Are Keyword Tools Overrated? Most Internet Marketers Think So…
By Anna Johnson on April 19th, 2010MarketingSherpa’s survey of Internet marketing professionals indicates that most Internet marketers regard keyword suggestion tools such as Wordtracker, Trellian, Hitwise or Market Samurai as overrated.
When asked to nominate all the keyword research tactics they saw as ‘highly effective’ only a few marketers nominated keyword tools as highly effective, whereas most rated analyzing website log files as highly effective.
MarketingSherpa divided its survey respondents into two groups of marketers: one including marketers with annual search engine marketing (SEM) budgets of $25,000 per annum or more; the other including marketers with budgets of less than $10,000 per year.
Survey respondents were asked to nominate those keyword research tactics they regarded as ‘highly effective’ as part of their SEM efforts. They could rate one or more (or none) of the listed tactics as highly effective.
Here are the percentages of respondents who rated the various tactics as highly effective, in order of the tactics highly regarded by the MOST marketers… to the tactics highly regarded by the LEAST number of marketers:
Internet marketers with SEM budgets of $25,000 or more:
- Analyzing site log files for highly converting keywords: 85 percent
- Analyzing site log files for frequent keywords: 54 percent
- Internal site search analysis: 48 percent
- Competitors’ sites: 38 percent
- Competitive analysis tools e.g. SpyFu: 31 percent
- Exploring long search phrases: 31 percent
- Social semantic mining (‘new buzz words’): 15 percent
- Keyword suggestion tools: 15 percent
Internet marketers with SEM budgets of less than $10,000:
- Analyzing site log files for highly converting keywords: 54 percent
- Analyzing site log files for frequent keywords: 54 percent
- Internal site search analysis: 30 percent
- Competitors’ sites: 26 percent
- Competitive analysis tools e.g. SpyFu: 9 percent
- Exploring long search phrases: 20 percent
- Social semantic mining (‘new buzz words’): 7 percent
- Keyword suggestion tools: 26 percent
MarketingSherpa suggests that the reason why Internet marketers with bigger budgets were more inclined to rate the various tactics as highly effective is a question of expertise.
In other words, Internet marketers with bigger search marketing budgets tend to have more experience and expertise. This is plausible, given than bigger budgets mean more opportunities to learn and hone skills.
