The other day SEOMOZ wrote about KeyCompete, a new service that uses scraping and a variety of ways to monitor competitor’s keywords and help a search marketer dig deeper into keyword research. Services like this are valuable because they provide another angle for real keyword data outside of the search engines tools. I know there are some similar ones from companies such as Hitwise which use log data from ISP to provide a sample of data.

The question with any of these tools is — how does one manage these keywords and classifications? It seems the problem with search marketing is not in getting the data, but in managing, structuring it, and turning it into action.

Lets say you do get all of your competitors keywords — how do you know those are even good keywords? I just read a study from Omniture (which we are taking a look at) from Jetblue and how they cut their cost by 94 percent when they really dug into their search marketing spend. Some competitors might be bleeding money and not even know it.

So while it is great to see more data, the best data is going to be the one you can easily gather yourself — how your keywords are performing and how you can better target your own landing pages, ads, etc. I’ve found that to make the biggest difference and I have more then enough work to last me a year just on what we have right now. Last I looked I have about 1.4 million to go through, and that isn’t even counting combinations.