Yahoo! Search Term Suggestion Tool

Yahoo! Search Term Suggestion Tool

Yahoo! Search Term Suggestion Tool is a free tool based on the prior month’s Yahoo! Search Marketing ad distribution. Please note that the Yahoo! tool combines singular and plural versions of a word (car and cars would both appear as car). Since Yahoo! makes money by selling ads and many automated bots search through their distribution network, their search volume results may run high (some highly broad and highly competitive commercial terms are off by a factor greater than tenfold).

If you find the term barber shop gets fifteen monthly searches and you find a term like Seattle barber shop gets 137 monthly searches, then it’s likely some Seattle barber shop owner is frequently checking his rankings.

Yahoo! has local keyword databases as well. For example, if you search for Overture suggest UK you should be able to find their U.K. interface.

Google Suggest

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Google Suggest auto-completes search queries based on search volume. You can use this tool to help you find many of your deeper keyword phrases after you find some of your broad keywords. My site also offers a scraper tool that queries Google Suggest.

WordTracker

WordTracker is more robust than most keyword research tools. The data pool WordTracker uses offers better data than what is offered by something like Overture since it separates plural listings from singular versions and also tracks meta search click-throughs versus tracking search engine ads. WordTracker also provides lateral and thesaurus searches, which means that they will return many keywords like search engine promotion when you search for seo.

Since WordTracker makes money by providing accurate statistics versus selling keywords, their traffic tends to be a fairer representation of actual web traffic than Overture’s commercially biased results. Keep in mind that their meta search user breakdown might be different than the cross section of normal web surfers and very low search counts will likely produce many anomalies.

WordTracker is a tool well worth trying if you plan to do in-depth keyword analysis. You can buy a year subscription for a few hundred dollars or use it for a day for under $10. They also offer a variety of subscription options between those two time frames. WordTracker also offers a free more limited version of their keyword research data.

Like any other keyword research tool, WordTracker data can be spammed by competitors. For example, if you find the phrase golden nugget to convert really well, then you can go to Dogpile and WebCrawler and search for an alternate version (like gold nugget) to make unimportant terms look like important ones and hide the good ones. I do not think many people do this, but it can be done and is more likely to happen in competitive markets.

WordTracker has a free informational guide on their site you may want to read before using there service so you can get the most out of WordTracker.

WordTracker also has a competition feature (called KEI) that aims to determine how competitive a phrase is, but the KEI tool is no longer very useful in my opinion. KEI looks at the number of competing pages to determine how competitive a market is, but that has long been a poor measurement of competition. Later in this e-book I will give you my tips on how to determine how competitive a phrase is.

Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery is a product similar to WordTracker with a few more features and a deeper database. WordTracker is believed to have a cleaner database, but Keyword Discovery offers historical search data and a deeper database.

Keyword Discovery also allows free access to the top terms by category in their keyword directory, which shows some of the terms that drive traffic from some smaller engines to sites listed in the various DMOZ categories. Keyword Discovery also offers a more limited version of their keyword research data 

Keyword Intelligence

Keyword Intelligence is HitWise’s keyword research product. It is a bit more expensive than the other tools with a subscription fee starting at $89 a month. HitWise partners with Internet service providers and search engines that allow them to track user behavior of 25 million users. In tracking the behavior and clicks from various sources, this data is likely to be cleaner than most of the other tools. Additionally, they track the actual click-through rate of the completed searches to know what percent of searchers were happy with the results of their search queries.

Having tried Keyword Intelligence, I can say it seems a bit top-heavy (only listing most of the more generic type terms). The only keyword research tools I usually use are Google Suggest, Google’s Keyword Tool, my keyword suggestion tool, and WordTracker. Some of the other tools may be useful, but I get the most value using all the free tools from the engines and WordTracker. What makes WordTracker well worth its price is the lateral search and thesaurus features, which help you think a bit broader about keyword terms.

Another great option for figuring out keywords is to use a broad match Google campaign and use negative words to filter out obvious bad traffic. As you collect the various search referrals you can mine that data for deeper keyword sets.