To lay the groundwork for a successful traffic strategy, advertisers and publishers give immense importance to Google Keyword Planner tool that helps you search for keyword and ad group ideas, see how a list of keywords perform, get historical insights or create a new keyword list by combining several lists of keywords together. For advertisers it helps them to choose competitive bids and budgets to use with their ad campaigns. Online sales and website traffic is all dependent on how powerful your keyword research strategy is. Today I will introduce WebTextTool as an alternative to Keyword Planner and explain some of the ways in which this keyword research tool proves more helpful than the free AdWords tool.
If you are new to this tool, please read the following guides first:
Indeed tools built by Google are outstanding in every way but when it comes to small publishers, sometimes an advanced tool like Keyword Planner could be more technical (confusing) compared to a precise user friendly tool like WebTextTool (WTT) to better interpret the keyword data and keyword suggestions.
This post is surely not a Keyword Planner VS. Webtexttool comparison but a helpful guide that lets you understand the pros and cons of both these tools and how to use them both effectively to meet your objective.
Is Keyword Planner Not The Right Tool For Small Publishers?
No that would be the biggest lie!
As a programmer by profession, I have learnt one thing in life, no matter how good tool you may develop, it never meets the need of 100% of its users. There is always a room for improvement. One such con attached with Keyword planner is that it is more oriented to serve interests of advertisers compared to publishers. It is built solely to help AdWord advertisers to create successful ad campaigns by doing keyword research. A keyword suitable for an advertiser has a sole different purpose compared to a keyword used by a blogger.
If you are an advertiser with a budge to invest in online advertising then this tool is the best option for you which helps you to use statistics like search volume to help you decide which keywords to use for your ad campaign. It can help you get forecasts, like predicted clicks and estimated conversions, to get an idea of how a list of keywords might perform for a given bid and budget.
But if you are a blogger or content writer who solely looks for best keywords that could help him rank higher in search engines, then you can not solely rely on keyword planner for building a solid keyword strategy.
An Example
Lets take an example of one of our clients who runs a site on Indian Sarees. She got into trouble and could not figure out how to find related keywords for her website content using Keyword Planner.
Keyword Planner gives you 3 options:
- Search new keywords using a phrase, website or category
- Get Search volume and trends - Which ever publisher wants!
- Multiply keyword lists to get new keywords
She chose the second option to find the number of people who are searching for Indian Sarees on monthly basis and also decide what combination of words or phrases do they type for this query. Her targeted customers are in UK so she selected London to see what people are typing in search.
At first she was confused to see almost no data shown for her keyword. She kept on receiving this error which either meant that the keyword she chose has no considerable search volume in Google database and thus no charts can be displayed to show how it trends. Or it could have been a system not responding properly.
On her 6th try she finally managed to see some data displayed. Adwords Keyword planner gives you 7 insight options out of which the first 4 are of interest for publishers. Last three are more of interest for advertisers.
I am a personal favorite of these 4 options:
- Search Volume trends : Which gives you a bar chart illustration of how well the keyword is trending for last 30 days
- Mobile trends : Total queries made on smart phone devices
- Breakdown by device : Shows traffic stats for mobiles, tablets and desktop computers.
- Breakdown by location :Tells you how popular is the keyword in your selected zone compared to other cities of the world.
But the question that came to her mind was: Where are the related keywords? What other keywords are people typing to search for Indian Sarees?
Bloggers needs keyword suggestions to find what different combination of keyword they could include in their content and how to find high ranking long-tail keywords. Choosing best keywords is an important SEO benefit that helps you rank well in SERPs without even a single backlink!
Here you come to a conclusion that indeed Keyword Planner provides advanced insights on different keywords but it is a good keyword research tool but not a good keyword suggestion tool.
How WebTextTool Simplifies Keyword Research?
We are using WTT since few months and we have begin to love the way it helps us in writing keyword rich blog posts to compete for organic traffic. It's not just a simple keyword research tool but also a DIY on-page optimization tool that helps you optimize your content in real time before publishing it online.
WTT is the best alternative to Keyword planner when it comes to keyword suggestions and building a powerful keyword research strategy. It is extremely simple to use (friendly UI) and supports features that are best suited for content publishers. You wont see complex charts that you may find difficult to interpret or understand and neither will you see the numbers game.
I have written a detailed WebTextTool review on all its features and I would really recommend that you read it for comprehensive explanation. Here I will just focus on its Keyword suggestion tool.
This tool consists of 3 important sections:
1. Select Country/Region
Every keyword research starts with your targeted zone. You select a country and then find stats related to that query based on the geo-location you chose. In our case we picked UK to find interested customers for Indian Sarees.
2. Keyword Analysis & Selection
In next step, you mention the keyword for which you expect related suggestions, volume reach and competition. WebTextTool then gives an overall rating of how well this keyword is trending in search and whether you could compete easily for this query or not.
3. Related Keywords
The third step is where you get keyword suggestions and ideas to use long tail keywords that could help you boost better in search.
WTT also offers volume and competition stats just like Keyword planner but with some additional info and better presentation.
The search volume is an indication of the number of queries on your keyword per month.
Competition is an indication of how strong competition is on your keyword.
The overall score combines the search volume and competition
By looking at that report you can easily decide that users in UK are more interesting in following queries:
Indian Sarees in UK
Indian Sarees Online UK
Indian Sarees London
Indian Sarees latest Collection
Indian Sarees Models Photos
Indian Sarees blouse Neck Designs
So on...
WTT also stores your keyword research history as archive. These are some of the keywords we used in our latest blog posts:
This is all that matters for someone who runs a site on Indian Sarees and wishes to find the combination of keywords that people type in London or all over UK to find about the product. It's the primary goal of every publisher to find such keywords so that they could use them in their website content to attract as many visitors as possible.
Keyword planner indeed is an excellent tool to find how well a keyword is trending but to find related searches you can surely use a free alternative tool like WebTextTool.
You Can Now Use WebTexTool For Free!
WTT has a free 14 days trial after which most of our users requested a way to keep using it for free. Fortunately just recently WebTextTool released a new feature called Rewards, which will give you additional free keyword analysis credits, pages, pagetrackers and extension of a trial period. Users can also get additional credits with a free account, for things like following the explanation tour and inviting friends for webtexttool.
Even pro customers can benefit from this feature. We are using the Silver plan, we have therefore decided to often promote WTT excellent features with our readers to get more rewards in terms of keyword credits and to continue using WTT forever because it surely deserves it. Similarly if you can not afford the paid plan then you can earn free credits by simply inviting your friends and readers to WTT or do one of the followings:
How do you see WTT as an alternative to Keyword Planner?
Web if full of SEO tools some free, some paid, so far we could only find WTT which fits the budget of both small and pro publishers. Its realtime on-page optimization tools and keyword research tool has really helped us in selecting rich phrases, long-tail keywords and related keywords for our blog posts. We have also shared a detailed tutorial on how WTT helps you to stop making SEO mistakes.
You may surely try using this free tool and share your insights with all of us. Let us know what feature impressed you the most and what are the SEO mistakes that you had been making?
Wish you all a keyword rich blogging life. Peace and blessings buddies =)
