A Powerful Keyword API

The first ever partner of Majestic was a company which some very old hands might consider a “blast from the past”. Well I am here to say that Wordtracker are not only very much alive and well, but have recently launched what we feel will be a very valuable API command for the SEO industry. Wordtracker are these days able to track 3.5 billion searches monthly and importantly for businesses that are building tools that will stand the test of time, they generate this data through licensing data, not through the scraping of search engine results.

The result is a powerful API for keyword research. I talked to Hal MacDermot, the Content and Community Manager at Wordtracker and much of how the API works below is his words.

The API is a developer tool and there is no designed interface, as such. So, the best way to use the tool is with a Rest Client, like the Cocoa-rest-client which is a native OS X app used for testing HTTP/REST endpoints. The results are much more accessible than if you used a browser. The API uses JSON for commands. You can get Cocoa from here:  and then after sign-up (with Wordtracker.com/api) you are provided with an API Key and API ID to perform authorization. You need the Key and ID in the query string, whichever way you run an API request.

Let’s do a search. Who doesn’t like Chocolate Cake?

There’s quite a bit of slicing and dicing that you can do with the API. But let’s start with the basics… How difficult would it be to rank or buy adverts around the phrase “chocolate cake” in the US? You would first need to get an idea of the number of searches for chocolate cake (In the case below,compared to the searches for “chocolate cake recipe”).

Searches for “Chocolate cake” in the US

So you can quickly see the relative search volume for any keyword. However, Wordtracker have always used a metric called the “Keyword Effectiveness Index” which helps to spot keywords which might be good opportunities to bid on or optimize for in search. Wordtracker can also show you the KEI value and competition for any keyword. Let’s add this to our search:

“Chocolate cake” in the US with added metrics for KEI and Competition:

On top of this, many phrases are seasonal in nature. Wouldn’t it be great to pull in keyword data over time? Well once again Wordtracker’s new keyword API let’s us segment by time. Let shows an example:

Search for “Chocolate cake” in the US with added metrics for KEI and Competition for the last week in week in September:

How many results can you get per call?

The API allows you to input a keyword, and the number of results depends on your pricing plan. Free users get up to 100 returns per call. For paid plans, each API call can return up to 2000 results, and these can be paginated to return higher numbers of results.

What else can you do to slice and dice the data?

You can do an exact search, or to pull up themed and related list of keywords results, you can use broad and phrase.

The API allows for multiple parameters, allowing amazing segmentation. The API offers:

• more than 200 countries and territories
• time segmentation by week or month
• metrics including: keyword volume, IT, IAAT, Competition, KEI, Linkability
• Filtering of adult terms
• Plurals
• Control over the term length (number of words in the phrase)

Want to try it?

Wordtracker are using a Freemium to subscription model – with a paid offering from just $20 a month! The price goes up with usage. You can sign up for any one of these over here.

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Dixon Jones

Founder of DHJ Ventures and Founding CEO of Inlinks, Dixon is also the Global Brand Ambassador at Majestic.

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