Why WordTracker Sucks
I’ve been working in the online marketing industry for a long time now and I have to say I am still surprised that the WordTracker tool at www.wordtracker.com still exists.
First of all, the data that the tool makes available to you is crap. Any person relying on the information that is pulled out of the wordtracker database’s are doomed from the get go.
If you take a look at the information found on the wordtracker website about how wordtracker collects it search data, you will see that the data they collect is from two very small, very niche search engines: dogpile.com and metacrawler.com. This is a major problem when you consider that these two search engines account for maybe half a percentage of the entire search engine market searches over any given period of time. In fact, the search volume is so small on these search providers you would be hard pressed to find any comparison of exactly how much market share they have – most studies ignore these two engines altogether.
The other problem is that these two search engines also attracted a very specialized type of searcher. Most search savvy users will avoid using these search engines as they understand that much of the results in these two search engines are populated with “sponsored links”. This means the while you will occasionally see some useful organic listings in their results they are more interested in providing results that they will make money form when a user clicks the links.
So when you look at wordtracker results and think you have found a set of super awesome keywords – think again. The keywords you are looking at may rarely (or never) be used in the search giants (google, yahoo, msn).
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