Drill.com / Syntryx reviewed

The competition for traffic amongst websites has reached a fever pitch over the last year or so and taking advantage of Search Engine Marketing has become a talking point of great debate. What are the best methods? What works? What is a waste of time?

We could go on for days about the intricacies of a field which nobody quite understands completely, and that’s where the thrills and frustrations of marketing a website lay.

Drill.com (aka Syntryx) arrives on the scene looking to provide a helping hand for webmasters and marketing analysts alike. While there are many websites offering a sandbox of tools to analyse web traffic and search rankings, not many can claim to do the job as comprehensively as this new site.

Drill.com has been experimenting through a beta phase, gathering further options to present one of the best online analysis tools on the web. It is a must-have for any webmaster who wishes to keep a close gauge over the traffic of his website – and competition websites too.

Sometimes the best SEM strategies involve pinching what works from other websites, and why not? We all have to start somewhere.

By using Drill’s complex member’s suite (dubbed The Member’s Club), you can draw up a tremendous array of statistics in relation to your website’s popularity. This applies to organic search listings, traffic demographics, Page Rank prediction, and much more.

The service is broken down in to three main areas; domain dossiers, keyword evaluation and advanced link analysis.

Want to compile a list of keywords to aid your marketing campaign based on what your competition is succeeding with? It’s possible to do so with the Drill.com member’s suite. Likewise, do you want to see where those blossoming websites are stealing their traffic from? You can get exact links so as to help your affiliation plans and link building strategies. It’s a wonderfully complete package and you can spend many hours analysing the intricacies of your website’s current performance.

Admittedly, the control panel can seem a little daunting at first view. There are a lot of tabs offering many different tools and it will take a while to get used to how everything functions, especially with the use of slightly confusing icons rather than text.

Don’t be put off though. The functionality is where Drill.com excels in a major way.

It is possible to run a search for a group of similar websites and compare them in great depth. We can look at market share, traffic force, the advertisement schemes that a domain is using, and even the value of the domain itself.

If you’re thinking about splashing out on a new URL, it’s great to have Drill’s analysis at the ready. You can weigh up the competitive rating of it before you’ve spent a penny!

The ability to build keyword dossiers and export them for use with your own campaign will save literally hours of painstakingly repetitive work. Not to mention, it’s likely to hand a major boost to your organic search ranking performance.

Drill.com utilizes an unusual credits system to cater for its members. For example, compiling a list of domains may require 20 credits which will be detracted from your member account. It’s a pay-as-you-go style system and one which can end rather abruptly if you tear through your credits.

All in all, however, Drill offers a brilliant overview of just about every aspect to SEM that you could possibly want to have access to. It is great for analysing successful websites, and starting from scratch with your own. This is certainly one of the webmaster suites that delivers on its promises.
 

KeywordSpy.com – see what keywords are working

There is no doubt that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of the primary focuses for aspiring webmasters. It is where the crucial rankings are determined that can send a website skyrocketing in to global fame, or spiralling in to the cyber scrapheap of forgotten concepts and slow crawling traffic.

Anybody who has studied the field of Search Engine Optimization will be able to testify that keywords play a large role in the success of a marketing campaign – whether it is through strategically placed keywords in the Meta tags, or keyword density in the copy.

Yes, it really is true that a choice of words could be the difference between the first page on Google and a position of anonymity in the subpages. KeywordSpy.com  is here to challenge the stranglehold of successfully marketed websites by opening up the door for other webmasters to see what keywords are working for that particular website.

KeywordSpy offers a free trial to test its services, and if we’re being honest, this is probably all that you’re going to need to compile a list of relevant keywords for your own project.

The system is simple, yet effective. You run a search for a particular keyword and a list will be returned with the competition for it. This includes the PPC (Pay per Click), and the actual popularity of the keyword itself, i.e. How many people are clicking it.

Not stopping there, KeywordSpy gives you the chance to search for a domain and find all of the keywords that are operational for that particular URL. As you can probably imagine, this is an excellent way of discovering which words are driving traffic to your direct competition. It also illustrates which keywords are offering the most traffic with the least competition.

The service is rather similar to the now defunct Google Sandbox, but the ability to search out keywords for any domain is extremely helpful during the research stages of your SEM.

To aid us further, KeywordSpy provides full export capabilities on its search findings. So if you find a website which is in line with your own, and you wish to use some of the keywords, you don’t need to flap around typing them out originally. You can simply export them to a small spreadsheet (or plain txt file) and add them to your own campaign in a couple of clicks. It’s a welcome utility and a great time saver.

The website claims to offer access to over a billion keywords in its database, and we wouldn’t dismiss that. Some websites have literally thousands of keywords in use and it can be quite surprising at first, especially if you’ve been campaigning with only a dozen or so.

While we wouldn’t go as far as to justify whether you can really boost your ad revenue campaign by 10,000% – as KeywordSpy boldly claims – the tool is certainly a welcome concept for any aspiring webmaster.

If you’re feeling a bit lost with your SEO strategy, don’t give up just yet. KeywordSpy.com offers a helpful peek in to the strategies of other competitive websites. Sign up now to enjoy a free trial and improve your search visibility with this neat online tool.

Drill To Provide Free Competitive Data on More than 40 Million Sites

A couple of days ago I chatted with Gil Alter, co-Founder of a company called Drill.com that is about to launch an online competitive measurement device in approximately two months from now. Drill.com is currently in beta mode with around 50 chosen media buying and mega affiliate companies paying to use the tool. Focusing on offering a complete picture of site-top referral ad avenues, for nearly all relevant online destinations, it represents one of the first free competitive measurement sources. Alexa.org, Compete.com and Quantcast.com (the main competitors for free data) are known to be quite limited, and other options such as Nielsen Netratings, HitWise, and Comscore are often out of the price range for many smaller organizations and clients (and therefore not as widely used). Those 40+ thousand dollar tools are all based on ISPs and Panel data, which is purchased by those companies and derived from third parties, and in many ways it abuses the end user’s privacy. The beauty of Drill’s solution is in its crawling based view (see screenshots below) that allows you to compare your sites, large and small to your competitors’ sites and to your industry in general. A key challenge Gil Alter noted for advertisers is finding highly targeted and untouched inventory of a particular viewers, on sites beyond the top-tier media properties. For instance, if you sell travel packages, finding the sites that produce quality traffic for everyone else selling travel packages but you has never been so accurate and available.
Efficient media planning demands much skill. However, media planners tend to look for the superficial solutions in interactive, using networks like AdBrite and going for the largest sites in a particular category without much consideration. On one hand, this generates a considerable inventory flood on the largest players, on the other hand it overlooks a large number of sites.  The vision of Drill.com, so Gil Alter, is to facilitate advertisers’ access to hidden data treasures, consisting of enormous amounts of PR avenues, affiliate link-ins, media-buy sources, blog postings and the SEO structure of competitors.  As Drill crawls more sites for a longer time period, this data will gather greater value, as more inventory is exposed in a more up-to-date fashion. In the meantime, the system is already a human-resource and time saving tool for anyone who does not want to miss out on the top media spots.