Wordtracker Review
Wordtracker 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 Wordtracker may be useful:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
