search engine ranking seo strategy website marketing
Wordtracker: Inquiring Minds
Want to Know
I love wordtracker.
However, over the past several weeks I’ve gotten emails with questions about it. Questions I suspect others might also have about how to get the most out of wordtracker.
Generally they boil down to these three:
How do you use wordtracker exactly?Here’s the info inquiring minds want to know.
What’s up with KEI?
Do I use wordtracker to research searches on AOL, Overture,
Google or what?
QUESTION: How do you use wordtracker exactly?
A lot! Seriously, I have found wordtracker to be the best tool for keyword research. So here’s three ways I use wordtracker to discover gems among the rubble.
Say I want to research two similar terms - "rental truck" or "moving truck,", "quotes" or "quotations", "pawpaw" or "paw-paw". Wordtracker gives me the stats I need to decide which is most profitable.
In fact, usually I’ll find one option is not only more searched for but also has fewer competing pages. Making it glaringly obvious which to optimize for first. A fact evidently lost on most.
Then believe it or not, sometimes misspellings are more searched for than the correctly spelled word. For sure it will have fewer competing pages. Wordtracker reveals that to me in a heartbeat.
Oh yeah, the same goes for pluralization. And the plural form is usually your better bet.
I also use Wordtracker to point out promising "lesser keywords" which can be golden. Since sites ranking for them are often not run by seo savvy webmasters. Making them easy targets.
QUESTION: Wordtracker assigns a KEI number the higher the better I presume. What number do you shoot for?
Okay, let’s back track a bit to answer your question.
KEI stands for "Keyword Effectiveness Indicator". KEI an attempt by wordtracker to correlate keyword popularity and the number of competing web pages. The theory being the higher the KEI the more popular the keywords and the less competition they have. In essence KEI tries to highlight the keywords that will be most effective at delivering the traffic.
So presumably the higher the KEI number, the better, yes.
That said, I use KEI more as a guide not an absolute.
The reason I say that is it doesn’t consider the overall quality of competing pages.
Look, if you’re in a niche with a lot of seo know how, then that’s going to be more competitive than a niche populated by hobbyists with few seo skills.
So to me, simply using the number of competing pages to arrive at KEI isn’t all that reliable of a number.
True, it’s a number. Yeah it gives you a "feel". But it’s not really all that helpful in my opinion.
Okay then what KEI do I shoot for?
Can’t answer that. Why? What’s a great KEI in one niche is just so so in another.
For instance, in one of my niche sites the highest KEI on my list of the top 25 keyword phrases is 18.
While in a completely different niche the highest KEI is 1152. With more than half of the top 25 keyword phrases in the 200+ range.
So there’s no one-size-fits-all KEI to should shoot for.
QUESTION: Which so many search engines tracked which do you do research for?
I generally only do wordtracker research on Google.
Knowing that if I rank well there, I’ll be good on AOL, Yahoo, Netscape etc which right this nano-second covers roughly 80% of all searches. Which is good enough for me.
Besides, if you optimize for Google ALL THE rest take care of themselves.
Those are the answers I give to the typical wordtracker questions I get. Any more?
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