Wordtracker Keyword Tool

Wordtracker Keyword Tool

Wordtracker offers a couple of payment plans depending upon how long you wish to use the product. At the time of writing, the annual subscription is £161 and the monthly subscription is £28. Your best choice however is to go for the Free 7-day Trial.

This is excellent as it gives you full access to all the Wordtracker keyword tool options and is even likely to be long enough to get all your Wordtracker keyword research done without paying a penny. If you need longer, simply go for the 1 month payment. If you think £28 is too much to pay for finding keywords for your business, you should seriously rethink whether DIY SEO is for you. Believe me, it is money well worth spent.

So you have your account and logged on for the first time. Even though the menus and options look complicated, just follow this article, and you’ll soon have your lists of keywords. Once your Wordtracker subscription runs out, you will not have access to your online lists so it is important to Export all of your Keyword Projects into spreadsheets for future reference. This article explains how I do my keyword research on the Wordtracker Keyword Tool. The end result is simply to create lists of keywords that I will then use to optimise my website. Analysing these keywords will be tackled in another article.

Wordtracker Projects

Your first screen when you log in is the dashboard. Scroll down to Projects. Wordtracker has created a ‘My First Project’ for you. Either rename this one or create a new one. Call it something obvious like your website or business name. Mine is Free SEO Expert. Next, click on Start Your Keyword Research.

Keyword Research

This is the way I do it. I start by searching for a single keyword. Make a list of all the top-level keywords that relate to your business. Mine would be SEO, Optimisation, Marketing, Promotion, Social, etc. Don’t go mad, 5-10 should do it. Type one of the keywords in the box and also any variations on the keyword. So for Optimisation I would type Optimise, Optimising and Optimisation each on a separate line. Choose either to search in the US or the UK. Click the More Search Options dropdown and check Include Plurals. Next click Search.

Related Keywords Tool

If you are stuck for finding keywords for your business, there is the Related Keyword Tool which appears when you click Show next to the heading. Put in a word related to your business and the tool will show related keywords for you to choose from. It is really easy to get utterly confused with all the different keywords, so the best advice I can give is just try to be as organised as you can. First concentrate on all the single keywords you have, and then move on to the double keyword phrases. Be as specific and as targeted as you can.

Creating Keyword Lists

After pressing Search, below will be a list of all the keyword phrases that contain your chosen keyword in order of search popularity. The first thing you want to do is Select None, otherwise you will find yourself with a list of hundreds even thousands of useless keywords. Now work your way down the list checking any that are relevant. Try not to think too much about it otherwise you’ll take days choosing your keywords. It is better to delete them later than to miss out on important ones now. For me, the maximum keywords in a phrase I choose are 3 unless the phrase is geo-targeted like London or UK.

Once you have got to the bottom of the page, scroll back up and select the Save button under Save Selected. A small box will appear. Select your Project from the drop down and choose an obvious List name. Make the List name the keyword you have searched on. A small confirmation will appear at the bottom right detailing the number of keywords saved to the List.

Click on the next page and do exactly the same and continue until you feel you have all the keywords you need. I generally stop when the Search count gets down to single figures. When you feel you have all the keywords you need, scroll to the top and select your new List name.

Wordtracker Additional Metrics

The following screen displays all the keywords you have chosen. Click Get Additional Metrics. Check the two checkboxes under Metric 4: Google Count (Option) and select the Get Additional Metrics button.

Export your Keywords

Next to the Export option, select All Columns and then the Open button. This then displays all your chosen keywords in your default spreadsheet application. If you do not have a spreadsheet program, you may wish to check out Open Office which will give you a free productivity Suite similar to Microsoft Office. The first thing to do is to remove the KEI, KEI3 and Google Count columns. My Google Count column is empty so get rid of this one too. The reason I remove KEI and KEI3 is that Keyword Research will throw at you so many different statistics you really want to get rid of anything that is likely to confuse you. Keep it simple and just leave the columns Keyword, Searches, In Anchor and Title and Google Count Quoted. Save the document and move on to the next keyword.

Do not go worrying about what all these numbers are. Analysing the numbers will be covered in another article. For now just produce your keyword lists. Click Find keywords at the top of Wordtracker which will take you back to the Find Keywords page. Change that keyword for your next top-level keyword and do it all over again. Wordtracker keyword tool research will have produced a handful of spreadsheets each listing some fantastic keywords that you can use to optimise your website.

Deep Keyword Research

The last step is to look through each of these lists in turn and find the most popular 2-keyword phrases that relate to your business and for each do exactly the same as your top level keywords. The process should be quicker and easier as there will be less resulting keywords to choose from. I would choose Optimisation Service, Optimisation Company, Optimisation Expert, etc. Search for keywords for each of these phrases in turn. Leave all the Wordtracker settings the same. Name the lists you create with the keywords that you are searching for just as you did for the single keywords.

These are the lists you are looking for and these should provide you with 3-keyword phrases that are specific to your business. These are the keyword phrases to optimise your website with. A keyword phrase I could well choose for my home page is Website Optimisation Services which has a count of 91. Each keyword is related to my business and the keyword phrase tells exactly what I do.

Wordtracker Keyword Tool Conclusion

It may seem daunting to go through your keywords like this, but remember you have 7-days free of charge, so take your time. Take a day to produce your top-level keywords and that evening highlight any 2-keyword phrases to search on the following day. The next few days with a clear head work your way through this list.

SEO Expert Tip

This is all you want to use Wordtracker Keyword Tool for. Get those lists on your computer and you can refer to them time and time again as you build your keyword campaign, and not a penny has been spent.