Analyzing Keywords

Rank Tracker offers its users extensive analytical data to steer their SEO efforts towards the most profitable keywords. It lets you instantly find out how popular a keyword is among searchers in your market, how many visitors it can bring to your site and how many pages are competing for it in your target search engine(s). Rank Tracker helps you make highly reasonable choices by weighing search demand for your niche keywords against the number of competing pages you will need to outdo. This way you can easily pick keywords with a sufficient traffic potential and a moderate competition.

Rank Tracker offers 4 types of research statistics to backup your keyword selection:

Search volume
Traffic potential
Competition
Keyword efficiency indexes

These valuable data are available within a single workspace in Rank Tracker (Keyword Research View).

Types of Keyword Research Statistics

Number of Searches

Before starting to optimize your landing page for a keyword, you will most likely want to make sure that your efforts will bear fruit. Therefore you might want to know how often it is used by real Internet searchers. If the popularity of the keyword is close to zero, you can't possibly expect many visitors through it even if your site ranks #1 for it. And vice versa, popular keywords can make your website popular once it is optimized for them. That is why they should be considered in the first place.

Data Sources

Using Rank Tracker, you can get the average number of monthly searches for any keyword over the recent year. The data is taken from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool — the most respectable and widely-used keyword research database. To get maximum results from this service, it is preferable to create a free account with them. Registered users can explore more of Google Adwords resources. When logged in, you also don't have to enter captcha codes. If you would like Rank Tracker to connect to Google AdWords through your account, simply enter your e-mail and password to Preferences -> Google Account Settings -> Google AdWords Account. Whenever Rank Tracker needs to update search volume statistics or find keyword suggestions, it will log in to your Google AdWords account and get all necessary data on your behalf.

Before you start using your Google AdWords account in a Rank Tracker project, please log in to it through a browser and look at the layout of columns in the main view. It is necessary that they follow in the default order: Keyword, Competition, Global Monthly Searches, Local Monthly Searches. There can be other columns as well but they should appear after the columns Rank Tracker pulls data from. Also please pay attention to the sorting method: the entries in the main view should be arranged by relevance.

If you prefer to keep workspace customizations in your Google AdWords account, please create a brand-new one to be used in your Rank Tracker projects. It won't cost you anything but you'll be sure that search volume functionality in your projects is 100% accurate.

If you would like to import search volume from another quality source, please use a drop-down list under Preferences -> KEI Settings -> Number of Searches -> Use this tool to extract number of searches. Choose a keyword research database and click OK to apply the settings..

Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Keyword Discovery
Wordtracker (can be used with an API key)
Yandex Wordstat

Adjusting Settings to Your Market

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool lets you refine search volume statistics with the help of region/language filters. Using them, you can get results for a local market (a specific country and/or language) or for the global one (all languages and countries).

If you use the global filter (it's on by default), the data you'll get will encompass all countries and territories in Google's network. If you switch to the local mode, Google AdWords will return results for searches limited to a particular area of your choice. For example, if you sell car tires to dealers in the United States and aren't going to expand your business abroad, you'll definitely want to measure the demand for your product in your country. Or if you have an educational resource that people from all over the world can use and post their ads at, you will be interested in an international audience speaking your language.

Choosing Keyword Match Type

Another way to adjust search volume statistics is with the help of the Keyword Match Type filters:

Broad match
Exact match
Phrase match

Choosing the exact match option, you'll get search volume for search queries consisting of the very word or word combination you've entered to your project. Say, if you check search volume for "seo services", searches for "cheap seo services" or "seo services brisbane" won't be taken into account.

If you use the phrase match option, Google AdWords will return search volume for all queries containing the key phrase. So not only "seo services" but "affordable seo services", "seo services review" will be considered. Searches for "search engine optimization services" or "seo company" will be ignored though.

The broad keyword match type option will show data for all search queries containing the key phrase or any of its components (including singular/plural forms and synonyms). Examples: "search engine optimization services", "seo company", "professional seos" and the like.

Estimated Visits

A sensible measure of a keyword's value is its traffic potential. Rank Tracker lets you foresee which portion of search traffic your site can realistically get if it advances to the top of search listings for the term.

Rank Tracker uses a special formula to figure out how many visits the keyword can bring to a top-ranking page. The calculations are based on monthly search volume for the keyword. Therefore traffic estimates in a Rank Tracker project can vary depending on your search volume settings. If you would like to refine your traffic estimates, you'll need to use the Number of Searches menu under Preferences -> KEI Settings.

The actual number of visits (Visits) can be higher than estimated for URLs with a high click-through rate. It can also be lower if the CTR turns out to be worse than the average.

Competition

It is important to know in advance how many pages you will be competing against if you choose to optimize your site for a keyword. The fewer web-pages rank for it, the easier it can be to advance yours to a top position.

Data Sources

By default, the number of competing pages for all keywords is taken from Google.com. Rank Tracker enters each keyword from a project to the search field in Google and pulls the number of listings offered for this term.

If you are targeting a search engine other than Google.com, you can choose it from a drop-down menu under Preferences -> KEI Settings -> Competition. Click OK to save the changes (they'll be applied next time you update the number of competitors). If your target search engine isn't on the list, you are welcome to file a free request for it.

Refining Results

There is a set of advanced search operators in Rank Tracker that you can use to better assess your competition. For example, you might want to narrow it down to pages that are optimized for your keyword. Most of such pages will have the keyword repeated in their titles (allintitle:keyword) or URLs (allinurl:keyword).

The list of supported operators may differ depending on the search engine you choose. The most extensive search options are provided by Google.

KEI

The most comprehensive measure of a keyword's usefulness for an SEO campaign is its Keyword Efficiency Index — a ratio between competition and search volume. Professional SEOs use KEI to pick the best keywords with the highestt number of searches and the lowest competition.

Keywords whose KEI is 1 or higher are green-colored. These are highly-profitable keywords with the best number-of-searches-to-competition ratio. A yellow marker next to a keyword means that its KEI is 0.5. The efficiency of such a keyword is medium. Keywords with a KEI of 0 are accompanied by a red identifier. Their efficiency is the lowest of all. If you sort keywords in your area by the KEI column, the green ones will top the list and are usually the ones to be considered in the first place.

Please keep in mind, however, that KEI is a relative value making it convenient to compare keywords to each other. It doesn't mean that less efficient keywords should always be ignored. They can be valuable sources of traffic as well. In some keyword niches, KEI for all keywords can be close to 0 which is absolutely fine. You can still sort the list by the KEI column and single out the most efficient ones.

While the KEI formula stays unchanged, you can adjust data Rank Tracker uses to calculate it. There are 2 ways to do it:

through the Competition settings (Preferences -> KEI Settings -> Competition)
through the Number of Searches settings (Preferences -> KEI Settings -> Number of Searches)

Updating Mechanism

To update keyword research values for a keyword (or a group of keywords), you will need to select the keyword(s) in your work area and run the Update KEI command. There is a button for it on the Keywords toolbar.

Clicking the arrow next to the KEI button will open a list with groups of keywords you can update:

current selection
all keywords visible in the current workspace
all keywords from the project

These same options are available through the Tools menu (Tools -> Update KEI).

Alternatively, you can right-click on the keyword selection and choose the Update KEI option from a context menu that opens up.

This will initiate a search process. You can interrupt it at any moment by hitting Stop.

When the search is over, you will see a confirmation window with a brief summary of completed tasks.

Please use the View logs link on the Congratulations screen to access search details.

You can click the Finish button to add the new data to your project, or you can click Cancel to start over and discard the findings.

Updating Selected Types of Data

By default, the Update KEI command in Rank Tracker collects all groups of keyword research statistics for selected keywords:

If you like, you can set Rank Tracker to update a particular group and skip the rest.

Enabling/Disabling Search Volume Checks

Here is how you can turn on and off search volume updates.

Click Preferences -> KEI Settings -> Number of Searches (it will activate the Number of Searches menu).

Uncheck the Collect number of searches every time you update KEI option. Click OK to apply the new settings.

Update KEI as usual.

When the search is over, you will find only the Competition column updated. Since Rank Tracker needs search volume statistics to calculate KEI and Estimated Visits, these columns will also be empty.