Why WordTracker is Obsolete!
WordTracker is dead! Long live Google!
Why do I say this? Well, for the past two years, I’ve paid $300 per year to have a WordTracker subscription. Last month, my subscription expired, and guess what? I didn’t renew it!
You see in those past two years Google’s keyword tools have been upgraded, and also they have an entirely new keyword tool, which I think blows WordTracker (and everything else of similar cost) right out of the water. Best of all, in fine Google tradition, these tools are FREE!
What are these tools?
Well, it all started with Google’s AdWords tool, which you can access easily if you have an AdWords account. This was their basic keyword research tool. Even if you don’t have an AdWords account, you can access their External Keyword Tool, which does the same thing. (I mean it’s the same tool, you just don’t have to be in your own AdWords account to get to it.) If you want to see it, just click here.
This tool used to have a major drawback. Google would not show you real numbers for search volume, just meaningless bars. I say meaningless because the bars were either full, 3/4ths full, 1/2 full, 1/4th full, or empty. The problem was, these measurements were all relative (to something, at least!). And you could never figure out what the real volume of a particular keyword search should be.
Google’s old version of their keyword research tool was great for getting ideas, and also for comparison, but if you wanted solid numbers, you had to use a paid tool like WordTracker.
I forget when it was, but sometime this year (2008), all that changed!
Google added search volume numbers to their external keyword tool. Wow!
For a while, I used both Google’s external tool and WordTracker. No keyword tool is perfect, and I liked the triangulation this afforded me. I wondered, however, if my WordTracker days were numbered!
Then something amazing happened! A literal game changer!
A few weeks ago, Google introduced a new kind of keyword research tool. It’s called “Google Search-Based Keyword Tool”, and you can take a look at it, here.
Let me explain the basic difference between Google’s External Keyword Tool (the one that you use for AdWords), and their new Search-Based Tool.
With the External Keyword Tool, you enter one or more keywords, fill out the captcha, hit the button and voila! Google returns two lists of keyword phrases, one directly related to your keyword phrase and a second list that was more loosely related. You get numbers for the previous month’s approximate search volume, the average search volume (per month), and a bar showing you relative advertiser competition. You can look at numbers for broad match, phrase match, and exact match. You can even play around with negative keyword terms and see how many searches are left over.
The External Keyword Tool also allows you to generate keyword phrases based on the contents of your or someone else’s website. This is a great way to expand your keyword list.
Taken together, I found both these parts of the External Keyword Tool to be heavy competition for WordTracker. I often found myself, creating large keyword lists just using Google’s tool and not even using my WordTracker tool. At this point, before the introduction of the new Search-Based tool, I was on the fence. I assumed that I would renew my WordTracker account when it came due.
But then, as I said, a few weeks ago, I learned about Google’s new Search-Based Keyword Tool.
As I said earlier, WOW!
Now, I’m a sales and marketing guy, specifically a writer. I’m no expert in latent semantic indexing or any of the technologies that actually make Google’s search engines work. I’m sure some of my readers will understand the nuances of all of this better than I do. (If you’re one of those readers, please feel free to put in your two cents in the comments. Your input will be appreciated!)
Having said that, let me give you my take on the main difference between Google’s Search-Based tool and their external Kkyword tool. If you look at the home page of the Search-Based tool, here, you’ll see where Google says that their tool is “Based on actual Google Search queries,” and is “Matched to specific pages of your website.”
So, to my mind, it looks like through this tool, Google is essentially adding information from their search database (or databases) into the creation of a keyword list. Exactly where this differs from the website portion of their external tool, I’m not sure, but from what I’m reading lately it seems that the website portion of the external tool just relies on what’s on your website, where the Search-Based tool actually gets information from previous searches, or previous similar searches.
Again, if you know more about this than I do (not hard), please feel free to comment.
Let’s talk about something I do know.
As an experiment, I took a new niche where I had just started an AdWords campaign. The campaign looks very promising. I’m already making a profit. The problem is my keyword list wasn’t big enough to find profitable keywords that I didn’t have to pay an arm and a leg for. (It’s a very competitive niche.)
So, I decided to give Google’s Search-Based tool a go.
I did this by finding several full-blown websites that were closely related to my niche and feeding their URL’s into the Search-Based tool. I did this until I had about ten thousand new keyword phrases. I’ve just uploaded those phrases using my AdWord’s editor, and I’ll let you know how well they did. But just from a cursory look at the phrases I got through the Search-Based tool, I do believe that there were several clusters of phrases that I have never even thought about before.
In other words, although I can’t measure anything yet, I’m of the opinion that the Search-Based tool gave me a much broader list than Google’s External Keyword Tool would have. Also, quite frankly, that broader list looks to be of better quality than what I would get out of WordTracker’s Keyword Universe, their “broadest” tool.
This is a huge post, and I hope your getting some information you can use, but right now at this moment, I’m extremely impressed with Google’s Search-Based tool. I feel like it’s getting me closer to finding those very long-tail searches that are cheap to buy, but yet make a lot of money because they have a very high ROI. (What you paid for a click, divided by what you make out of a click.)
So, I didn’t renew my WordTracker account.
Should you do the same? Well, I can’t say that for sure. I might have done the wrong thing. I might renew my WordTracker account next month, or tomorrow. But for now, I really feel that the combination of these two tools (Free tools!) from Google has made WordTracker obsolete!
Comments
4 Responses to “Why WordTracker is Obsolete!”
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Google’s choice to provide downloadable numeric data was a very smart thing to do.
But to say that Wordtracker is obsolete though is a little premature. If you are interested in using Wordtracker to explore behavioral trends using right and left hand word stemming, then to date, I have not found a tool to match Wordtracker.
However, if you want to do “Keyword research” for SEO, then there is a brand new tool that let’s you take Google data and apply an even more superior method of research which takes into account things like Keyword Density, keyword Proximity, and keyword Prominence, in Title tags, H1 tags, Anchor tags, and Body text at the same time assigning a difficulty score to each phrase.
http://www.SEO-Sniper.com
There are some great advantages for using Wordtracker if you are looking beyond keywords to behavioral trends.
I also like Keyword Discovery a lot and watch to see what they come up with in the next few months too.
I enjoyed reading your post about Google’s tool too so thank you for sharing.
Highest regards
John Alexander
Author of “Keyword Forensics for SEO”
KEIobservationDeck.com
Hi John!
You’re absolutely right about behavioral trends. And, quite frankly, I might well re-up my WordTracker subscription. As you’ve pointed out so clearly, the keyword research tools you use have a lot to do with your goals. Also, thanks for the SEO-sniper.com link! And, I’m glad you’re enjoying the posts!
Lee
Thanks.
For you info about Google base Search tools, I will try to used it
Hey Lee,
Keep up the great posts and I wish you the best of continued success in all of your work.
Highest regards
John Alexander
Like the only REAL magic - the magic of knowledge