WordTracker Tips

Most professional Search Engine Marketers, including ourselves, use KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker as a key part of the keyword research process we do for clients.

If you're doing your own search engine marketing in-house then we strongly recommend you use one of these powerful keyword research tools. (WordTracker used to be the tool of choice, but the new KeywordDiscovery tool is substantially more powerful which is why it's now our preference).

Either way, here are some tips to help you get the most out of these tools. This was originally written for WordTracker, but most applies equally to KeywordDiscovery.

Overview and Traps To Avoid

One of the key benefits of these tools is a very useful function that enables you to brainstorm and generate hundreds of potentially lucrative keywords - many you'd probably never think about on your own.

Then once you've generated your shopping list of potential keywords you can run an analysis it to determine how popular they are. That way you can narrow your list down to search terms enough searches are being done on to warrant optimising web pages for.

Based on the number of times a keyword has been searched on in a sample of search engine queries (over 300 million) WordTracker extrapolates this and gives a predicted daily search figure across all major search engines.

"Quality over Quantity"
A trap to avoid is falling in love with keywords simply because they are queried with higher frequency than others. Always discriminate first on relevance to your site, not potential traffic.  

Attracting a smaller amount of quality traffic that's more likely to buy is invariably better than getting lots of visitors who are less likely to buy.

Just as in offline business, you want to focus on attracting prospective buyers to your site rather than lots of time wasting tyre kickers (let your competitors waste their time and resources dealing with them!).

"Competition - know what you're up against"
WordTracker also provides a Keyword Competition report. There are 2 parts to this - one useful and the other not so useful (in my opinion at least).

The useful bit is it allows you to drill down into specific search engines and directories and get predicted daily traffic for each keyword in each search engine, such as Google. WordTracker also shows the number of "competing pages" for each keyword. This is the number of search results returned by each search engine for a particular keyword.

The idea is that the lower the competition the easier you will find it to reach the top using this keyword. As a rough rule of thumb that's probably true.

However the only real way to determine the degree of competition is to check the Top 30 results in a search engine for a given keyword. You need to determine how many have been specifically optimised for that keyword phrase and how well.

Remember if your page isn't in top Top 30 results it's effectively invisible to most web searchers. Position 31 is marginally better than position 9,999. In other words - it's not the total number of competing pages, but the degree of competition amongst the top 30 results that really matters.

"KEI Analysis - don't bet the farm on it"
Now the not so useful feature is something called KEI Analysis. KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) is a formula that measures popularity against competitiveness in an effort to identify the most promising keyword phrases to target. 

The idea is that the higher the KEI the more popular keywords are and the less competition they have. When this occurs it enhances the chances of getting to the top of the search engine being targeted.

Nice theory but it doesn't always work that well in practice and can be a trap for new players.

Often keywords look promising because they have a high KEI but they really aren't worth optimising pages for because search demand is too low. There is no point dominating a keyword phrase with little other competing web pages (i.e. a high KEI) if no one searches for it!

Also figures used in KEI can be skewed by automated searches making demand look higher than it really is for certain terms. Many SEOs ignore KEI for these reasons.
 

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 WordTracker Tips