KeywordDiscovery VS Wordtracker - How Do They Compare?

If you have been marketing on the internet for any length of time you are bound to have come across the keyword tools KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker. There is a crucial reason for this as an essential part of any internet marketing campaign is your keyword research and choice of keywords. This applies to a variety of internet marketing campaigns and is just as relevant for pay per click (PPC) advertising as it is for organic search marketing through search engine optimisation (SEO).

It is generally recognised that KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker are the industry leaders when it comes to keyword research. Bear in mind that there are paid alternatives for keyword research out there such as NicheBot. In addition to this there is also a plethora of free keyword research tools available with Yahoo's Overture tool being one of the best out there.

It is beyond the scope of this article to look at the main alternatives to KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker but it is definitely a subject that I want to cover at a later date as they are important alternatives. The main focus in this article is KeywordDiscovery vs Wordtracker
- what are their main data sources and how do they compare in use?

First off, I have to admit that I am biased. I have tried virtually all the keyword research tools, paid and free, known to man. After a lot of trial and error I have finally settled on KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker for my day to day work as it is my sincere belief that they are the best tools out there!

KeywordDiscovery vs Wordtracker – where does the data come from?

The main advantage of KeywordDiscovery is the fact that it draws its data from a very large keyword database of over 32 billion searches compiled from over 180 search engines. This data is also compiled over a 12 month period so you get seasonal trends as well and this makes for a very large and comprehensive database.

This contrasts with Wordtracker which draws its keyword data from just Dogpile and Metacrawler which are two metacrawler search engines. These search engines aggregate search results in one place from a variety sources but the initial query is made in the metacrawler engine. Wordtrackers database is made up of over 300 million keyword phrases that users have typed into Dogpile and Metacrawler in the past 90 days.

This means that, in theory, you are much more likely to get accurate keyword data from KeywordDiscovery as is, statistically, drawing from a much larger keyword sample than Wordtracker. It also means that the data is smoother as it is looking at 365 days history rather than 90 days as Wordtracker does.

This "smoothness" also means that KeywordDiscovery caters very well for seasonal anomalies. For example, you might find that the keyword "christmas decorations" is heavily searched on if you ran a query in Wordtracker in November whereas KeywordDiscovery would show you that this may not be the case in April!

Paradoxically, this larger size of KeywordDiscovery's data sample actually highlights a big advantage that Wordtracker has over its rival: it is widely believed that Wordtracker contains cleaner data as its source data form the metacrawlers is not plagued by automated queries carrying out keyword research etc.

This can be a serious problem with some keyword tools and can provide flawed results if you are researching a very popular or competitive niche as the results are not representative of organic or natural search! As KeywordDiscovery does not fully disclose where it obtains its search data from it is probably safer to assume that there is an element of data skew or "corruption" in KeywordDiscovery keyword results.

There is also a theory that Wordtracker is not very representative of the average internet user as it obtains its keyword data from just Dogpile and Metacrawler. Now the average internet user will probably never have heard of these search engines and just use the major ones such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

This theory stems form the belief that users of Dogpile and Metacrawler are internet savvy and, as a result, their searches are not representative of the internet as a whole. This is not the case with KeywordDiscovery which draws it data from over 180 search engines so is much more likely to contain a sample of data that represents the internet as a whole.

This is a crucial point as you could rely on Wordtracker for 100% of your keyword research and subsequently find that KeywordDiscovery showed a very different picture for the same core keywords!

KeywordDiscovery vs Wordtracker - Ease of Use

I found that KeywordDiscovery was much easier to jump into than Wordtracker. It has a simpler interface although its use of icons for various actions takes a little getting used to carrying out your research, saving projects etc is not too hard. It is also faster if you need to carry out quick keyword research.

With Wordtracker, the learning curve is a little steeper. For example, when I first started using it I did not realise that, when querying the search engines, you could only submit batches of 100 keyword phrases at a time. Consequently many of the keywords I saved in my baskets where not analysed! I also didn't realise that significance of projects and their use for organising keywords. Overall I would say that KeywordDiscovery has a simpler interface and is easy to get started with but Wordtracker offers a very full experience once the learning curve is achieved as it does some very deep long tail keyword mining.

KeywordDiscovery vs Wordtracker - Conclusion

KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker are both top quality keyword research tools. I actually believe that they are complementary as they draw their keyword data from different sources and present it differently. This is why I personally use both keyword research tools. I usually start my initial research with KeywordDiscovery as, due to their large database, they have a good variety of well trafficked keyword terms that originate of your seed keywords. Once I have these subsidiary terms I then fire up Wordtracker to do the real deep long tail keyword mining on these subsidiary terms. As you probably know, these long tail keyword phrases are gold!

The crucial thing is not to rely on just one keyword tool as both KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker can provide very different results for the same set of core keywords due to the fact that they pull data from different sources. The key to success is to realise the strengths and weaknesses of each tool. Once this is done, intelligent application of both tools will bring you guaranteed success in your internet marketing whether it is via PPC or SEO!