How To: Find Great Keywords and Track 'Em - Wordze and Trackur

June 25, 2008 by ian

I've been playing around with two new internet marketing tools of late. They're impressive enough that they deserve some special mention. I've gone as far as signing myself up as an affiliate, too (full disclosure) which is something I rarely, rarely do.

Wordze is another keyword-mining system similar to WordTracker and Keyword Discovery, with some critical additions I'll talk about in a minute. With Wordze, you can figure out how folks will search for you.

Trackur finds a wide range of social media mentions of a particular phrase. With Trackur, you can figure out who's talking about you.

The two together make a heck of a team. Here's how:

Wordze: Keyword Mining for Internet Marketing

If you've used other keyword mining tools,
Wordze will look very familiar. You can type in a keyword, find synonyms and see how many folks are searching for particular phrases:

The stats are great, and divided into 30-day chunks which I love. The 'Dig' feature is fun to play with, too (if you're a hopeless marketing geek like me).

But the features that really set Wordze apart, by a million trillion miles, are:

• They have an API and they make it available to all subscribers. You don't have to pay them $99999 extra, or do anything else. You can directly query their system from your own scripts. I nearly swooned when I saw that. Seriously. My wife looked at me like I was insane.
• It has a very speedy keyword density tool. Not a huge deal except that it's nicely integrated into the rest of their toolset, so you can take the density report and feed it right into a keyword mining project.
• Their competitive research tool is extremely cool. I'm not sure I'd depend on it (your brain is still better at this kind of stuff, plus it had trouble picking up EDU and GOV links) but it's a nice way to check your assumptions.

But really they had me with the API.

How I Used It Today

I've been battling to get Conversation Marketing into the top 10 for 'internet marketing' forever. I'll bob up to the 3rd page of Google results, then slump back to the 5th page. For a long-time SEO like me, it's utterly humiliating. I'm starting to feel like Sisyphus. So I ran a report:

I'm not a great believer in KEI as a measurement tool, but a lower number means it'll be tougher to get a good ranking. Whoa. No wonder it's been so hard.

But given the massive number of searches, it's probably worth it. In the mean time, I'll have a look at 'strategic internet marketing', which is not as busy but still a nice phrase.

So, Wordze helped me find out why I'm hitting a brick wall, ranking-wise. It also helped me find an easier niche keyword. And their competitive research tool told me I need about 20,000 more links if I have a prayer of moving up. Sigh.

You can sign up for Wordze here.

Trackur: Seeing Who Said What

Since links are going to be so critical, I wanted to see if my submissions to a blog carnival got me any new ones in the social media world.

I can do that by hand, using Google Blog Search, Google Reader, searching Twitter and checking all the other big aggregators like Technorati.

Or, I can pay about $20/month and use Trackur to find all the information in one place. Since I'm still lazier than I am poor, I elected to try out Trackur. I logged in, typed in my name, and bingo, I got a list of every blogger or Twitterer who's used it in vain:

I immediately learned that Blog Carnivals Are A Good Thing. I submitted a few articles to an e-mail marketing carnival last night, and I've already picked up a few nice mentions. Woo hoo!

Now, though, I need to start submitting to some internet marketing carnivals. I've got a long way to go.

Why Pay For It...

...if you can get the same data for free? Easy: It takes me about 30 minutes to pull all this data together if I do it on my own. That comes to about $75 of my time, on a cheap day. Or, I can spend $20 or even $100 a month, which is a lot cheaper (I'm too lazy to do the math) and then do more important stuff, like try to get that Gladiator's Belt of Ultimate Pain Infliction in WoW.

You can sign up for Trackur here.

Two Tools For One Purpose

Pull them together and these two tools help you do one thing: Become more discoverable for the right concepts.

Wordze helps you nail down the phrases folks will use to find you.

Trackur helps you see who's talking about you in the same breath as those phrases.

Put 'em together and you can influence the conversation in your favor.

Yes, I'm an affiliate. If you buy these tools from the links on this page, I'll make a dime or two. If you think I'm selling out, well yeah, I am. I make $0.35 a day on this blog right now, literally, so gimme a break. Plus, you'll note I don't debase myself for just any keyword research or social media gadget. These two are extraordinary.

Subscribe using RSS

comments (1) | trackbacks (0) | permalink