KeywordSpy Rants and Raves

The past few weeks I’ve done some series of study on keyword research tools and some companies offering web and SEM analytics. I was curious about them all at once after reading some forums sharing views about who’s in and who’s not in the industry. I have apologize it took some time. While doing my research I come across one interesting review on (as you may know it by now) my personal favorite KeywordSpy. I say it interesting because there were only two responses to this review yet they seem to be real encounters of people who had entirely dealt with KeywordSpy before. Here are some of lines from their post.

From Privatebox (rants)
“Firstly what made me signup was the fact that I could see all the keywords my competitors were using. This is great in theory, but after I signed up I found that most of the keywords many of my competitors were using were rubbish. It seems that all my competitors were using keywords that were not working for them. After I signed up I found that over 2/3 of the keywords I received from my competitors were useless.”

First, if I were KeywordSpy I’d like to know the address you’d been typing on the search bar, Privatebox. In this way we would be able to identify the keyword results you’re getting. If you see keyword results that are irrelevant to your competitors’ industry, don’t just suspect your keyword research tool for that, instead, check on your competitors’ site and do a little observation.

One way of checking is thru the Source file. Some of the keywords in a site are shown on the Source file of the website; get this by pressing ctrl + U. In the illustration below you will see Meta keywords on the Source file that serves as the sites’ backup keywords.

If you see anything similar Source file results on your competitors’ website with that illustration above then you can start the comparison. This way you can check if your competitor is indeed using irrelevant keywords or not. For some reasons you will not find Meta keywords on the Source file of the website don’t worry. It simply means that your competitor is not one of the few who are left trusting the ever changing Algorithms of Google. That’s no joke you see. It’s a big strategy. You have to understand that many advertisers rely on the Algorithm swing or the popularity rate of SEO techniques that some just opt to take out Meta Tags instead.

Back to the topic. My point is just do a major comparison first and then get some real analysis on the results you’re seeing. It wouldn’t hurt hiring an SEO analyst to read you the results if you’re serious about online marketing.

Let’s say you did found out your competitors’ had been using irrelevant keywords. Well, as I had been telling my clients before, don’t be surprised. There really are a lot of site owners who allow the use of whatever keywords on their site since (even if it’s too risky) they’re only concerned of getting traffic our site popularity. That is why there are a lot of SEO agents around who tries to get this notion out of any marketing strategy (read: too risky).

From Lorlyn11 (raves)
“Regarding some people's comments on their subscription & cancellation method, KeywordSpy’s way of doing things is no surprise to me anymore because I know for a fact that once you are subscribed to an online service, using your credit card, your account is already subjected for an automatic renewal and it's only up to you - the account holder - to continue or not with your existing account before the subscription expires. This is the same procedure I’ve gone through with all the hosting providers I have ever used.”

Like what I mentioned earlier, this is what interests me about this review is that because two real people shared their thoughts about the situation. I admired the brilliance of Lorlyn11 here. In her post she quoted that the cancellation method practiced by KeywordSpy isn’t the first time she’d encountered, matter of fact she’s right! I have friends who were Senior Billing Officer of an online company for years and they do the same thing. Internet companies usually don’t allow their members to just cancel anytime. Typically, they’d send someone to check on the cause of cancellation, talk to the company representative and all that just to make sure the termination isn’t a fraud one.

On the other hand, I would like to comment that KeywordSpy need to change their cancellation process. I hope they really do something about it because if they’re only capable of dealing with their members online then they should create a cancellation option on the ‘My Account’ page or something so that all the subscribers won’t have a hard time dealing with that issue.

Well, those were some really interesting inputs you see. Unfortunately, many reviews almost slaughtered KeywordSpy to the core. There were some predictions that before the last quarter of the year the company will introduce some enhancement on their tool, something highly anticipated by many subscribers like myself. Well, let’s just wait and see if this happens, and hope that the matters discussed on the review above was considered.