The Last Keyword Tool (Op. 1)

As the main engineer for Theme Zoom, I frequently get questions/requests that use varying other tools as points of comparison or reference. One of the most common classes of tools is the Keyword Tool class. I won’t bother to mention any names here but it appears as though there are probably a dozen or more keyword tools out on the market that all claim to do various things and present the information in some particularly unique or insightful way. Sometimes there are some shiny graphs, sometimes there are certain reports that appeal to one particular market (niche, etc), sometimes they go for the quantity aspect and return tens of thousands of keywords, and sometimes they have one or more magic columns that are some sort of market value or relevance calculation.

So what does all this mean? This means that you need to be a subscriber to about 6 different tools in order to get all of the information that you need for some particular project and copy/paste keywords around to do different kinds of analyses on them. Being the engineer that I am, this strikes me as a really inefficient way of getting anything done. I keep thinking that somebody should figure out how to make keywords™ so that instead of thinking about which tool you are using and copying keywords around, you can get down to the business of building traffic and making money.

What sorts of features would this tool have to have in order for it to be The Last Keyword Tool™?

• Keywords must be localized for international market
• Interface must be in multiple foreign languages
• All useful raw data and techniques from other tools must be present so that no other tools are required to perform some particular analysis
• Powerful filtering interface to help you get done whatever you need done as efficiently as possible
• Export to all of the most common formats
• RESTful/SOAP API for interacting with the tool from other tools for mashup purposes
• Some shiny visualizations where appropriate to help analyze data
• Vibrant/open community of people discussing and improving ways of analyzing the data

There are probably a few other little bits that I’m missing, but that pretty much seems to encompass what every other tool I’ve seen does (there are also some ranking tools and some ranking features built into keyword tools, but I’m excepting those for the moment as a separate class of tools).

How hard can it possibly be?

- Kelley
Update (May 23, 2009) The Last Keyword Tool™ is now available at Theme Zoom