Keyword Difficulty Tool v2.0 - Big Upgrade

Dear SEOChat members,

Let me first off say thank you for your kind reception of the initial version of this tool. It makes it feel very worthwhile when so many people that I respect get such great use out of the tools. I hope to add more very soon, including a very exciting sandbox factor detection tool (ETA - this week!).

http://www.socengine.com/seo/tools/keyword-difficulty-tool.html

Version 2 of this tool takes into account much of the criticism the tool received (which was quite a bit, see - http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3154)

The tool now is more accurate (in my opinion) although the percentages still need quite a bit of tweaking to approach true accuracy. It is certainly a more robust tool, and surprisingly, a little faster. The average processing time is now under 60 seconds. Please post your criticism and suggestions here. I have listed below some of the terms I've run through the system and its results.

- mesothelioma 80.23%
- news 75.78%
- gaming computer 53.39%
- halloween costume 51.20%
- used cars 75.04%
- gift ideas 76.15%
- mortgage refinance 82.53%
- anatomy software 27.77%
- buy ipod 40.14%
- online personals 62.46%
- new girlfriend 25.50%
- write an apology 22.33%
- search engine optimization 67.31%
- seo 69.5%
- pinot noir 45.40%
- chardonnay 47.17%
- pinot grigio 31.32%
- wedding rings 60.38%
- platinum wedding bands 41.33%

Enjoy, and please feel free to provide input - I use your comments to make the tools better!

BTW - Special thanks go to EarlPearl for his relentless testing and help in making this a better product for all of us.

Hi randfish,
thanks for this time-saver tool! Just one suggestion: would it be possible to create an international version (I would think just the possibility to select the serp eg google.uk uk results, google.de... would make the trick..)
By the way, http://www.socengine.com/seo/tools/tools.html is currently a 404..
Thanks again,
Johann

I didn't enter top 3 bids at Overture (because I never get's any results returned for some reason from Overture). Because of that(?) your script returned some errors. I guess you should do something about that. Except from that your tool returns very valuable information.

Cheers for the use of the tool randfish. It seems to be quite accurate. One of my sites scored 71.25% but then I knew that it would be a difficult one!

Very nice rand...although if you don't fill out the overture numbers when the next page is displayed you get

Quote:

Warning: Division by zero in /home/httpd/html/socengine/seo/tools/Dustin/KeywordDifficulty.2.php on line 396 Warning: Division by zero in /home/httpd/html/socengine/seo/tools/Dustin/KeywordDifficulty.2.php on line 396 Warning: Division by zero in /home/httpd/html/socengine/seo/tools/Dustin/KeywordDifficulty.2.php on line 396

On the top...maybe add a function that if those arent filled in it doesn't try to display something (or make them required)

What a great tool! This is a real time saver!

Also, you could have a check button if overture doesn't give you any bids, so your script assume the 0.10 by default.

Also, webcertain gave a very nice suggestion.

Look forward to trying it out. The first version was very insightful.
Dave

u da man - tool-man rand!

Wow thats very cool.

Anyway to throw the Overture bid lookup into an iframe so you dont have to switch back and forth between windows?

Thanks for all your suggestions. I will get on the fixes immediately - hopefully have them done by tonight or early tomorrow.

How do you all feel about the accuracy (aside from the bid errors)?

I like the tool, but I think it could use some work. Don't take that the wrong way, but the term "google" is showing up as 60.1 - 70% when it should be in the nearly impossible category. Same goes for "adobe", "microsoft", etc. If those sites don't show up in the nearly impossible category then I don't think there's any that will, or even in the extremely difficult category.

mattm -

Thanks for your critique. Sadly the tool must focus on commercial terms and so (as stated above and on the tool page itself) it will be quite inaccurate, especially for very non-competitive, non-commercial terms and very competitive, non-commercial terms (both ends of the spectrum).

For terms like these, the tool can still be very useful (in my opinion) by allowing users to see how strong the competition in the top 10 is. However, the lack of Overture bids needs to be a part of the algo, and thus, the tool will return downward skewed data.

Perhaps in the future, I can try to build in a feature that will analyze non-commercial terms differently from commercial terms. Thanks again for the input! I hope you're still able to put the tool to good use.

Hi,
I guess I missed that statement about commercial keywords. I only mentioned it because I didn't think you knew about it yet. I will definitely be using this tool a lot. Saves me from copy and pasting my competitor's URl's into uptimebot one by one Good work!

Hey Randfish:

You are the man. Looks good. It appears the allintitle information makes a difference as the experts at Search engine watch suggested. From my quick review it certainly appears to alter the final score results vis a vis my comments. I'm busy but I'll look at it harder later on.

From my perspective it has lots of utility.

Go killer.

dave