In Chapter 11 of the 2nd Edition of the book Mike and I recommended Trellian’s Keyword Discovery tool. Well David and his team have continued to make improvements to the tool. For many of the top Search marketing companies Keyword Discovery is the keyword research tool of choice.
For those that are looking for a free tool or want to kick the tires before they make an investment should take a look at Keyword Discovery’s free tool or a demo of the full version. The free tool allows you to enter any set of keywords (with a limit of ten per query). Like any keyword research tool, it spits out the most popular variations of those keywords along with the relative search demand. The free tool limits you to using the tool 50 times per day, but search marketers looking to estimate keyword demand with a free tool can’t go wrong with Trellian’s offering.
So, as exciting as Trellian’s free tool is, its premium offerings really shine especially some of the new functionality.
Keyword Research Data:
Keyword Discovery main database uses historical data from 38 billion searches (an increase of 6 billion in the last 6 months) from 200 search engines from around the world. This data typically comes from an amalgamation of data from search logs provided directly by the engines as well as “sampling” the referral logs of sites receiving traffic from search engines and “packet” data from large ISP’s.
It’s not known exactly what sites are being sampled, so some bias in the sample is possible. Still, none of the other keyword research tool vendors claim to include Google and Yahoo! in their analysis while Trellian does.
The Global Premium Keyword Database contains over 4.4 billion keyword searches based purely on user panel data, which is less prone to skew caused by automated agents.
There are a number of Regional Keyword Databases that offer country-specific databases, including Australian, Canadian, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, UK and US with plans to offer many others including Japanese.
New Features
Google Searches vs. Yahoo!
This new feature allows you to see if there are any differences in how search queries are formed and or used in the different engines. For example, in the screen shot below, it appears there are more beer mug collectors using Yahoo! than college kids looking for “beer pong” information.
The data is not perfect but may give you an edge when working on creative or optimization changes for the different search engines.
Google Formatting Tool
This is a neat little function that allows you to customize a few or all of your words for the various match types of Google’s AdWords programs. Most agencies have tools that do this as they are working with the bid optimizations but for the individual this can be tedious work or some expertise on functions in Excel.
With this feature you can put a set of words in that you want to be formatted for “Exact Match” – Google interprets a keyword that is wrapped in brackets as only appearing when the exact phrase is the search query.
Richer and Comparative Keyword Analysis
A new feature they have offered is to go deeper into the specifics of a keyword and since it is based on the premium database only the data is much more accurate and richer.
Next to each keyword in your results you click the graph icon and you can pull more analysis – note the data is Google data by default. . In this update you can now get data from additional search engines and have it stacked side by side. To get this simply tick the checkbox next to the search engine name and click the Analyze button.
Subscription Options:
Trellian currently offers three version of the tool:
Free Option: The free option is well, “free” but will only allow you to do 50 searches per day with each result set limited to and 10 results for each keyword.
Standard Option – this is the typical subscription level for many companies and smaller agencies that wish to do more robust keyword research on an ongoing basis. This standard edition allows up to 1,500 searches per day with each keyword set returning 1,000 unique results per keyword. It offers project management and access to additional segmentation and tools. The subscription rates for this version are $69.95 per month or $599.40 annually (29% discount).
Professional Option – this is the agency grade option. It allows 1,500 searches but returns up to 10,000 unique results per keyword phrase which allows you to mine deep into the long tail. There are also API hooks available at this level so you can integrate into more customized tools you have developed in-house. Subscription rates are: $199.95/month
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