You are in: ECommerce-Guide > Solutions > Customer Relations

ECommerce-Guide Essentials eBiz FAQ Everything you need to know to start your own successful e-business. Selling on eBay How to make money in the online marketplace. PayPal Payments and More What's new in secure payments for your online store. Shopping Cart Software Solutions to close, process and track your online sales.

Keywords Revisited: Paid Research Tools
By Kevin Lee
March 19, 2004

The free keyword research options are great. You can develop an amazing marketing campaigns for your e-business using free resources, but sometimes you just need more keyword research. If you missed earlier columns on the free keyword research tools and log files, start there, then return to this column. Today we'll focus on paid keyword research tools and resources. Many go far beyond keyword research and into the competitive intelligence.

Wordtracker
This tool is the most popular external source of keyword research data. Wordtracker has a database of terms that, though similar to those of Overture and Google, comes from a different search engine source -- several meta engines. Some feel the data from Wordtracker is purer because so many marketers constantly check their listings in the major portals. That skews free tools' results. After all, the Overture and Google keyword research tools include all the search marketing folks who check their organic listings.

Truth is, no data set is perfect. But all provide value to search engine marketers. Most of the time, precise accuracy is not as important as inclusiveness. Wordtracker data is a valuable addition to free data sources. Its interface and method of searching and collecting keywords are unique.

There's the capability to build keyword lists within the Web-based interface and to continuously drill down and tag keywords as you go. Wordtracker lets you save research to continue at a later time. A fun feature is to query each keyword in a search engine to determine the level of competitiveness based on the number of results. So if a keyword is popular with searchers but not well represented in the search engines, you have a better chance of successful search engine optimization (SEO).

Several pricing plans are available for the service.

Keyword Hounddog
I didn't have time to test this paid tool (downloadable, unlike most of the Web-based tools listed). The demo looks interesting, as it includes built-in dictionary and thesaurus functions.

Site Content Analyzer
This software tool parses Web site copy in an attempt to find keywords on a site. It's an interesting addition to a toolbox, but the same process could be accomplished manually. Depending on the sites you hope to use for keyword extraction research, this could be a helpful tool.

Tools:

Add ecommerce-guide.com to your favorites Add ecommerce-guide.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.x Receive news via our XML/RSS feed