Google Keyword Tool VS Wordtracker
May 15th 2009 12:48 AM
Categories: 
Want to drive lots of quality, organic search engine traffic to your website? Keyword research is the first and most important step of this process. Selecting the perfect keywords and phrases is a balancing act between their popularity / search engine volume, and the competition for them.
Your selection must target key phrases that generate adequate search traffic and you can realistically achieve a top 10 search engine ranking for. This balancing act resembles learning to ride a bicycle. It takes some experimentation and practice to learn, but your ability will never fade once you have acquired it.
Keyword research tools provide you with the information you need to make that balanced decision. I would like to compare two of the more popular keyword research tools: Google Keyword Tool VS Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool.
Google leaves Wordtracker in the dust. It is bigger and better, and in this case, bigger IS better. Why?
Pricing
Google Keyword Tool is completely free to use. Wordtracker offers a premium version of their tool for $60 US per month, and $330 per year. It also offers a free keyword suggestion tool with a limited set of functionality.
Reliability of Search Volume and Competition
The reliability of the search volume and competition provided by these tools is very important. The two factors that contribute to the reliability are: sample size, and demographic diversity.
Sample Size
Sample size in this case refers to the number of search engine queries the results are based on. A higher sample size results in higher accuracy in the results.
Wordtracker collects and bases results on two search engines: Metacrawler and Dogpile. These two search engines have a combined search engine market share of approximately 0.65% - 0.7%. This constitutes a very small sample size relative to Google’s. To estimate search engine traffic on the popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo, it multiplies the number of results from MetaCrawler and Dogpile proportionally according to the market share of the popular search engines. Unfortunately for Wordtracker, multiplying a number containing error or uncertainty ends up multiplying the error as well.
Google’s search engine market share in January 2009 was approximately 63% in the USA, and 55% for the rest of the world. This sample size dwarfs that of Wordtracker by about 100 times in this case, leading to much more accurate results. In addition, Google’s data comes from its own database, whereas Wordtracker has to use and modify data from two search engines in an attempt to predict results.
The following example illustrates how inaccurate Wordtracker can be, especially for low search volume keywords.
As of today, the Toronto Blue Jays are the best team in baseball and I will make a bold prediction that they will win the World Series this year. Let’s say I want to have a landing page whose goal is to sell Blue Jays tickets online, targeting the city of Toronto.
I would like to know how much traffic I can expect to the page. So I enter the phrase ‘blue jays tickets Toronto’ into the keyword research tools, and here are the results:
Keyword Research Tools Results: Google VS WordTracker
WordTracker
Google
Wordtracker’s results are per day while Google’s are per month. If we multiply the Wordtracker results by 30 we get 90 results per month from Wordtracker. Compare this to Google’s results of 6600, it indicates that WordTracker is off by an enormous magnitude.
This difference is due to the superior sample size of Google that leads to more accurate results. In general, my opinion and that of other experts in the field is that Wordtracker should only be used for very popular searches. This will increase its accuracy significantly, the reason the error was so high is that the search term used is not very popular.
Demographics
How many of you have heard of DogPile and Metacrawler recently, let alone use them? I’m guessing not many of you. Wordtracker uses these as its only sources of search engine data.
Dogpile and Metacrawler has a very narrow niche of users that does not reflect the behavior of the larger internet community. Google on the other hand has a very wide demographic reflecting a much more diverse user base. As a result Google’s results more accurately reflect search engine user behavior than WordTracker’s.
Functionality
WordTracker’s free version provides the following functionality:
Google Keyword Tool provides:
The fact that the free version of Wordtracker does not have data on the level of competion puts it at a huge disadvantage over Google. Competitive data is just as important in SEO keyword research as search volume.
Conclusion
Google Keyword Research tool is better than Wordtracker because of its reliability and functionality. Google provides more functionality and accuracy than the free version of Wordtracker. It is also more accurate than the premium version of Wordtracker.
Although this post focused mostly on the free version of Wordtracker, the paid version is not a bad tool. It offers some useful features such as ranking keyword difficulties, however its accuracy is still a problem. I’ve evaluated the trial version for Wordtracker and just found its price point to be high for me given what it offers, but you can try it out for free to make up your own mind! Beware that you can’t sign up without submitting credit card information.
The more popular the search terms and phrases you enter, the more accurate its results will become.
There are many other keyword tools on the market. It is recommended to use several of the more popular tools together while performing keyword research, as this will decrease the margin of error in your research!
What do you think of my analysis, is it fair? Do you have anything to add? Is there another keyword research tool you recommend and would like me to review? Please share your thoughts below!
Thanks for the article, its quite informative when deciding between the two types of tools.
I also believe that Yahoo! also has a Keyword Selector Tool. I wonder how that would compare to these two tools above.
Elemental
hhtp://www.elemental.co.za
Thanks Elemental, I’m happy you found the post informative. Yes, Yahoo! does have a Keyword Selector Tool, and I think its a good idea for another tool review to compare it with Google, WordTracker, or some other popular keyword research tool. I’ll put that in my list of posts for the upcoming month.
Regards,
Omar
A few points worth noting …
You don’t know Google’s sample size as they don’t tell you. Be aware it includes more than what you might call organic searches (it is a PPC tool), see:
http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2008/07/15/why-the-google-keyword-tool-is-useless-for-seo-even-with-exact-numbers/
G “Global” figure really is global (average of last 12 months). “Local” is for the region you have selected, eg “United States”. Wordtracker figure is US.
The Google results you use is a “Broad” Match result. Wordtracker’s are “Exact”. These are completely different things. I just repeated your G search for “English, United States” and G’s “Local” results (now May not April) is “not enough data”. The Global result is 320.
Wordtracker free tool currently shows a result of 20. Using your logic (which I don’t), Wordtracker just got bigger and better than Google.
You’re assuming more is more accurate - it ain’t necessarily so.
Don’t think we should take any tool’s figures literally - they will all always be inaccurate a lot of the time. We should use them to make relative judgements and then *verify* before investing time and money. Then the pro’s question is “are they useful?” …
… this is where Wordtracker’s paid-for service (the new one - have you tried it?) comes into its own because you can save lists of keywords and group them into ‘projects’. This allows the detailed planning that professional SEO needs.
Providing the sample is good (and I think both G’s and Wordtracker’s are), it’s all about how the tool helps you use the data.
Interest declared: I do some writing and SEO work for Wordtracker.
Hi Mark, I haven’t tried WordTracker’s paid for service very recently, although I did several months ago. It definitely has some features that Google’s Keyword Tool does not. It’s my opinion that adding WordTracker into the mix doesn’t hurt, if you can afford it.
I still think that the fact Google is using a much larger sample size (their own search data), from a popular search engine (Google as opposed to the ones WordTracker uses for data that no one even uses today), and does not extrapolate results makes it more accurate than WordTracker, which is not to say that Google is 100% accurate.
Like you said, the key is to look for relative trends. But there are many niche keywords and phrases that do not even appear on WordTracker, which is why I recommend it for more popular searches but not for specific ones.
Thanks for your comment, I appreciate it.
Regards,
Omar
For it’s tool, Google doesn’t use anything like all searches on its search engine. You can easily see this by making a quick comparison of its reports with the keywords used on any reasonably successful site. G uses a sample just like all the other tools.
The numbers you see are extrapolations from that sample. Google doesn’t tell you how big the sample is but it might be less than other tools (see the new figures I gave using Exact match on Google - you used Broad).
Also do note that G’s sample has been proven to include ’searches’ that are not you and i would call organic searches (see the Smackdown link above).
hey i guys i have a premium account at wordtracker and want to sell it:) if you interested in please write me to bambinopazzo@gmail.com
Hi,
You recently commented on my blog and I am returning the favor. I don’t use any other Keyword tool other than myself. I prefer good old research! It allows you to find things no tool will ever find.
I provide local small business SEO, but my client base has never heard of SEO. However,they might search for increased website traffic!
Hi,
I’m using wordtracker to figure out the best keywords to target in my link building campaign (begin in 2 to 3 days) (still have a couple of pages to code ..)
My site is a kind of article directory (this is the main service) , But I’ll try to make it ( http://www.youtips.net ) more than that .. (Building a site network, soon I’ll launch Youtips inside : forums, ask and answer center, chat rooms etc)
the problem with article directories , is the SEO .. especially the keyword selection .. As I said , I use wordtracker and want to find two to three keywords to focus on containing the word “tips” ..
Have you an idea about what keywords i may use ? Can you give me a reasonable daily search volume for keywords for this kind of websites ?
What I noticed , is that the common keywords searched are very specific , and can’t be targeted and used in my title for example .. So what can I target for such a website ?
for example ,
“Hints and tips” is searched 18 times daily according to wordtrack , and it’s a very low number ..
according to google keyword, “Hints and tips” is searched globaly 90,500 ; so as you can see there is a big difference ..
I want to know , how much would be a reasonable search volume to target ?
Thanks for answering.
Nice website design. How much search volume to target really depends on the resources you have at your disposal, which includes time, money, individuals, and expertise. So the less you have at your disposal, the lower the search volume to target should be. It also depends how fast you want to rank for your keywords.
For lower volume searches I personally wouldn’t recommend WordTracker to estimate search volume. I think your current search phrase and website itself is too general. ‘Hints and Tips’ about what? If you are trying to cover everything, this will be very difficult. I would recommend sticking with several niches for hints and tips, or even one. I’m not a big fan of article directories, I think it will be tough to get a favorable ranking from Google on it.
If you are one person with a lot of time to devote, and can wait about a year to get a top ranking, I would say between 5000 - 20000 monthly searches. I personally target around search volumes of about 1000-3000 per post topic. I recommend using http://www.spacky.com as a quick and dirty search engine volume estimator, it proves details about the top 3 search engines. Good luck!
Regards,
Omar
Thank you Omar for your advice ..
I’ll try to stick with one or two niches so far ..
Analyzing my future competitors websites , I noticed that they stick with two to three niches, even if they are running articles directory ..
Thank you for the nice tool also !
Regards.
I used wordtracker on a 7 day trial because all my training for IM pointed to wordtracker as being more accurate than google. I got very frustrated at getting results in the 1000’s with google, yet with WT very little. I emailed support at wordtracker and they fobbed me off with the reason being is that google gets bombarded with robot queries which greatly increase and falsify the search results. I cancelled after my 7 day trial.
I would appreciate any comments on this
Dave