Last night I was doing a little bit of casual browsing trying to find a good keyword tool to test for creating some content for a directory project.
I really don’t use keyword tools anymore, but at one point, they were a big part of my daily routine. But so too was watching the Maury Povitch show, and stopping that cold turkey has done nothing but make me a far healthier human being. I guess I assumed the same would be true for giving up keyword research.
It turns out, I’m probably missing out on a lot. (and no, i’m not talking about “You are NOT the father!” episodes, which were some of the most emotionally engaged and heart wrenching days of my adult life)
Having been one of the first people to use SPYFU.com way back when, and the ubiquitously annoying Wordtracker.com, and all of their various analogs and derivatives, from Ispionage.com to Keyword Country to just about everything in between, I’ve always thought that keyword tools were way over-rated. (unless you are doing PPC competitive intelligence work, in which case, they are obviously a great advantage to have)
So last night I was going to bite the bullet and sign up for AHREFS, which is cool and very highly regarded – but it’s also expensive for a yearly subscription, and I know that it’s a slippery slide back into the abyss once you re-enter that universe. (you start to talk to people about KEI, and using cottage industry terms like backlinks and pulling rank in casual conversation, and at that point, I’d rather someone just shoot me and put me out of my misery)
So I happily stumbled onto the review below of a new tool called Ferzy – which I then checked out and was super impressed.
Why?
1. Ferzy is beautiful. It has that material design (obviously to emulate Google’s palette – smart!) and just feels good to use for those of us who feel our keywords, as much as we find them. (I am a feeler, not a finder – which is probably not a good slogan for a Tee shirt)
2. Ferzy is inexpensive. The basic plan is $17 a month, and while it doesn’t do all of the backflips that other tools do – I don’t really need that for this project and in all liklihood, neither do you.
3.Ferzy is fast, and intuitive and easy to extrapolate into real world, actionable content campaigns. You see the data you need, you drill down (or not) – you get a good feel for the landscape – and you dive in or don’t.
I really like it, and am looking forward to giving it another go later today. For a more detailed look at Ferzy, you can read the review by this fine chap below. (he covers it in more detail, and his review is how I found Ferzy last night)
PS – my favorite line from the review below is: “I almost ways (sic) do keyword research whenever I write a blog post. I rarely write just for fun.”
Who writes for fun?
You think Hemingway wrote for fun?
Hemingway wrote for the chicks.
And for Bing.
Because Hemingway hated Google, like the rest of us.
So I’m with you, mr. whatever your name is below.
Only pussies write for fun.
Put that on a T- shirt.
The rest of us do it because we want to get something good out of it. (like good first page google results.)
Check out Ferzi here, and the rest of the review below, below. 🙂
What is Ferzy?
Before diving into Ferzy, let me explain a little bit about what you can use it for. Ferzy is a keyword difficulty tool, which tries to give you an estimation of how hard a keyword would be to rank for. I almost ways do keyword research whenever I write a blog post. I rarely just write for fun. In fact, check out my post on how a little keyword research increased reach by 170%.
What I Look For in a Keyword Research Tool
Ferzy just launched this year but is already adding a lot of handy features which I always look for in a keyword research tool, such as:
