Brad Callen, Keyword Elite and his R/S ratio

Brad Callen - this guy seems pretty knowledgable on the topic of Adwords etc. I've read the free ebook floating around on the net called "Adwords made easy" - he also owns the "popular" keyword tool "Keyword Elite" which is (from what I've been told) only particularly effective in America.

First of all can anyone confirm if his adword tool is useful? I can't see how it would beat a bit of adword research personally using the google tools. The Google Keyword tool is the best I've found for Ireland.

Secondly, what do you make of his R/S ratio for finding profitable markets?

Here is an excerpt from the free ebook:

Once we have these 2 numbers, we can use them to calculate something called an R/S
ratio, which is basically a ratio used to determine how much demand there is for a
product/keyword.
R = Results
S = Searches
From our example above, we've said that the keyword "organic gardening" was
searched 17,246 times last month, so S wouldbe17,246.
We've also found that their were 140,000 websites advertising this keyword, so R would be
140,000
Now, let's divide the 2 numbers
140,000/17,246 = 8.12
Our R/S ratio for this keyword is 8.12. I know from experience that this isn't a very good R/S
ratio. Typically the lower the number is, the more profitable the keyword will be for you,
should you decide to createawebsite based on the keyword.

Is this R/S ratio effective for a country like Ireland with considerably smaller audiences than America? Or should I just ignore this R/S ratio?

Ideas?

Thanks.:cool:

Edit: To be honest, whether you are reading something by Perry Marshall or Brad Callen, they are all trying to promote their tools and that's fine but Jesus, it's so damn obvious even when they are trying to make you believe they are not. It's hard to listen to these "experts" sometimes.

Derek B

Just running out the door so don't really have time to give a proper reply, but it sounds quite similar to Wordtracker's KEI

http://www.wordtracker.com/database_help/keihelp.html

notnem

I've spent a lot of time using keyword programs hoping to come up with a magic solution. At the end of the day I didn't get anywhere with the keyword programs. I've used Wordtracker also but for the Irish market there

I read this keyword ebook which I found very useful:

http://www.wordtracker.com/offers/kickass/

Basically all the data I needed was in my Google Analytics keywords report, but this ebook gave me different ways of looking at and analysing this data and then using it. If you want more info on what I did to test keywords etc let me know as I know this is slightly off topic.

I do use SEO Elite by the same developer and find that good. As with all of these things they give you plenty of data, but using it (or getting time to use it) is the problem.

Cheers for the info lads, overall, this R/S ratio and KEI, how effective is the information from them for Ireland? Or what do you do to test if the market is profitable? A/B tests etc ?

NotNem, will give that ebook a read today. Thanks

notnem

Deleted User wrote: »

Cheers for the info lads, overall, this R/S ratio and KEI, how effective is the information from them for Ireland?

I used Word Tracker when I wanted to start looking at keywords. Wordtracker was giving me one phrase as being worth targetting on. I did target it and rank 9th for the phrase at the moment. So far this month I have received 3 or 4 visits on that phrase plus variations of it.

If your site is already up and running and receiving traffic being about to work Google Analytics was valuable to me. Taking that ebook I mentioned I implemented the techniques in a test area of my site that was revenue neutral. The results were very impressive and I got approached by a company offering me an affiliate for the niche area and made some money out of it (not much).

When I say impressive I mean results for a given area went from 35 for 30 days to 450 for 30 days. It showed me the techniques worked and were worth implementing elsewhere.

Derek B

I haven't worked in the industry in Ireland yet, so I may not be in the best position to advise on the most effective tools to use for Irish data analysis.

Wordtracker is very US orientated, with no real regionalisation. I work on a small number of US clients, so obviously I can look at this data. I also sometimes use Wordtracker to get a general idea on highly searched terms, it can help give ideas for blog posts, articles etc. However, I wouldn't advise putting any real worth on it's KEI measures - the data seems pretty questionable from my experience (It's taken from Dogpile and Metacrawler)

As the vast majority of my clients are Oz based, I need local search data for here, which I can get from KeywordDiscovery & Hitwise, and to a lesser extent Google Adwords Keyword Tool (I just checked and KeywordDiscovery does not offer Irish regionalisation).