Keyword Examiner FeaturesWhat it does and what you can use it for

Keyword Examiner is a huge time-saving tool for keyword research. It uses Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool to find keywords that people are using to search for your products and services, based on the “seed” words or phrases that you enter. If you are a Wordtracker user, you can also import keyword data from Wordtracker either separately, or merged with the Google AdWords keywords, giving you a broader range of keywords and data.

Keyword Examiner will then search on any or all of the three measures of search engine optimisation (SEO) competition for each keyword in the list:

• Exact match: How many pages in Google contain the exact phrase, found by searching for the keyword in quotation marks (e.g. “key phrase”).

This is used because search engines need to see the phrase being used in the text on the page to know that it is relevant for the search term entered.

Search engines are more likely to put pages near the top of search results if they contain an exact match for the phrase in question, rather than simply having the words scattered around the page somewhere, not necessarily in conjunction with each other.

• In Anchor: How many pages in Google have at least one link pointing to them using the keyword in the link (anchor) text.

This is used because search engines, Google in particular, use the words in links to pages to understand what other people (and site owners themselves) think the pages are about.

You can see this in action if you search for the phrase “click here” on Google – the number one result is the Adobe Acrobat Reader download page, because so many people link to it using phrases like “click here to download…” Look at the page itself and you will see that “click here” doesn’t actually appear anywhere, demonstrating the importance of this factor.

• In Title: How many pages in Google have the exact key phrase in their title tag.

This is used because the title tag is the single most important aspect of the page itself when a earch engine is deciding whether it is relevant to a search phrase.

If the exact phrase appears in the title tag (the piece of code that sets the text in the window bar at the top of your browser), the search engine treats that as the title of the document and hence understands that it is likely to be very relevant for that phrase.

The figures that Keyword Examiner generates will therefore show you where the opportunities are - the keywords with good search volumes (i.e. people are looking for those keywords), but with a small enough amount of competition to make it realistic to get first page ranking for them.

Keyword Examiner will also generate “Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)”-style scores for each keyword (twice, if you have merged Wordtracker keywords with Google keywords), so that you have an at-a-glance list of top targets with little competition but good search volumes (i.e. people actually using those phrases to search).

You can then export your list of keyword data as a CSV file for use in any spreadsheet program.

Keyword Examiner works for any country in the world where Google can be used and will target the results of your data search to either searching “the web” or “pages from your country”, according to your preference, just like a normal person searching. That means that you can get an accurate picture of the best keywords for your target market, not just the US like many other keyword tools.