Yes, it’s a great tool for keyword research but there are some considerations you should take before applying this data to any of your keyword research efforts. OK so first, what is this list? From what I can see on the page at stats.grok.se, it’s a tool that reports the number of page views received for any given article on Wikipedia over the last three months. So…that’s it. It shows page views. In other words, just because the search engine optimization article from Wikipedia ranks number one on Google for [search engine optimization], it doesn’t mean that all of those page views (ie., 113,468 in February) came from Google searches (or any other search engines for that matter).
So with that in mind, here are some of the main considerations off the top of my head.
- The page views do not directly correlate with organic entries (click-throughs from Google or any other algorithm-based search engine). They are page views. That’s it.
- The page views that are correlated with organic entries are likely a result of search engine users performing informational queries. In other words these keywords will not always be effective for ecommerce sites or sites targeting transactional queries.
- Do your research NOW. I doubt this will last (it even says the tool, “may disappear or change at any time.” at the bottom of the page). I’m sure the data’s been scraped many times over and will likely be made into variety of other tools (unless it already has) but just in case, I would archive your main keywords’ data. If you want to learn how to take some/all of that data by the horns so you don’t have to worry about this, check out Smaxor’s PHP Data Scraping Scripts to get started (I’m not sure if it’s “allowed” but it’s absolutely no different from viewing the pages and copy/pasting the data manually so…).
I’m going to make a tool (well, try to at least) that compares the grok data to data from other mediums like Wordtracker, Google Trends, and anything else I can think of that might show something interesting. If I do, I’ll be back to post what I found and a link to the tool. If I don’t post about it again, it means I failed miserably at the tool and probably just don’t want to talk about it anymore.
