This is part 2 of a Wordtracker review (part 1 – introduction, part 3- vertical keyword search)

In this section I will look at how Wordtracker helps you to discover related keywords (also known as lateral keyword research). In my case, I wanted to set up a website selling paragliding accessories, and started out looking for keywords related to “paragliding”:

The list of related keywords is sorted in “most popular” order. I struggled to find a detailed explanation as to how they calculate the popularity, my guess is that it is compiled from  the content of (?all?) the related indexed pages on Dogpile and Metacrawler. The more pages the keyword is contained in, the higher its popularity score . The Wordtracker Academy also indicates that they are using Majestic-SEO’s database of URL’s to get In Anchor and Title Metrics, perhaps they use this same database of URL’s to calculate keyword densities.

If you know more about how Wordtracker calculates the popularity, please add your comments to this post. I am sure I am not the only one wondering about this.

It would have been great if the related keywords tool reported a couple of additional values – total searches on the keyword, and total number of vertical keywords – this is currently possible, but only if you save a search term to your project.

The related keywords tool is useful to give you of the language in use in the marketplace. As a discovery tool and a checklist it is great, but bear in mind that  it bears no relation to search volumes.  It is just an indication of keyword density on indexed content (perhaps this should be highlighted slightly better in the Wordtracker interface).  Before you add any of these terms to your seedlist, pop them through the vertical keyword finder and assess their relative popularity against the rest of the words in your seedlist.

A quick comparison between Wordtracker and Google Adwords Keyword Tool reveal a fair number of missed keywords, covering important keywords like “reserves” (if you are a skydiver or a paraglider you will know how important a reserve is) and big paragliding brand names, like  Independence, Niviuk, Icaro and Woody Valley. Common sense would assume that these keywords are fairly popular, and Google stats corroborates that.  Wordtracker’s failure to pick these up can only be ascribed to their small and possibly biased dataset.

This not to say that Wordtracker’s lateral keyword search tool is not useful, but do not for a moment assume that it is exhaustive. Review the recommended set of keywords critically, and use as many other reference sources as you can.

In Part III I will assess the vertical keyword search, and I will comment on the service I have received from Wordtracker during my trial period.