Keyword Data Tools

You've got a nice long list of keywords. But the list doesn't mean much to you until you find out which of these keywords are actually being used by searchers. You're also going to want a sense of how competitive the SEO field is for a keyword so you can get a handle on just how hard you might have to fight to rank well for it.

Fortunately, there are keyword analysis tools available to help you suss out this important information. And also fortunately, there are not so many different high quality options to choose from, so the decision is far from overwhelming. We'll discuss the top three here:

- Wordtracker

- Keyword Discovery

- Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Today is a “study hall” day. You're going to find these tools and get your feet wet using them.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is the keyword research tool of choice for many professional SEOs. In a nutshell, it tells you how many people are searching for the terms you may want to use on your site. It does this by monitoring and recording searches on meta search engines throughout the Web. You can use it to get an estimate of how many searches will be performed for a given term, and it is also an excellent source of related terms and common misspellings (see Figure 6.2).

Wordtracker doesn't give an up-to-the-minute snapshot its data reflects searches that took place a few months before you retrieve it. Wordtracker is available at www.wordtracker.com for a fee.

If you decide to go this route, you can use Wordtracker today and tomorrow as the primary tool for whittling down your long keyword list into something meaningful. If you need to be frugal, Wordtracker makes it easy for you: You can purchase low-cost subscriptions in one-week or one-month increments. They also offer a free version of their tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com. Although this version lacks some features of the full version, it's a very useful reference tool.

Wordtracker isn't hard to use, so we'll leave the step-by-step instructions, if you need them, to the folks who made the tool. You can download their user guide once you have logged into the system. There is also a FAQ and other resources on their website. Be sure to read up on the different databases (Comprehensive, Compressed, etc.) available within the system so you can choose the best one for your needs.

Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery is pricier than Wordtracker. It is a feature-rich tool that has fast become the darling of many hard-core search professionals. Keyword Discovery's data comes from over 200 search engines worldwide, and the data displayed in the main search results are from a historical period of 12 months. Data is updated monthly (like Wordtracker, this data is not an up-to-the minute snapshot). Keyword Discovery is available at www.keyworddiscovery.com. A limited free trial is available and easy to use.

Keyword Discovery claims that its “Global Premium” database is free from data skew caused by automated agents such as rank or bid checkers. What that means is that it attempts to deliver data derived only from human searchers, not robots or other software. We have our doubts that Keyword Discovery is significantly less “skewy” than Wordtracker, so don't let that be your deciding factor.

Even as professional SEO's, we find it hard to make full use of the feature set available here, but you might find some of their options irresistible. For example, Keyword Discovery allows you to review search popularity in some very specific databases, such as eBay, News, and Shopping, not to mention several international databases. These are great fun when you're doing an exhaustive, multitiered keyword research sweep for your site. But based on the data we've seen, we don't recommend these niche databases as a first-line tool for your research. We recommend sticking with the general databases and then graduating yourself to some deeper digging once you're familiar with broader trends.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

If you have absolutely no budget or if spending a day without using a Google product makes you twitchy take a look at the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

Google isn't exactly tripping over itself to help you understand the data, or even where it's coming from (Organic traffic? Paid traffic? Their lips are sealed.) But it does show recent data, and it's a fine place to start if you want to identify search trends, or if you want to verify a trend you think you're seeing elsewhere.

This tool is primarily targeted to advertisers who want to tune up their Google AdWords paid search campaigns, but you can glean solid keyword ideas and popularity trends no matter what your end goal.

Notice that we keep saying “trends,” not “numbers”? The Google AdWords Keyword Tool doesn't give you actual numbers just bar charts to indicate popularity. But it also gives you at-a-glance competitor information (for paid competitors only), which can be quite enlightening as you pick through your keyword possibilities.

Keyword Data Gathering

Congratulations you're over the hump in your first week of SEO! You have a long list of possible keywords and tools in hand to help you analyze them. Today you will fill in those all-important columns on your Keywords Worksheet:

Search Popularity How

many people are actually searching for a given term Relevance How well a keyword connects with your site and conversion goals Competition How many, and how well, other sites are targeting a given keyword Finalizing your top target keywords will require a balancing act between all three of these factors. We'll look a little more closely at each of them here. Search Popularity

Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and the Google AdWords Keyword tool provide values for keyword popularity (see Figures 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4). Today you're going to gather these values from your keyword research tool of choice.

It can be time-consuming pulling up the search popularity values for every term on your long list, but if you're using Wordtracker or the AdWords Keyword Tool, you can save time by copying and pasting several words at a time or your whole list into the search popularity tool. If you're good with Microsoft Excel, you can even export the search results from any of these tools for easy import into your Keywords Worksheet!

Don't pay too much attention to the absolute values of the numbers here. Search popularity values provided by these services do not give you the total number of searches throughout the entire Internet, so you should only use them for comparing the relative search popularity between two terms. If you're using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool for your research, you can just substitute AdWords' assessment (low, average, high, very high, etc.) for search popularity numbers. However, keep in mind that Google's search volume graphics are normalized scaled up or down based on the popularity of the most popular term on the list. Be sure that you gather all of your keyword data at one time so they're all being compared fairly.

You may notice while you gather your popularity numbers that you find other tempting keywords that you hadn't previously considered. Add them to the list! You'll begin slicing and dicing this list very soon, but for now, it won't hurt to add more promising ideas.

With these values in black and white, you'll have a much stronger command of which terms are going to be good performers for you.