Like all marketing strategies, SEO is a dynamic business. We have to adapt as the emphasis of Google’s algorithms shift from time to time, and we want to stay on the forefront of emerging SEO developments. This means we are always looking to update our approaches to SEO and the software we use to do it. This week, I’ve been looking at an update to one of our preferred keyword tools, Wordtracker, to see how the new version of the software shapes up. Wordtracker is a longstanding stalwart of our keyword analysis and research programmes, and we use it regularly to complement data from other tools.

The new WT tool is slicker in appearance, and seems faster, needing fewer clicks to produce results and export data. The other thing I noticed straight away is that some of the terminology has changed.

A category that used to be called “Competing Sites”, which counts how many sites are fighting over each keyword, has been renamed ‘In Anchor and Title’. This clarifies things a little in terms of ‘competition’, making it clear that the web pages counted will have both the keyword in its title and have external inbound links carrying that keyword. Basically, it counts the pages that are actively optimising for each key phrase. This is nothing new (in fact it’s why we use WT) but it’s interesting that they thought they should define this more clearly.

Additions to the Wordtracker tool include an alternative and experimental KEI metric (KEI3), that hopes to clarify, if not improve on, the established KEI calculation. I won’t waste your time by explaining this to you, because what is more pertinent is what the new WT tool has left out.

When you enter a query phrase, Wordtracker counts the number of searches for that phrase and related phrases over a given period of time. It compiles this number from what Wordtracker calls its ‘partner search engines’ collecting data from ‘the major meta-crawlers: Dogpile and Metacrawler.’ This is all fine and dandy, but the old version of WT did something that the new one does not: it delineated data from four search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Altavista. This meant we could see the balance of search traffic (and competition) across the search engines and make decisions about what to optimise based upon our preferences.

I don’t think anything is gained by combining the data; in fact, it obfuscates the origins and proportions of the results.

To be blunt, we predominantly want to know about Google. With respect to the other search engines, it easier to optimise pages for MSN and Yahoo! and rank well in those than it is in the market-hogging Google. And Altavista just doesn’t figure in our keyword strategy at this time. Mixing the data for all of these together makes it harder to make informed decisions about Google.

Hopefully the developers at Wordtracker will hear my pain and restore the WT tool to its former level of functionality so we don’t need to look elsewhere in order to give our clients the full picture.