Trellian’s Keyword Research Tool
I’m always on the lookout for new and better resources, particularly those that help me client SEO and PPC campaigns for my clients. I’ve been recently given the opportunity to try Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery as an alternative to tried and true WordTracker. Here are some initial thoughts:
The interface is very clean and relatively straightforward. It’s easy to get of queries that include specific words, and the side-by-side drill-down is nice. The look and drill-down capabilities make it look like a nicer version of the Overture keyword tool with many more features. Other “likes”:
- It’s fast, taking seconds to call up a hundred terms unlike the unpredictable Overture tool delays and without the quirkiness of WordTracker’s multiple panes.
- You can sort and reverse-sort by any column.
- Counts include simple phrase variations like plurals (e.g. used car and used cars are different keywords).
- Two databases: their own and Overture’s. (Many if you count each national Overture database.)
- The Industry Terms feature is interesting, but it only seems to be useful for high-volume mature market keywords.
- There is a nice built-in keyword density tool for web page evaluation.
In spite of the vast improvement over the current WordTracker interface, I have some qualms with that of KeywordDiscovery. For one, they should put all commands at the top AND bottom of the screen, not splitting them between the two. Want help? Scroll all the way down. More annoyances:
- The use of “projects” is not at all intuitive.
- When switching from their own database to Overture’s, it doesn’t warn you that you’re going from annual to monthly data.
- Some online documentation is unclear. For instance, are these annual or monthly numbers? They look to be monthly.
My main gripe is that they provide no specifics about their information sources. They could have the best feature set and interface in the world, but that’s not important if the data is innaccurate. I’ve looked at a few terms upon which my clients advertise in AdWords with budgets and bids that provide a very good count of the number of searches on these terms in Google’s search network. Of the 5 keywords I looked at, KeywordDiscovery, AdWords, and the Overture suggestion tool were usually within less than 50% of each other, which I consider to be … adequate. This is a very difficult area to measure, and something that I may pursue in more detail in future blog posts.
There are a host of other features that I haven’t played with yet, such as “Advanced Search Syntax”, import/export, seasonal analysis, etc. Perhaps a future blog entry will touch on these.
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