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Sort of. It's very clunky, It never suggested my best performing keyphrases and missed a great many. The numbers are probably useful in a relative way. It hasn't changed appreciatively in the four years I've used it. I'm not a big time user and probably have missed the finer points, but I'm just glad the lads don't build airplanes.
Really, unless I've missed something terribly important, they are all alone out there. Talk about cornering the market, and I've never seen even an attempt at competition. Please don't mention Google or Overture...
Think about the opportunity, and that's without the possibility of skewing the results and holding back goodies for higher paying clients. What fun it could be. Is there an under the table, well funded agreement with some un-named search company NOT to improve Wordtracker - and does the benefactor quietly buy out any emerging competition?
Stay awake some night and think about it. It's easy once you get started!
I tried Google,Overture and Wordtracker itself;
I've experienced that no one of them is minimally reliable!
But I don't think to an under-table agreement,to a lobby of big proucers that "hide" the golden keywords.
I think that they are still unreliables due to the fact that the overall system itself is relatively "young" and that depends on many servers that collects keywords data across the internet.Probably the software that manages them is still perfectible and has serious problem that make it not yet able to index and classify with any realistic accuracy the returned results.
Leaving out the fact that in tools such as Google keywords or Overture the primary target is their gain...
Personally I've found more effective the "old",traditional system : to pick the keywords that people would type to find you;
It's dispersive and unuseful to research hundreds of keywords; better to point on a few highly effective of them.
Of course Google could do this for 75% of searches at once. Wonder why it isn't?
Over the years I've seen several modest KW rating sites come and go - none worth using. Surely there is enough Webmaster interest and revenue to justify a good competitive service.
YourAmigo
Quigo
Dulance
multiple Indian offshore firms
multiple SEM firms who've built inhouse tools
We're an SEM firm and have built our own keyword generation capabilities as well. The keyword gen solutions on the market largely stink, and you're right, there's a lot of value that a good keyword generation system can bring advertisers - for which they're willing to pay.
One of our clients for whom we've generated over 200,000 keywords told us the other day that they expect those new keywords will generate US$1M-$1.5M in additional profit this year alone.
I've experienced that no one of them is minimally reliable!
Compared same term in
Overture
Wordtracker
GoogleSandbox
Other
Results were all different, the 2nd position was different in all cases and "most searched terms" didn't appear in some cases.
"Keyword 1 Keyword 2" appeared some cases and others "Keyword 2 Keyoword1" (inverted)
So you can't take any decision based on those results.
Still can't figure out a reliable method to discover WHAT users search really.
I looked in logs but I think you trick yourself doing that. You will find exact phrases found to get to you in past or present. That will show you what gets ppl in your site but doesn't mean you are missing a lot of traffic searching actually other things.
Or just tell you that some pages worked better than others, no that keywords were more effective...
Any ideas?
Google has that information, but does not offer it except by inference ("you can expect "n" clicks per day" is quite helpful in the context of AdWords, but doesn't give us the real data).
WordTracker seems to miss many of the related search phrases for a KW, possibly due to the limited data sources available to them or to their own data techniques which keep too high a volume threshold for a KW to appear. The top performing 2 word phrase in a niche site of mine (seasonally 18-35% of searches logged) did not, does not appear in WordTracker. It is not a high volume search phrase compared to many - quite low, in fact. Fine, but two years ago it had 12 (twelve) competing pages... it now has over 500,000 - of course.
For small business, finding niche KWs is very important - and very difficult with PPCs wanting to keep everyone competing for the high volume, high priced terms. But if you have limited competition, a few low volume KW can add up to good business.
