Keyword Country Competition

[mndstevens]

Hi All,

I'm curious if anyone has actually built a site based on keywords from Keyword Country. We bought the monthly version and it is a great tool, but the metrics are different from WordTracker. The competition is based on intitle/inanchor, which basically means the keywords have to be in the title tag and in anchor text leading to the page. WordTracker's numbers are based on Google's regular search which means the words can be anywhere in the page. So Keyword Country's numbers are significantly lower, but they are sites really competing for those keywords. I'm just curious at what level people have been successful at bringing a site into the first page or even the top 3 on Google based on level of competition.

Another way to test this without even needing Keyword Country is if you have a site that you've promoted to the top, type in intitle:"keyword phrase" inachor:"keyword phrase" on Google. That will give you the number that have those keywords in the title and anchor tags leading to them. I'd just like to see if 1000 competitors for a particular keyword is achievable, or 500 or whatever. If you have a site that has made it to the top, using Sydney's SEO optimization, run that test and see how many competitors you have. You don't have to divulge your keywords. I'd just like to know your current position and the number of competitors using the intitle/inachor methodology.

Thanks,

Matt

[Sydney]

Matt: there's a lengthy discussion here about Keyword Country:

http://community.auctionknowhow.com/showthread.php?t=192

Sorry I can't help but I've never used it. Fortunately, some other WP members have.

[mndstevens]

Thanks Sydney,

I read that, but unfortunately I didn't see any follow up on what the findings were for it's use. It is a nice tool, but considering the metrics don't line up with your original plan I wanted to know whether people have been able to compete at the 1000 level of competitors (In Keyword Country) or not. I'd even be interested if you could run that search quickly on Google on one of your sites that was successful. I'm just curious how hard it is to overcome 1000 true competitors (or 500 or whatever). All that you have to do is type in Google lets say for "dog house":

intitle:"dog house" inanchor:"dog house"

Then tell me what rank in Google you are and how many competitors it says you have.

Unfortunately I just don't have any websites yet to find that out with. The search might be helpful for lots of people planning sites because it will give them a more accurate way of determining how many people are gunning for the keyword. I am looking forward to and appreciate all replies.

Thanks,

Matt

[gtrusler]

I know you're not the only one that's been wondering about Keyword Country. There are a few people using it, but I don't think anyone has any concrete results they can report yet.

Graydon

[mfoster7]

Hi Matt. I saw your inquiry when you wrote it a week ago, but wanted to do a little testing before responding. Like you, I've been intrigued by the possibilities of using Keyword Country (KC) rather than WordTracker (WT). Having already paid a year's subscription for WT in July, I'm admittedly loathe to shell out another $500 (yet) for KC - and of course their month-by-month rates are even higher.

The very issue you raised (competition numbers) is exactly what I had planned to test. I was - and probably still will - buy a one-month subscription to KW, test it like crazy, and then request my money back (30 day guarantee) before committing one way or the other down the road.

But making a determination of what competition numbers in KC constitute comparable WT numbers is key for me. Sydney's cutoff point for competition in WT is 25,000. It's not an absolute with her, but a general rule of thumb (along with at least 30 daily searches and CPC of $2-10).

Until your forum post last week, frankly I didn't know you could simply do the intitle/inanchor Google search manually in a web browser to simulate the competition search that KC does. That's what I've spent some hours doing during the past few days - searching manually (I guess the poor man's version of KC... :rolleyes:).

The exercise so far has been both eye-opening and disconcerting. I searched all of the keywords on two of my sites: 1) my oldest site (which is only from September of this year), and 2) my highest traffic site.

For each keyword, I searched for the following:

The number of SERP results on a general Google search, not using quotes around the keyword phrase (just as most end users would search)
The rank of my keyword from that general Google search. That is, if the general search for my KW found 1 million results, was my site URL anywhere on pages 1-10 of the Google search results?
The current WT daily predict searches. This number will of course be different than when I originally did my market research on the niche three months ago.
The current WT competition for the keyword
The intitle/inanchor competition results of the keyword
My web site's URL rank within the intitle/inanchor results
The intitle ONLY results of the keyword (did not include inachor results)
My web site's URL rank within the intitle results
The inanchor ONLY results of the keyword (did not include intitle results)
My web site's URL rank within the inanchor results

Here are some of my general findings:

For one of my sites, I did the general Google results search on each keyword on Saturday, Dec. 8. Three days later on Dec. 11, I did the exact same search on the exact same keywords. The difference in the search result numbers after 3 little days was huge. Frustratingly huge. The numbers were different by tens of thousands, some by hundreds of thousands, and one by over 1 million. For example, on one keyword on Dec. 8, the general search produced 174,000 results. That exact same keyword on Dec. 11 showed 1,210,000!!!!!!!!! Google...hello???
For both of my web sites, I only had 3 keywords/URLs from each that even broke into the top 100 for SERP in Google (i.e. within the first 10 Google search results pages). That helps to explain my meager financial results so far.
For some of the competition numbers originally found in WT vs. the competition numbers found yesterday, they also differ by several thousand. For example, a keyword that showed, say, 25000 in WT three months ago might be showing 50000 today. Have there been twice as many competitors emerge for my keyword during the past three months? Not likely. WT even has their own documented explanation for the discrepancy - http://help.wordtracker.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=53. Again, a Google quirk.
For the most part, intitle/inanchor results for my keywords are very tiny compared to WT's competition search results. For example, for one of my keywords, the WT competition is 23,900 while the intitle/inanchor results is only 41. According to KC, that means there are only 41 sites truly competing for this keyword. For another keyword, WT competition shows 3320 while the intitle/inanchor result is 28.
For another of my keywords, the general Google SERP showed a total of 314,000 results, while WT shows 3550 competitors and the intitle/inanchor result shows 1 - which is my URL. So I'm number 1 for intitle/inanchor on that keyword! You might think that would result in a very high position for my site in the general search results. Not so. For that keyword, my URL is somewhere beyond #100 (i.e. beyond page 10 of Google search results).
What I also find interesting is that after doing the intitle/inanchor search for my keywords, my own site URL doesn't even show up at all in the results for several of the searches. I'd go back and check my HTML title and anchor URL. It is there in each and spelled correctly. The web page is also indexed in Google. So why does it not even show up in the list???
When I did the intitle (alone) OR inanchor (alone) searches, it was not unusual for one of my URLs not to show up in the search results list for one or the other.

What does all of that mean? Here are my preliminary conclusions:

Both WT and KC rely on the availability of useful, accurate data from Google. Google searches seem to produce quirky, unreliable results. The numbers you find from one search may be far different from what you find in the second search on the exact same keyword phrase, even if done just a few days apart. In fact, in Google's general search, I found small differences in search results literally 3 seconds later! (I ran a search, saw the results, hit the enter key immediately, and saw the results again...that time, with slightly different numbers.)
For the WT vs. KC competition comparison, the ratio is typically roughly in the ball par of 1000:1, or 0.1%. That is a VERY rough estimate of my results. For example, my WT:KC results for one keyword is 17,100:18 (that's roughly 1000:1). Another is 23,900:41 (that's roughly 600:1). And another is 51,300:7 (roughly 7300:1). You can see the wide variation.
Given the variation above, my initial plan for a KC or manual intitle/inanchor competition cutoff point to be comparable to Sydney's WT 25,000 cutoff point is something under 100. Probably even half of that.
What that means for me if I use KC is that my Sydney Triple Crown numbers (initially, until I do much more testing and am more confident of the findings) will be 30+ daily search results, <100 KC competitors, and CPC $2-10.
KC even has a payout per click estimator that will be interesting to try out as a possible alternative to using Google's Traffic Estimator to come up with the $2-10 CPC keywords.

I'm not finished testing, and as mentioned earlier will likely purchase KC for a month, test it, get my money back, and draw some "harder" conclusions afterward. In the meantime, I know there is some interest in this forum for KC and thought you might find my preliminary observations of some benefit. Certainly the quirkiness of Google search results have been eye opening for me!

If anyone else has additional information, testing results, etc. your feedback would be appreciated.

[mndstevens]

Thank you so much Mike (mfoster7). I had been hoping someone that has been around a little while would post their findings. My wife and I have decided to go with KC and have developed an interim strategy. Sounds like we were heading the right direction. KC says even the newbie can compete at under 1000....I'm not sure I buy that. I did some research myself and the competition between Google search in quotes ("dog house") and Google intitle, inanchor varied widely, almost to the point of apples and oranges comparisons.

The way my wife and I started to look for keywords is try to find at least 5 keywords under 100 competition in KC, then build the rest of our list from the rest of the keywords under 1000 (usually we'd check 101 - 250, then 251 to 500, and 501 - 1000). I'm not sure that that is going to work or not, but hopefully we'll be very competetive at least on 5 keywords and maybe luckily over time win on the rest.

I was just wondering after someone had a site going for at least 6 months (Google's aging penalty) had anyone succeded in getting a keyword to the first page on Google and if so what were the competition numbers. Are any of your sites making it to the first page on Google in a non quoted search? Just curious. I know it's possible to move up with enough links and other things, I just wanted to know how much competition can be overcome with the basic promotions Sydney outlines.

Again, thank you for your input. I was beginning to wonder if anyone was going to respond at all. Thanks for your time and research.

Matt

[mfoster7]

Hi friends. During Christmas week, I purchase one month of Keyword Country (KWC) to compare its features and functionality against WordTracker (WT).

Part of our forum discussion above revolved around the different way from WT that KWC determines "competition" numbers. I won't rehash that here; the details of that discussion are at http://community.auctionknowhow.com/showthread.php?t=192, starting at post #8.

Adwords cost per click are also determined differently by each tool. Sydney uses the Traffic Estimator's low number, while KWC uses the high number. And in fact, you'll see there may be some confusion over how exactly KWC defines cost per click since in the document I will link to shortly, a development person indicated that KWC cost per click is the average of the low and high numbers. So with KWC, which is it: the high or the average? I don't know yet.

My intent with testing the two products was to see if there is any way using KWC to come up with a means of determining "Sydney Triple Crown" keywords that correspond to the same when using WT and Google's Traffic Estimator, located at https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox.

After doing a lot of testing, my preliminary conclusion is that there simply is no good way to correlate WT output to KWC output. For example, it would be nice if a WT competition total of 25,000 corresponded to a KWC competition total of, say, 1000, or 500, or 100... or whatever. It doesn't.

Even the Google search numbers (which should theoretically be close to the same in both tools) vary wildly. That concerns me a lot about the accuracy and reliability of KWC Google search numbers. WT's search numbers are daily predictions based on 90 days of data. KWC's search numbers are monthly averages based on 6 months of data. (When you divide the KWC totals by 30 to get daily averages, they still are much different from WT daily numbers.) Given the 90 day vs. 6 month data collection differences between the two tools, I would expect some level of reasonable differences in totals. But they don't seem to align at all. So are KWC's numbers incorrect? Are WT's numbers incorrect? Both? I don't know.

I tested KWC's current software client (v. 4.3) as well as the beta version (v. 5.2) of their planned next release and provided a lot of feedback to the KWC development team.

If you're interested, I have posted the current email "conversation" between us at http://www.greatwayplus.com/wp_files/Keyword_Country_Feedback.doc. It contains my initial feedback to KWC in black font, their response in blue, and my follow up feedback in red. I'm hoping for another response from them this week. (At the moment, the document is 10 pages, so it's not a quick read.)

In the meantime, given the questionable convenience & reliability of KWC over WT (not to mention that KWC costs $200 more per year than WT), I figure that since Sydney has been successful with the Wealth Plan using WT, I with stay with WT until I have more confidence in the KWC tool.

Does that imply I think using KWC will not translate into successful web sites? Not at all. But for the time being, it means I don't think there's a convenient (if any) way to correlate WT output with KWC output. It's like comparing cats and dogs. They are mammals, have 4 paws, a tail, lots of hair, and bring - as a goal - enjoyment to owners as pets. But their means of doing so differ significantly.

So I think using KWC will likely require some of the same testing and exploration that Sydney did in the beginning of her search years ago to determine what search/competition/CPC combination would produce a winning website. KWC users (which might also include me in the future - pending my confidence level of convenience and reliability of their data) will simply need to similarly test & explore to determine a winning combination using that tool.

As a result, my temporary conclusion harkens back to Matt's earlier comments in this thread on Dec. 5 asking if anyone has winning sites to compare against. It will take someone (Matt & Dawn, Brett, someone else?) to use KWC and see it through long enough for several months to determine a winning search/competition/CPC combination.

If my email conversation continues with KWC, I will update the previously linked document with their follow up comments. (If for some reason you have difficulty downloading the document, just me me know and I'll email it to you.)

[mfoster7]

Hi everyone. As a follow up to my previous comments on Jan. 8 about Keyword Country, I have only received brief follow ups since providing them a lot of feedback. Indication is that they plan to implement many of my recommendations. We'll see. As of today, they have updated their beta version with one fix and one new feature.

Also as of today, they are offering for sale the use of their tool for fairly sizable savings. For example, their three month deal is currently $99 (normally $160), and their annual deal is $299 (normally $500). See http://www.keywordcountry.com/buynow/?birthdaydiscount. They say they don't know how long the deal will last, which I'm sure is "web speak" for "we'll make a decision based on demand."

Anyway, personally (for what it's worth to you), I still cannot endorse the product over WordTracker yet, at least not until many of my recommended modifications are implemented, if they truly decide to make them at all. (See my previous posting in this thread for more details.) But if you already like the product or were leaning toward it anyway, their 40% off deal is appealing.