Online Marketing Blog

In my preview post for SES Toronto, I counted John Alexander’s Keyword Forensics session as one of my “Must See” presentations for the 2011 conference. The promise of really digging down into keyword discovery and keyword analysis techniques sounded far too good to pass up. After all, keyword research is an essential part of any SEO process.

The session starts with an inspiring quote on the projector “Keyword Forensics – Exploring the Hidden User Search Behavior for Keywords That Are Often Missed by Keyword Researchers.”

I research keywords!  What am I missing?

Here are some good nuggets from the presentation:

Understand the Difference Between Keyword Research vs. Keyword Forensics

Keyword Research: Researching identified keywords to determine which phrases will provide the most search traffic.

The popular keyword research tool, Keyword Discovery, has announced several new updates today. Here are the updates that stand out the most:

• Keyword Database Update: The KD global database now has 35 Billion searches and the premium database has 10 Billion searches from the last 12 months. This is in contrast to 300 million queries in the past 90 days with WordTracker.
• Plural Search Feature Release: KD should have had this feature a long time ago.
• Import to any KeywordDiscovery keyword database: Another long overdue feature recommended by KD users.

Upcoming enhancements to Keyword Discovery include:

• More keyword databases, such as French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
• Wildcard and “contains” search functions
• Adult search term database
• KEI improvements

Customers of Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery service received an announcement today:

1. Increased Keyword Database from 26 Billion to 32 Billion
2. New Keyword Importer and Keyword Filter
3. New Thesaurus Search
4. Dutch Keyword Database Release

Additional features that will be included in version 2 beta of Keyword Discovery include:

- New user interface – easier navigation
- KeywordDiscovery v2 Beta (Faster, Bigger and Better)
- Increased speed and search response times
- Advanced import features
- Advanced competitor analysis
- New projects interface

My SEO consulting firm changed all of our keyword research and analysis over to Keyword Discovery recently. David Warmuz and his team have done an exceptional job at listening to their client base and enhancing product features accordingly.

There’s an interesting thread over at HighRankings Forums on Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery debating the accuracy, pros and cons of each. I’ve been a Wordtracker user for at least 6 years and have been dabbling with Keyword Discovery off and on for 2 or 3 years. Both have their pluses and shortcomings.

Of course, when I need to outsource keyword analysis, I just go to Dan Thies over at SEO Research Labs, who by the way, should be the topic of the next Spotlight on Search interview.

Update: Aaron at his newly designed SEOBook site posts a link to a free link building video from one of Dan’s teleclasses.