New SEO Book Keyword Tool...3 Cheers for Wordtracker!!!

I recently talked to the fine folks at Wordtracker about how unreliable the Yahoo! keyword suggestion was, and Wordtracker offered to work with me to power the SEO Book keyword tool using Wordtracker's robust and reliable API.

keyword tool

The new SEO Book keyword tool operates like the old one, but with the following improvements

  • We now have a CSV export option at the top of the results. And it is pretty sweet! It lists keyword, WordTracker count, daily estimates for the big 3 engines, and broad and phrase match versions of each keyword :)
  • Because Wordtracker's business model relies on selling keyword data, they have a vested interest in keeping it as clean and reliable as possible, and are unlikely to pull a Yahoo
  • Wordtracker does not tokenize plural words into their singular versions, so you get to see volumes for both singular and plural to know which is more popular. In fact, if you search for the plural they will still return the singular
  • Wordtracker does not arbitrarily alter the word order like the Overture did
  • Wordtracker's API is much more reliable than grabbing the data from Overture was
  • Wordtracker's API allows you to filter out adult keywords.

Yahoo! Search Marketing offers a developer API, but given how rough their transition away from their old keyword tool was, I would much rather use a reliable market leading tool like Wordtracker. Please give it a spin and let me know what you think.

Recommendation: If you don't mind investing a couple bucks into in-depth keyword research, make sure you try the paid version of Wordtracker with all the added features and benefits they offer.

Published: December 14, 2007 by Aaron Wall in seo tools

Comments

poster boy
December 14, 2007 - 10:53am

Nice improvement to the old version. Is there a way to show local results ie. just for Google UK to gain more accurate results?

December 14, 2007 - 10:59am

I know Wordtracker offers a UK specific tool inside their paid service, but I am not sure if that is available yet in their API.

Nixies
December 14, 2007 - 11:04am

Hi Aaron

Thanks for working on this the Yahoo error were driving me nuts.

Having said that, at the moment I'm getting this error: Notice: Undefined variable: ret in
____*
on line 243

On a lot of the searches.

Also I agree with Poster boy would be great to have local results.

Thanks again.

* Aaron edited out URL. thanks for the feedback!

December 14, 2007 - 11:24am

Hi Nixies
Can you tell me a specific keyword / search query that throws that error so I can try to fix it?

Nixies
December 14, 2007 - 11:37am

The term I tried it with was 'horse insurance' now it just seems to crash when I try. Might be something my end but everything else seems to be working okay.

melissa
December 14, 2007 - 11:37am

Hi Aaron

We love love love this application and have been using it religiously for months however all our clients are based in the UK so we can't use it any more :(

Will you be finding out if UK is available in their API?

Many thanks

Melissa

trooperbill
December 14, 2007 - 1:34pm

nice but for me i'll still have to use overture with all its flaws as wordtracker doesn't give me the option to show results from the UK only like overture does .

omarinho
December 14, 2007 - 2:45pm

It looks like that I have never learned how to use WordTracker in an appropriate way. I don't know if I am doing something wrong but whenever I make a "Simple Search", I end up having a lot of keywords that don't have anything to do with the original topic.

otane
December 14, 2007 - 4:00pm

Great tool.

Matias Bulox
December 14, 2007 - 4:03pm

Nixies, you're right. The keyword tool returns the following error. "Notice: Undefined variable: ret in _____*
on line 243

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in ______*
on line 243"...Aaron, I figured that if I click on the 'Suggest!' button it works just fine but if I hit the 'Enter' key on my keyboard then I get the error. On the other hand...thanks for the improved keyword tool...it's great.

* Aaron edited out URL. thanks for the feedback!

Phil
December 14, 2007 - 5:30pm

It's a great tool and it's certainly refreshing that we don't have to get the fopen() error anymore. Don't know if you mentioned it but Wordtracker seems to distinguish between lower case and upper case as well! On the downside it becomes apparent that a few keywords I've been targeting have significantly lower search volume than they had on your old system. I.e. one keyword had a total expected search volume of 207k/month and now only 750 daily or 22.5k monthly (30 days).

Judging by the PPCs though I guess it's still worth going for the top :-)

December 14, 2007 - 7:07pm

Hi Everyone
I talked to Mike Mindel from WordTracker, and found out I had a setting wrong. We now got it consolidated to lower case instead of showing upper and lower case. I believe most search engines treat upper and lower case letters as being the same.

Desiree
December 14, 2007 - 7:49pm

I love this new version! I also have a paid subscription to wordtracker but for some reason I end up using your tool more. :)

Especially love the Export feature!

Thanks Aaron! you rock!

December 14, 2007 - 8:11pm

Hi Desiree
My tool just aims to be a quick starting point - fast and easy. If you really want to dig in deep Wordtracker has a lot more features though.

tingeltangeltill
December 15, 2007 - 6:32am

Hi Aaron,

unfortunately this tool is just helpful for english seos or seos fighting on english markets :-(

Regards from Germany

Till

Phil
December 15, 2007 - 3:38pm

Is there any chance you could offer a legacy version of your old tool so we can pull the data from Overture for the foreign markets? I've always been interested in researching some of the bigger EU markets as well.

December 15, 2007 - 9:32pm

Hi Phil
I am about to leave, but I will do this when I come back tonight.

anntheman
December 15, 2007 - 11:00pm

Your last keyword tool said my keywords recieved 100,000 searches per month and now it says 15.
What's to say in 2 months it will be different again?
Do you really have any idea what search volume is going on?

December 16, 2007 - 2:32am

I don't use keywords to get exact volumes. I use them to get relative values and think about what I should structure my site toward.

The old keyword tool sampled Yahoo! but had large biases toward over-representing high value keywords due to automated searches on the Yahoo! network. The Wordtracker tool samples metasearch services like Dogpile.

Lestarte
December 17, 2007 - 4:00pm

Great stuff.
Since you don't use WordPress, I'll leave a manual PingBack for your article :)
http://www.lestarte.com/blog/2007/12/17/search-engines/39-seo-books-keyw...

@posterboy: Since Google has some parameters to play with, this task is easily done:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&num=100&q=
(Leave out the "&num=100" if you don't like to get 100 results at once)

Greets,
Lestarte

Sway
December 17, 2007 - 5:32pm

Even better than the last version -- I love this tool for quick cross referenced insight into traffic volumes for the phrases that pop into my head all day...without having to fire up my KD account and dig, and wait, and dig...

Thanks

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