Wordtracker, an Essential Keyword Tracking Tool

Wordtracker, an Essential Keyword Tracking Tool

There are a number of tools available to help you research and track potential keywords phrases to focus on.  One of the first tools continues to be one of the most popular with online marketers; the Wordtracker keyword research tool (www.wordtracker.com).

While the full-featured paid version of Wordtracker is extremely powerful, there is also a very useful free online version that you can use (freekeywords.wordtracker.com). 

When you use the free keyword suggestion tool on the phrase “weight loss”, you’ll see the top 100 keyword phrases related to the weight loss market.

The Wordtracker results are meant to mirror Google search traffic, so according to this search, there are approximately 31,000 Google searches performed each day with the term “weight loss”.  (Some industry experts believe that this data underestimates the volume of Google traffic, and that the actual volume may be several times the amount shown in Wordtracker.)

Not surprisingly, the most obvious terms are searched most often.  In the example above, the term “weight loss” is itself searched about 9,500 times each day.  With almost 100 million web pages relating to weight loss, there is a significant amount of competition for each of those 9,500 searches.

Your goal is to find keyword terms where you have a chance to get a top 10 search ranking for keyword terms and phrases is a relatively small number of competing websites.  If you can find a keyword phrase that returns less than 10,000 web pages for the exact phrase (i.e., where the search is done with the entire phrase inside quotation marks), then you’ve found a great phrase.

If you find a relevant phrase that generates more than 10,000, but less than 30,000 competing pages, you still have a good opportunity to get your own website into the top 10 ranking.  Even if you find a phrase that generates less than 100,000 competing pages, it can still make good sense to develop a website page around that keyword phrase.

Take a look at the Wordtracker results page.  Review the list of terms and try to find a “well-grouped” collection of keyword phrases.  For example, visit freekeywords.wordtracker.com enter “la weight loss” and take a look at this portion of the results list, which has a common thread of “la weight loss”.

With 754,000 on Google, the direct competition for the exact phrase “la weight loss” is likely too great to reasonably address. 

In general, the longer a keyword phrase is, the less competition there will be.  Take a look at the following two examples:

“Does la weight loss really work”  shows 3170 results in Google

“Does la weight loss work” shows 4680 results in Google

Also, check how the results for these keyword phrases fare in Google PageRank (which is Google’s proprietary technique for ranking relevant pages within search results).  Go to (http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/) and enter your keyword phrase.  Look for keyword phrases where the top results (click the initial results page to sort by “Relevance”) have a PageRank of 4 or less.  This means that with the proper effort you’ll have a good chance to land a natural search results ranking in the top ten.

Using Wordtracker in combination with Google and a few other keyword research to build a list of potential keyword phrases.  Wordtracker is a great tool for a reason.  Use it to build your business, to target niche keywords and traffic, and to optimize your website for maximum results.