Ask IH: How can I improve wordcounter.io?
Hey folks! In the vein of feedback Fridays I wanted to solicit feedback from the community on my word counting web tool: wordcounter.io
I'm particularly interested in 3 areas (but appreciate all comments):
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Your use case and industry (if you'd use it).
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If you'd use it (or have used it) what is missing from your ideal experience?
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How can I increase engagement? Specifically, when you're in the 'word counting' zone what other things might you be interested in doing / learning about?
Would love to hear your thoughts (and happy to trade SEO advice in return đ)
I sell resumes and I love your tool. So much so I'm going to write it into my SOP for writers.
Specifically we would be using the Keyword Density tool. I need a tool that I can easily paste in a 7-job postings wall of text and I get back a simple and easy to read list of the most used 1,2,3-word keyword phrases.
There's one critical problem though - your tool isn't filtering out unimportant words effectively enough. For example, in second place on the single-word keyword density list is "make".
That's easily filtered out as an unimportant piece of data when interpreting the table, but since the list only shows 10, the tool has extremely limited usefulness in my process. The 2 and 3-word keyword density lists are pretty good, but it'd be very useful if I could double the list length.
Thanks @ChrisSavoie glad you've found it useful! The feedback on the keyword filtering and length is really helpful, I've got some things in the works but this is good to know.
I actually came across your website serendipitously the other day.
My use-case was that I wanted something to show me what đ„ amount of characters would look like. Maybe having the ability to generate dummy textâlike Lorem Ipsumâwould be useful for some.
@jarrod interesting point about the x amount of characters (I feel like I've done that before as well). I also have a Lorem Ipsum generator website (loremipsum.io), perhaps it's time for a collaboration...
Very nice website!
Yeah I think wordcounter.io is screaming for a word generator of some sort, as long as it could be implemented minimally that doesn't water-down the wonderful UX/UI you already have.
Incidentally, loremipsum.io doesn't have a 'characters' option, only words, sentences, and paragraphs. Characters I believe are useful too, in quite a few circumstances.
Mm, good point. Will have to add that in as another option.
I love it but I'd love to see a SEO keyword block under KEYWORD DESTINY, It'll matter a lot.
Hey @AhmedMaherS , I'm interested to hear more, care to elaborate? Are you referring to the keyword search frequency?
I'm sadly in a vacation right now but I wanted to show you an extension I have that basically if you google something it shows you how many people does per month, it's good for SEO because if someone is writing an article it could help, I don't see how exactly you can implement it to be completely honest, you could maybe do it for the last 10 words as a table? Idk. But I think it'll get you a big boost.
Suggestion: Show the SEO words and sentences count in the user entered text. Tell user the more SEO words the better it is, they will also be more than interested to reveal their real domain and where they are using it.
@prakis there is a keyword density list towards the bottom right (it only shows keywords if you input some text tho). Is that was you're talking about?
No, not that. What I mean is you can ask users what is their domain and then show the SEO word count. For example, one of my product is online photo watermarking tool (www.watermark.ink) while I am writing something your wordcounter can also show how many words are SEO valuable (in relation to photography and watermarking).
Use it a lot. Make it into a chrome/firefox extension. Should be fairly simple with webextensions fully supported now.
Bonus points for being able to add keyword targeting in the textarea
Great to hear! I've thought about an extension, glad to get validation from a user perspective. Can you elaborate on the keyword targeting?
I meant that from an seo perspective. So basically you let users enter some keywords to be targeted and when they paste their content it, you can parse the text and find out how many times it appears, etc.
Gotcha, I like the idea. Thanks!
I really like the...everything about this from a design perspective. This is the best word counter I've ever seen.
The SurveyMonkey popup at the end completely ruins the experience, though. So throw that away.
Yes, please remove survey monkey.
Thanks for the props @hakusaro. Yep, seems to be the consensus around the popup (although ~75 folks did fill it out đź).
Make it dark already. My eyes hurt, coming from indiehackers. Maybe with a toggle (stored in a cookie)?
Lol yeah it is a bit bright when visiting from Indie Hackers. Dark modes are pretty fun, I'll put on the list of enhancements for v2.
Make it pluggable to FF/Chrome/Safari. Check how Grammarly managed it with their grammar checker in <textarea> tags.
Yeah Grammarly is great; an extension seems like a great idea, definitely under consideration. Thanks!
Just some random ideas:
make it a dead simple landing page with just the "paste your text" box to make it load super-fast.
the counters could even appear after pasting, to make it look even simpler
the blog content is thus not necessary, it too could appear after load.
You could add buttons for tools such as "remove HTML" - "remove newlines" - "remove hyphenation"
My use case would be when writing report or paper. Many journals etc have length limit for text , so often people copy the text to MS Word just to check how many words or characters it is. The text length limit in these articles may or may not take into account citations and references. So you could have an extra checkbox "exclude parentheses" or "exclude references" with which you could exclude common citation patterns from the counting.
Thanks for the feedback @zerostar07 . I really like the idea about removing HTML and excluding common citation syntax. Interesting note about the counters appearing after pasting, I wonder if visitors would understand it was a word counter without them... Might A/B test some of this when I refresh the design.
Improve sentence counter - I passed your OP text and it counted 4 sentences, so it's off.
Remove the annoying modal asking for feedback - use blocks and non-intrusive way to point people to the feedback page.
Add readability score.
Add hidden symbols and characters detection.
Could you allow saving the text with a unique link and allow collaboration? (one link and everyone with it can edit the document)
Good luck!
Hey @BartBoch thanks for the notes! Good catch on the sentence counter, it is totally off for some reason. Needed a good excuse to refactor that JS anyway đ.
Agreed on the modal being kinda annoying (it was the quickest way to get a survey up), I'll look into alternative methods for driving feedback (can you elaborate on what you mean by 'blocks'?).
Readability is great idea. By hidden symbols you mean like " " kinda stuff?
Saving is definitely something I've been interested in building out. The site is currently static, so I'll have to explore ways to integrate a shareable URL. Thanks again!
Is it working based on interpunction signs? Seems like you could use double break as a new sentence indicator as well.
Just Bootstrap way of thinking - adding a block to the page that differentiates itself with colours. Just a small area with, lets say, green background and white text asking to leave feedback.
Like this:
;
That's not a semicolon, its a Greek question mark.
Using Unicode characters to "rewrite" the article to seem unique for bots.
Cool site. I was looking for something like this last night to count words in other people's content. When I'm analysing other people's work one of things I check is word count. The alternative to your site would be to copy the text into a google doc and count the words there.
Thanks @benforeva ! Iâve seen a few other sites that also let you paste a url and get word count from competitors. Are you using it for SEO / content development purposes by any chance?
No. Just writing research. Haven't heard of the competitors.
Gotcha.
Hey Alex, congrats on the launch!
My answers might seem a bit flippant, but I honestly checked out your site and put some real thought into them...
Ask customers/site visitors
Ask your customers/site visitors
Learn from your customers and replicate/automate that.
Good luck!
Hey @louisswiss thanks for the note! I'll be putting up a survey on the site shortly to get answers from the user base as well. I figured some indie hackers might already use the tool (as I do myself) or a similar one and thought I'd post here to get their feedback as well. Cheers!