Free For Your Site

My WordTracker subscription was going to expire soon, so I took the opportunity to try Nichebot.com, which they claim is more powerful than WordTracker. I played with Nichebot a good amount for the two-week trial period, here are the results.

Nichebot uses a credit system for certain functions (vs. unmetered use for WordTracker.) I started with $15.00 in credits and now am down to $6.90. I performed eight or nine searches; I felt like I was eating up credits pretty fast and wasn’t sure if I was using them in the best manner. Depending on what you’re doing, things cost partial to 3 credits, and you get charged separately for each variation (i.e. bagel, bagels).

Nichebot recommends a five-step system, which is time-consuming and confusing. There are “quick-digging” tools, which are free, including WordTracker and WT’s thesaurus. However, while it is free to search WordTracker via Nichebot, it only turns up the counts; if you want the competition data and KEI that’s a premium search. However, you can click on a word or phrase in the list and “dig deeper” for free, which gives you a list of phrases associated with the phrase you clicked on. The main purpose of using Nichebot’s is “to find as many keywords from multiple sources to cover as much territory for the maximum traffic for your Web site.” You go from a broad search and just keep refining, merging, narrowing in.

NicheBot Pros

• Gathers data from more sources than WT (Keyword Discovery, LSI and Google.) Lots of explanatory videos and screenshots.
• Lets you know how many credits you’re about to use.
• Nice system of organizing projects into folders. You can “merge” searches (i.e. bagel and bagels) and “clean” your list to eliminate unwanted words from your list.
• There are multiple ways to view results. For example, Google Keyword Cruncher or LSI shows search volume, competition and ratio on a 1-5 graph, but you can also look at it organically, or (for a fee) get Pay Per Click data on a search you’ve already performed. It will show you on a graph which keywords and phrases are good deals for advertisers and which are good deals for publishers.
• Can search for misspellings.
• You can find the addresses of the sites with the most backlinks to a particular keyword or phrase.
• It can find thematically related keywords.
• It can check for keyword density on your sites, to see if it’s bothering Google.

NicheBot Cons

• Not particularly intuitive.
• Time investment of figuring out the search process. All these different choices like LSI (Google’s own keyword suggestions), Keyword Cruncher, etc.
• Because of the pay structure, does not really lend itself to brainstorming or stream-of-consciousness style searching.
• Hard to keep track of the pricing structure. I accidentally ran the same search twice, in a row, as if I had clicked twice, and it still debited.
• Some of the same results anomalies as WordTracker
• Suggests keywords are labeled “Jackpot” if they have no competition, even if they have no competition because they’re anomalies
• You have to have a Google API key (which Google isn’t giving out anymore) if you want to use some of the functions; otherwise it will return Yahoo data
• When I tried to export the data, it looked all funky (spreadsheet and notepad both left out fields)
• It seems like everything is a separate step. You get the list of keywords, then you have to click everything you want to get competition/KEI data for and run another search.
• When you run some advanced searches, it puts it in a queue and it could take 5-20 minutes to get the results back.

Conclusion: WordTracker is so much easier, but the possibilities are greater with Nichebot. I do miss WT, because of the nature and volume of the searches I was doing (random stuff) but Nichebot is a good prompt to rein in the focus and follow each project through to the end before making a decision on whether to launch a site. It takes a lot of the guesswork out. But the getting there is somewhat painful.

Also, the credit-based system makes me nervous. My favorite tool was the Keyword Discovery 9-in-1 (especially the backlinks). It can go up to 10,000 keywords deep and the more you pay the deeper you can get. I also like LSI, because it finds related keywords Google likes, and it was interesting being able to see the top sites for each keyword. (However, sometimes it doesn’t show any sites when I know there are some.) Nichebot looks like it takes time and discipline.

To be fair, I’ve been using WordTracker for three years, and have been using NicheBot for only two weeks. Nichebot may provide more information, but it has a steep learning curve and much harder to learn than WordTracker. I will be switching back to WordTracker.