The Last Keyword Tool (Op. 2)

Internationalization when it comes to keywords can be pretty tricky. The three most common pieces of data are AdWords cost and traffic, and competing pages in various search engines. This data doesn’t actually change that much, but it has to be retrieved properly which is not quite as straightforward as it might seem.

Fetching the PPC traffic from Adwords is pretty straight forward, you just choose a language and a country and it’ll give you back a number. The cost is a little trickier because while you can fetch the amounts in any currency, currencies fluctuate daily, sometimes wildly. Pegging all of your fetched data to one currency then using a fluctuating reckoner will give inconsistent results that will change if you blink for too long, so you have to fetch the data in the local currency that AdWords gives you, but therein lies the next problem. Some currencies have decimal points, some don’t, some locales format their numbers with commas for precision instead of periods, it’s just a general mess.

The most difficult piece is the competing pages. It’s easy enough to think that you just type a query string into a search engine and pull back the results, but is it really that simple? Sadly, the answer is no. Just typing a string into Google will give you results in the US, in Canada, the UK, and possibly lots of other places. Are they really competing pages if your market is the US? What if you are in the UK and you are only searching on pages in the UK? In Canada and are searching only the French Canadian pages? It’s not so simple anymore.

Just to illustrate the problem, I’ll enumerate some differences based on locale for the term ‘mortgage’:

• www.google.com: 164,000,000
• www.google.com (us only): 131,000,000
• www.google.co.uk (entire web): 169,000,000
• www.google.co.uk (uk only): 8,690,000

You get the idea. In order for a keyword tool to be properly called The Last Keyword Tool™, it’s going to need to be able to allow you to specify which locale your website/market is in in order to give you the most accurate results.

Taking the locale idea one step further, imagine that we had an advanced feature that used LSI in order to determine which keywords were most relevant to your seed keyword (for sorting or otherwise). It’s not enough to just make an index out of any old documents and toss some terms at it, you’d have to have a stemmer that knew about stemming in multiple languages, the stop words would have to be language specific to avoid incorrect filtering, and the index itself would need to be able to handle all of the special characters that occur in the varying languages.

Not that it can’t be done, of course, but it doesn’t really appear as though any of the keyword tools currently on the market handle the internationalization sufficiently to meet these requirements. <shameless advertisement>Krakken handles locales this way of course, but it’s not a keyword tool, it’s a market research and website blueprinting tool</shameless advertisement>

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

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