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Overture Keyword Tool Dead, but Wordtracker Saves The Day (and now Trillain jumps on board)
Keyword research is the most inexact element of Search Marketing. The lack of any one clear source of accurate keyword data is perhaps the biggest problem any search marketer will face.
Overture, the free keyword tool from Yahoo!, is either dead or dying
Most people will be familiar with Overture’s keyword tool which has been returning free keyword estimates for many years. Now the old adage the you get what you pay for still holds true, and most professionals have long since moved to paid services.
But apparently the Overture tool isn’t too well cared for by its owners, as Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal finds out from John Slade, Global Product Management with Yahoo Search Marketing:
First, I’d like to clarify that Yahoo! Search Marketing’s public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today… the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the sheer volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear…
The same Yahoo! representative is then quoted as saying:
… the public tool continues to be available but my advice to our advertisers is to use the protected keyword research tool.
which bascially confirms something we all knew a long time ago – the Overture keyword tool pretty much sucks.
One man’s risk is another man’s opportunity
And lo and behold, hot on the tracks of the rumours about the demise of Overture’s tool comes an announcement via Aaron Wall that Wordtracker has introduced a new free version of Wordtracker that returns up yo 100 keywords.
The Wordtracker tool can be found at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.
Want a little bit more?
I use a number of keyword tools, both free and paid. To be honest there’s no fail safe method to generate 100% accurate keyword lists, but by using a combination of tools you can come up with pretty decent ones.
As I wrote previously, I’m using NicheBot (that’s an affiliate link) which has some great features for generating and processing keyword lists. Recently I’ve also added another professional tool to the armoury which I’m really liking a lot (I’ll post about that later).
If anyone knows of other tools that fly a little below the radar I’d love to hear about them.
[UPDATE – Now Trillian is offering a free keyword tool – http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html]
I’ve been using Wordtracker, the paid version, buy recently I started using Keyword Discovery. I find it gives a lot more in terms of volume and variations of keywords than Wordtracker and you can search by country also. Not Ireland yet!! Wordtracker apparently are announcing at SES London a UK version, not sure about any other countries. I’ll definetly check their stand out though to see what new functionality they’ll have going forward.
Comment by Peter — January 31, 2007 @ 2:02 pm
Hi Peter
I doubt whether any of the large data trackers will ever bother filtering for Ireland – we’re just too small. But then again if the cost of hooking into Irish ISP data is small they might do it, but then again the market here for products is tiny at best.
Are you going to SES? I’ll be there also. I wonder if there are many going from Ireland?
Rgds
Richard
Comment by Richard Hearne — January 31, 2007 @ 2:14 pm
Hi Richard,
As you say Ireland is probably way down the list!
Yeap, I’m going to SES. Very interested in the Keyword Research Training from Christine Churchill, http://www.keyrelevance.com
/Peter
Comment by Peter — January 31, 2007 @ 2:35 pm
Hm, I tried both, freekeywords.wordtracker.com and keyworddiscovery.com, and I must say that the second one gives more precise results (if shown searches are valid as monthly searches). However, they are not 100% precise.
Regarding above-mentioned thing, both tools miss one basic info; They say “Searches”, but man doesn’t know the period. Day? Week? Month? Year?
Comment by Jan — September 8, 2007 @ 7:21 pm
I agree with Jan, does anyone know if they are referring to day, week, or month??
Thanks!
Comment by Grant — January 24, 2008 @ 8:17 pm
I used the overture tool just to evaluate how many people were searching with particular keywords, not to generate suggestions for related keywords. I miss it badly.
Comment by kamaranti — October 8, 2008 @ 4:24 pm
Even the Google Keyword Tool is dead now! They have Google keyword planner though, which they claim to provide more accurate figures. I havent personally used it much but hopefully, when I do, I will be able to draw some benefits (more than Keyword tool) from it.
Comment by Dan — September 17, 2013 @ 5:25 am