Keyword Research With Wordtracker

What is Wordtracker?

Wordtracker is a web based tool for identifying the search terms that are being used by search engine visitors. Its wealth of analysis features will tell you search term popularity, alternative relevant terms and strength of competition for those terms.

The Wordtracker Database

The hub of all this research and analysis is a frequently updated database of over 300 million search terms that have been entered into the search engines in the past 90 days. It is complied from two of the major metacrawlers – Dogpile external links and Metacrawler . Whilst those numbers may only represent a small fraction of the overall market, the size is still sufficient for Wordtracker to calculate meaningful popularity values and extrapolate predicted daily usages.

Features

Wordtracker contains two main tools for researching keywords – the Keyword Universe and the Keyword Researcher.

Keyword Universe

The Keyword Universe is an area for brainstorming and coming up with a broad range of keywords. Use this tool at the outset to get a seed list, explore your market and as a source of inspiration.

You start by entering a relevant keyword. Wordtracker will examine other websites that perform well for this keyword and return an extensive list of the other keywords they use. The list will be wide-ranging and not always accurate because Wordtracker is looking at each website’s meta keywords list. Since the meta keywords lists serve little purpose these days (they do not contribute to SEO) the quality of their content is somewhat questionable. However they invariably throw up some useful nuggets and niche ideas, so they do have a value.

From the list, select the keywords that you want to research further. Wordtracker will show two numbers for each keyword.

Wordtracker Keyword Universe Count is the number of times the keyword appears in the database (its popularity). Predict is an estimate of how many times that keyword will be searched on in the next 24 hours based on Dogpile’s and Metacrawler’s portion of the overall market and the likely number of global searches that will take place. You can Dig a keyword to reveal further related keywords.

Select your preferred keywords to see how much competition there is for each in the main search engines. The popularity and competition factors are translated into a Keyword Effectiveness Indicator (KEI). The higher the number the better, as this indicates high popularity and low competition.

Keyword Researcher

Wordtracker Keyword Researcher The Keyword Researcher is a tool for digging deeper into the long tail of a chosen keyword. Use this tool to find the best keywords in your seed list, see how they perform as part of longer keywords and look for opportunities to mix and match keywords.

Start by entering your chosen keyword phrases into the Research box and selecting the research settings. The settings provide for an extensive range of different results:

Keywords in any order will return a list of phrases that contain all the words in each keyword phrase in any order.
Exact keyword only will return just the keyword phrases you are researching.
Exact keyword inside a search term will return a list of phrases that contain the exact keyword phrase.

You can also select case matching, include misspellings and include plurals. One very useful recent addition is the option to research UK keyword phrases rather than the default (US).

The returned list will show the count and predict (similar to Keyword Universe) for each phrase. Now you can choose which phrases to evaluate. This will show the competition, KEI and predict in the specific search engines (similar to Keyword Universe). From here you can export or save the results.

Other Features

Full Search is not as accurate as the Keyword Universe but will quickly return a list of related keywords for a chosen keyword.

Keyword Projects for the management of up to 5 different sets of research.

View all your results pulls all the results for different keywords together.

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