For years, search marketers had few choices for keyword research tools. Wordtracker was the professional’s choice, with those on lower budgets using free tools from Yahoo! and Google. But in the last few months, the keyword world has opened up, welcoming Trellian’s Keyword Discovery and Hitwise Keyword Intelligence to the party.
Many of you know the drawbacks of the traditional crop of tools. Yahoo! designed its keyword selector for paid search, so it ignores singular and plural—which is important for organic search marketers. Google’s Suggestion Tool has an even bigger drawback—it does not show the number of queries for each keyword. Wordtracker is a much more full-function tool, but it supports English-language keywords only. The market is ready for a more advanced tool, but have Trellian or Hitwise brought one to us?
Trellian, the maker of SEO Toolkit and other search tools, now offers Keyword Discovery, which has quickly become the biggest competitor to Wordtracker. Keyword Discovery takes a different approach from Wordtracker, which uses metasearch engines for its data. Keyword Discovery uses data from 170 search engines from around the world, sometimes employing search logs provided directly by the engines, but often “sampling” the referral logs of sites receiving traffic from search engines. It’s not known exactly what sites are being sampled, so some bias in the sample is possible here. Still, Wordtracker does not claim to use Google and Yahoo! data in its analysis—Trellian does.
Like Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery offers a list of keywords related to the one you’ve entered, including counts of each keyword. Unlike other tools, Keyword Discovery provides suggestions for misspelled keywords related to yours, and offers 12 months of data that allows you to see seasonal trends. It’s hard to judge the value of the data when it’s unknown where it comes from, but Keyword Discovery does offer new features you can’t get anywhere else.
Trellian offers two versions of Keyword Discovery, a standard edition (limited to 1,000 results per keyword) and an enterprise edition (offering up to 10,000 keyword results). Both editions are offered with monthly or yearly pricing as low as $390 annually.
Hitwise, a leading supplier of Web market intelligence, has begun to use its Web visitor data to analyze search keywords, even providing country-specific information. Alone among these tools, the Hitwise data collection technique ensures that the keywords shown were successful searches—that they resulted in a searcher actually visiting a Web site. Searches with no results or no clicks (including rank checking searches) are thus excluded from the data. Like each of these tools, it’s hard to judge whether Hitwise’s data sample is better than others’—it may skew to more popular queries.
Hitwise offers a basic version ($900 yearly) limited to 100 variations per keyword, while the 1,000-variation version weighs in at $1900 each year. Both prices are for just one geographic market, but at least Hitwise does offer country-specific data, unlike most of its competitors.
Will Trellian or Hitwise challenge Wordtracker in popularity? Only time will tell, but Wordtracker has never felt more competition, which can be nothing but good news for search marketers hungry for better keyword tools.
