Investigating search frequency

January 31st, 2007

Yahoo! have officially stated that their Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool is incredibly inaccurate and their were rumours about it being discontinued in the near future. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, after using the tool for any amount of time you can see it gives some very fishy results indeed.

So what are the alternatives? If you’re serious about search marketing, you really shouldn’t be relying on free tools to provide you with data that is critical to your campaign success. There are several companies such as Hitwise which can provide you with far superior and more useful data. Although this can be quite an investment, if you are an agency it is absolutely worth it.

If you are running on a very limited budget, there is a free Wordtracker tool which can give some usable results and I would highly recommend signing up for the beta of Hittail, which is also free.

Hittail shows you real-time search data as visitors arrive to your website and will break down your results into “top keywords” and “long tail” keywords. It builds a database which gives you suggestions on how to build long-tail search content on your site to consistently capture these more specific (and normally higher value) searches. This kind of information is precious when you are working in a highly competitive field.

Yahoo! annouces that they will release a new, “improved” version of their keyword selector and the old tool will remain (in a half working state) until this time.