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Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery - How Do They Compare?

I have often been asked by readers for more in-depth information on what I think of Keyword Discovery compared to Wordtracker. As you know, I have mainly focused on sharing my expertise in Keyword Forensics and have written two e-books on how to make the best use of Wordtracker for researching behaviors. One of the reasons I have not talked more about Keyword Discovery is because it is a rather completely different system, with different KEI values and frankly, I have not wanted to mix the two. But in fairness to our readers, I think it is an honest question and it deserves to be addressed.

No tool is perfect. While I have personally leaned on Wordtracker for years from the beginning because of it's behavioral research aspects, each keyword research tool has it's own strengths. As a starting point, before I get into any further in depth on any teaching, I think the best thing to do is give you some strengths and weaknesses of both and that will help you make your own informed decisions.

Here is a simple comparison that identifies the strengths of each program. This is based on my own personal experience and primarily where search engine optimization is involved.

Wordtracker - Keyword Forensics - WT has the ability to tap into hidden evidence of user search to find the phrases that "tell a story." Fascinating and very powerful way to quickly mine great data.

Keyword Discovery - Keyword Discovery does not have the same advantage with respect to this type of research. You can find great data, but not the same behaviorally related detail that without doing some digging.

Wordtracker: KEI effectiveness - Keyword effectiveness index indicates the probable effectiveness of a phrase based on a unit of measurement. Higher the number the better.

Keyword Discovery: KEI effectiveness - Keyword effectiveness index in KD works fine as well but is based on a completely different scale of 1 to 10. Don't confuse the two.

Wordtracker: Offers Reports for Purchase - Wordtracker sells a variety of other reports starting from 10,000 keywords for $69.00 to a report of the top 20 million most searched phrases for about $54,000US.

Wordtracker offers reports in quantities of:
* 10,000
* 20,000
* 100,000
* 500,000
* 1 million, 5 million and 20 million in size.

Keyword Discovery: Reports for Purchase - Keyword Discovery also offers Top Keyword Search Term reports of 10,000 for $99.95 which is a little more money. But the benefit you have with Keyword Discovery is that you can also order their Top term reports based on:

* Historical data
* News data
* Premium data
* E-bay data
* or based on shopping data

Keyword Discovery also will sell you very focused lists that they call "Exhaustive Lists of keywords."

Wordtracker: Historical Research Data - Not yet

Keyword Discovery: Historical Research Data - Yes it is available

Wordtracker: Languages Available - English US data, English UK data

Keyword Discovery: Languages Available - English plus Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and several other languages.

Wordtracker: Database Size - Wordtracker has a database of approximately 300 to 350 million queries within the last 100 days. Wordtracker Data comes from the Metacrawlers.

Keyword Discovery: Database Size - Keyword Discovery collects search term data from close to different 200 search engines world wide. Their historical global Keyword database contains over 36 billion searches.

Wordtracker: Seasonally Related Data - Not available yet

Keyword Discovery: Seasonally Related Data - Keyword Discovery search data can be displayed in a graphical format to help identify seasonal search trends over the previous 12 months.

Wordtracker: Industry Keywords Tool - Nothing comparable yet

Keyword Discovery: Industry Keywords - Industry Keywords is a tool that tracks the most popular search terms that drive actual traffic to sites in any selected industry. This data enables you to compare the keywords you are currently getting traffic for, with that of your industry competitors.

The purpose of this article is not to say one is better than the other. But depending on your specific needs, you should be aware of all of the available options there are out there and choose what works best for you. I highly recommend both of these tools and services to all SEO professionals and Webmasters who want access to great data. I will share more information on these subjects in the future.

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