Wordtracker vs. KeywordSpy
Dozens of keyword tools proliferated nowadays in the market, but two of the most talked and raging in SEO forums and blogs are Wordtracker and KeywordSpy.
To gauge these tools’ individual potential, I subscribed to them and did a couple of tests and runs to prove their worth in keyword research. Allow me to enumerate the things I found out.
Obviously, the monthly subscription for Wordtracker ($49.36) is almost half-lower than KeywordSpy ($89.95). If price was the only determining edge, Wordtracker would be the preferred system. If you’re on a budget, Wordtracker is the obvious choice since it’s less than half the price of KeywordSpy. It also has flexible pricing schemes that allow you to subscribe for about $8 for a day or $250 for a year.
But if you are test and analyze the results with reality (like testing in Google), it will surely appear that KeywordSpy has more accurate keyword data, more frequent updates than WordTracker. Also, if you are to compare the interface, KeywordSpy is more user-friendly and well-designed. Oh, I like the blue theme of the site! (Excuse the personal comment, anyway).
Going back to the discussion, Wordtracker helps you find related terms and keyword phrases by offering a built-in Thesaurus and Lateral Search. The Lateral Search allows you to look at keywords which are thought to be related to your market or industry. But then, KeywordSpy has features such as PPC (estimated cost per click), Ad Rank and Competitor Count which are valuable factors in gauging the effectiveness of keywords. And surely, Wordtracker doesn’t give competitor keywords which KeywordSpy boasts in its byline.
The KeywordSpy Gold Membership Account offers their subscribers 2000 keyword and domain queries and 50,000 exports per day. It’s nearly impossible to hit that limit in one day, unless you are to build your own keyword tool on top of it that provides some automated queries. In other words, you will probably never hit the daily limit with KeywordSpy. But then, the Wordtracker allows API keyword research access, which KeywordSpy doesn’t provide.
Both keyword tools offer a Free Trial for you to test their respective services. So for those of you who are curious you can do a dry run, but then of course their free trial is always a limited access.
WordTracker only grabs data from MetaCrawler and Dogpile (a couple meta search engines) making KeywordSpy better for it pulls down its keyword data from major search engines and databases. Since Wordtracker only gather data from small groups of the World Wide Web, their data sampling errors are magnified. Sometimes they will make low volume terms seem more important than they are, and other times some terms will not show up.
Also, Wordtracker’s exclusive country keywords is limited to United Kingdom region, compare to KeywordSpy, which (aside from UK) has a set of regional databases- US, Canada, Australia and South Africa. And just recently, I noticed that KeywordSpy launched its graphical representation of PPC Competition in certain regions which means they are really into integration of ground breaking features.
Although, the Lateral and Thesaurus Search make Wordtracker a brilliant tool, prior to the writing of this, I decided to settle with my subscription to KeywordSpy, because the competitors’ keywords I dig through the site are trove of treasures that bring lots of conversions for my sites.
http//www.keywordspy.com
