database :
The Keyword Discovery database is huge and pulls information in from Google, MSN, Yahoo and over 170 other search engines. This means your keyword research is often more accurate and informative here than with Wordtracker.
• Industry Keywords Function :
This allows you to compare the keywords you are currently receiving traffic for, with that of your competitors in the same industry.

It’s a good way to discover new keyphrases that are being used in your particular industry so that you can expand your search engine marketing and PayPerClick campaigns accordingly.

• Seasonal Trends Report :
KeywordDiscovery.com stores 12 months of historic data, so you can check the trends for a particular set of search terms and phrases over the course of a year. Essential information for planning PPC campaigns.
• Regional Keyword Databases :
One of the worst things about WordTracker is that there is no regional data. As an UK SEO, this makes life just a little tricky. Keyword Discovery rectifies this and when I first reviewed this system, this was the thing that got me to subscribe.

The UK data comes from MSN.co.uk, Google.co.uk and other UK search engines and makes doing regional keyword research so much easier. They also have databases for Australia, France, Germany, Czech Republic and a whole bunch of other countries.
All the features you are used to with WordTracker (such as KEI Analysis, Misspelling search and so on are here too, but it’s the newer features and the bigger, better database of search terms that makes KeyWordDiscovery.com a winner. This really is the keyword research service you should be using.