Hi Lynn and others,
I posted some concerns about my Wordtracker research in the 20K thread (please forgive me for that). Now Lynn has asked me to post it here:
I used the free version to look up keywords for my niche of living abroad. I included as many keywords, including Long Tail ones, as I could think of related to that. Then they add in "associated" keywords. But the ones I plugged in and the associated ones they gave me mostly ranked poorly.
Wordtracker lists along a bar on the top a numbered ranking system starting with "Poor" and moving along to "Good" and then "Excellent." Each keyword you've selected gets a rank number so you can see how your keywords are ranked -- whether Wordtracker considers them good keywords to go with, or excellent or poor or whatever.
So far, almost all my keywords were considered too competitive or just not searched enough. So they're not usable.
Two of the "associated" keywords they gave me, however, ranked either "good" or close to "excellent." Both would be considered highly competitive at first glance, so I was surprised at this finding.
But, as someone knowledgable about the general topic, I saw quickly that, although they're desirable and therefore heavily searched, they'd be difficult for just anyone to tackle. One activity is legally available to only a select few, and the other would present credibility problems to anyone who can't do the activity regularly.
Note that Wordtracker's free version gives you rankings based only on MSN, not Google, Yahoo or any other search engine. You've got to get their paid version for that.
Could that be part of my problem?
Ana