It’s late, and I’ve had a couple of hard days, but I need to get this down before I go to bed.
Why have the days been hard? Well, I’ve had a challenging SEO copywriting project that has been made worse by having to do most of the key phrase analysis again.
You see, just as I’d figured out which were potential goers, I looked more closely at the results I had in my spreadsheet. They were based on data imported from wordtracker.com, and that data looks pretty suspect to me.
I haven’t had enough time to look into this closely, nor to get in touch with Wordtracker – I will, because I’d like to hear their side – but the problem is this. For each term I’d selected, I found that Wordtracker was telling me that exactly the same number of searches had occurred on each of the different search engines.
I don’t know what the odds are against that. But over the section of spreadsheet I examined before I ditched the results as being untrustworthy, I’d say the figure would be getting away towards infinity (OK, I exaggerate, but it would be a bloody big number).
The cool thing is that I’ve been forced into reappraising a tool that I have been getting increasingly unhappy with. I’ve also developed an alternative approach, which, while it’s based on fewer search engines, is yielding far more believable results, and should be refinable further process-wise.
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I totally agree with your comments on Wordtracker! I too have been trying alternative approaches. While I usually end up going back to Wordtracker to confirm my research, I using Overture, Good Keywords (the program), Common Sense, and Google.
What have you found to be of help?
Hi Akagino
The problem is, of course, obtaining believable data to base your decisions on.
I’ve been using Overture, too, and have been calculating KEIs from that data. At the same time, we (at Web Positioning Centre http://webpositioningcentre.co.uk) have been looking to develop some in-house tools, which, as they’re commercially sensitive, I’m going to have to keep quiet about
But KEI figures aren’t the be-all and end-all, because SEO copywriting addresses both the robot and human reader, so the decisions I make are based on finding a workable compromise, so while it would be good to have reliable figures for all the major search engines, it’s not a complete loss if they’re not available.