MergeWords takes the elbow grease out of keyword research, domain checks and linkbuilding
March 17th, 2011 by
As Internet social media practitioners, we’re always on the lookout for ways to streamline activity in a fast-paced, data-heavy world, from apps that eliminate the check-in/out process of location tracking to integrating user reviews directly into Google Places along with basic phone book-style information. Keyword research is one of the less glamorous parts of the process; it happens at a basic level of campaign creation, essentially something of a grunt chore before the more tailored work can get underway. Most important, keyword research can be a long and tedious process that at the end yields only a small return on the investment of time — ie only a few keywords out of a large collated set will potentially have search value. Anyone who’s done keyword research will groan at the thought of the familiar ritual: copy/paste > Find/Replace, copy/paste > Find/Replace, copy/paste > Find/Replace, Find/Replace geographic modifier, rinse and repeat. This is where MergeWords — a handy-dandy web tool that can generate long-tail keyword lists from a set of disparate qualifiers in a snap — comes in.
From this...
MergeWords’ appeal lies in both its simplicity (a sparse interface with easy-to-discern options) and its power. While there are a few other websites that offer many of the same options, none allow for the same versatility of function. There is some sample data to be had which demonstrates the tool’s flexibility; linkbuilding, for example, can be greatly hastened by the addition of Google tags such as intitle: or inure:. The user is also allowed a choice of separators for their merged list; a simple keyword aggregate may require a space between all words in the column, but the creators have also made domain research a snap by allowing the elimination of this space or its substitution with a different character. All one has to do is add in their preferred modifiers, set the separator option to “nothing” (thus creating a truly merged, one-word product) or hyphens, and insert their preferred top-level domain appendations (.com, .net, .org, etc). Conversely, an individual looking to for pay-per-click keywords of exact specifications may choose to wrap their results in quotation marks or brackets. The end product, then, is infinitely variable and almost instantaneous in its results: the perfect solution for this kind of task that weak human grey matter finds challenging.
...to this!
MergeWords isn’t quite perfect– I would appreciate a fourth box to allow for the addition of a geographic modifier while still resulting in a three-qualifier long-tail keyword. However, this problem is easily remedied by creating a separate list of combined-qualifier keywords (for example, using “stiletto heels” as one keyword in one column instead of entering “stiletto” and “heels” into columns A and B respectively). While this may necessitate a little elbow grease, I’ll gladly take it in exchange for the lack of headache caused by having to keep track of huge numbers of disparate qualifiers, as well as merging them into a seamless list without duplication. Thanks, MergeWords!– and my command-C/command-V keys thank you, too.
