Keyword Quality And The Wordtracker Database by Ken McGaffin, 6 October 2006
Search engines get bombarded with automated queries from ranking monitors, popularity analyzers, bid optimizers and other tools. This deluge of non-human activity distorts keywords counts and if it is not identified and eliminated will leave you with very poor keywords.
Key points
- We get our data straight from the metacrawlers, one of the purest sources of search behaviour by real people.
- We protect our data sources by constantly monitoring and evaluating raw data, looking for spam and eliminating it from our results.
- We allow you to filter out adult oriented keywords.
- Our data contains no hard coded links.
- Duplicate results do not exist inside Metacrawler data.
Basing your search engine optimization on poor keywords is as sensible as building a house without foundations, as valuable as a ton of fools gold and as informative as a television set without an aerial.
In short, poor keywords will cost you money, waste your time and bring you zero return. To succeed online you need quality keywords - and that's exactly what Wordtracker provides.
Wordtracker invented the keyword research business and we have more experience in making sense out of millions of search queries made by real people than anyone else on the planet.
Here's why Wordtracker data is data you can trust:
We get our data straight from the metacrawlers, one of the purest sources of search behaviour by real people.
We didn't choose metacrawlers by accident, we chose them because of the quality of the data.
A metacrawler searches all the best search engines from a single screen and we have an exclusive partnership with two of the most popular:
Now metacrawlers are very useful for humans because they save time and bring back reliable results: but they are not very useful for the bots that make automated queries because these bots are interested in results from a single search engine.
So guess what? Humans use the metacrawlers, bots tend not to.
That means that keyword data coming from the metacrawlers is about as clean as you can get. The metacrawler data represents real people searching and is the best way for you to find the words people use when they search.
We protect our data sources by constantly monitoring and evaluating raw data, looking for spam and eliminating it from our results.
Metacrawlers provide the best source of human behaviour but of course there will be a hardcore of spammers who will still try to influence results.
We do our utmost to eliminate such spam activity. To survive a keyword must pass through a minimum of 10 different filters before it wins a place in our keyword database. And in addition to these powerful filters our developers constantly monitor our data and any spam that survives is removed within 24 hours.
We allow you to filter out adult oriented keywords. Many website optimizers are irritated by adult oriented words that clog up results and waste valuable time. That's why we've developed a proprietary adult filter that gives you the option to remove this material.
Our data contains no hard coded links.
Suppose a webmaster wanted to generate some additional income from his site, say from 'online casinos'. They'd publish a live link with the text 'online casinos' that when clicked triggers a search on a PPC engine. This brings the webmaster a commission but does not represent a natural search by a person as they are being led into the action by the website.
This will in turn inflate the keyword counts. This type of query does not exist inside the Metacrawler data.
Duplicate results do not exist inside Metacrawler data.
We often get asked why our keyword counts are lower than others: the main reason is that we exclude multiple counts.
Many PPC search engines have partnership arrangements in place - one search engine might have at least 2 or 3 different PPC engines on their results page. To give an accurate keyword count such duplicate results must be filtered out.
But because PPC engines give you all the data in one lump it can't be filtered out and so is likely to contain a many duplicate search terms.
Keyword Research is the only thing we do
Because keyword research is the only thing we do, we're totally focused on giving you the keywords you need to succeed online. We live or die on the quality of our data and it is not surprising therefore that we're obsessive about our data sources.
It is not quantity of keywords that matters but quality. And the metacrawler data that we use consistently outperforms alternative data sources that we test extensively.
Using Wordtracker, you will continually expand your lists of solid, profitable keywords and your online business will grow and prosper.
About Ken McGaffin
Ken McGaffin is an experienced internet marketing consultant. He has worked for major pharmaceutical companies, advertising agencies, government bodies and non-profit organizations.
13 comments
It is my desire to maximize my results by using highly or most frequently selected keywords with low cost per click for my PPC campaign. I am a Realtor who is using PPC for real estate sales & Marketing.
I wish to maximize results while being conservative with cost.
What is an optimum number of competing web pages - what is too high or low?
This is a tough question to answer. It can vary for different engines, the algorithms you use in your doorway pages and so on. Clearly, a general principle holds true. If a keyword has just 50 competing web pages, you probably have a better chance of getting to the top than if a keyword has 50000 pages, which gives you a better chance than 5 million!
Then again, if a keyword had just 50 competing web pages and you simply submitted your page without tailoring it for that engine, you might end up at the bottom!
Generally though, we tend to find the most success with competition under 1000 pages.
We also have a useful facility available in the 'competition search'. By setting the 'Analysis' tab to yes, Wordtracker will automatically compare the 24Hour result (the number of searches predicted in the next 24 hours) with the number of competing web pages to give you an idea of whether a page is worth targetting.
The higher the ratio, the more popular the keyword compared to its competition, and the lower the ratio, the more competition there is compared to the popularity.
In a nutshell: Aim for the highest ratio!
I'm still confused by the "count" when using the Keyword Universe tool.
The help file says that this data is over a period of 90 days. So if, for example, a keyword has a count of 45, does that mean...
A) It was searched 45 times over 90 days
B) It was searched an average of 45 times daily
C) Or something else entirely
What I'm trying to come up with is a monthly count for my spreadsheets. So if WordTracker gives me a count of 60, I'm wondering I need to divide by 3 to get a monthly average ... or multiply by 30.
Thanks!
So what would be a good count then? 45 does't seem like a very good count. Does that mean that you only recorded that keyword being typed into all the search engines 45 times over the last 90 days? What kind of traffic would that bring.
Thank you so much for this information! You have provided me with enough distinctions to decide to recommend your product.
Can wordtracker be used in Australia and does it pick up Goggle and Yahoo
Hiya,
The count is the number of times a keyword appears in our complete database of 1/2 billion keyword searches from Metacrawler / Dogpile in the last 90 days. So if you see ‘car insurance 45’ this means that we recorded 45 different occurrences of that search time at different times in the last 90 days from 1/2 billion searches. The predict is the number of times we ‘predict’ a keyword will appear in all engines today.
Hope that helps!
Kind regards,
Mike
I am interested in finding out whether I can isolate results from Australia only. Please let me know.
Really useful. I too appreciate the adult filter and, like many of your other users, would be frustrated without it, if presented with tons of irrelevant and inappropriate keywords. Thanks - Ewan Kennedy.
hi,I have never try it this way.
I would also like to isolate results just from Australia. Is this possible?
I as well would like to isolate results just from Australia. Is this possible?
I agree aswell - an Australian option would be fantastic!