An Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Question

[Avinash]

Hi friends!

Yesterday, I registered two .COM domains related to Web design and development @GoDaddy. These domains include the exact keywords (no "-" used) that are being searched over 8000 times/month in Overture.

Is there any way to make a reliable estimate of how many people search that keyword in all the major search engines/month?


Thanks!

[StupidScript]

Try Wordtracker and any other keyword suggestion tool you can find, then take an average. Without actual stats from each of the engines, we are left to do the math, ourselves.

BTW, unless your domains are one-keyword-per-domain name, the absence of hyphens will negate the value of using the terms in your name. For example, if you're trying to key off of "custom site design" and you buy "customsitedesign.com", there is nothing to tell the crawlers to separate the words, so the only term they might key off of would be the unusual "customsitedesign" keyword. Just throwing that out there.

[Kasparoff]

You can try to use this tool. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

It doesn't show actual amount of traffic you get, but you get an idea of average keyword popularity so you can plan something.

[Dustin07]

I use the overture tool... it's so/so.


and James statement about domains is true. While hyphens aren't pretty... they are a better choice in terms of SEO. John did a post about it a LONG time ago and I reference once a week. I'll bring it up again in 7 days.

[Avinash]

Thanks for the replies, guys!

[ToddW]

Doesn't matter if a million people search for the words or not you need to get some content up related to those words and generate some back links to your site to get the visitors

Your site could be XKLJKLFSF.com but if it talks about the keywords you are targeting and has people linking to you with he keywords you want it will help you rank for that stuff

[Dustin07]

well, yes... and no. It's just that it IS much easier to get a site with an SEO-minded domain ranked well. MUCH.

but yes, the onsite SEO and backlinks of course are also required.

[peter_d]

You can also get a pretty good estimate by running Adwords campaigns.

Use the page display data over a month, then calculate this against the market share held by each engine. Of course, you need to be on the first page consistently in order to get accurate data.

Here is the latest breakdown by market share:

http://tinyurl.com/2r4cfo

The tools are pure guess work, because they don't filter out automatic queries, whereas Google is probably better at doing this.

A rule of thumb in the past has been to take the Wordtracker numbers and divide by half, which I've found gets close to the numbers provided by the Adwords test above.

[Dustin07]

only half of wordtracker? That's impressively disappointing as the trial version only gives you MSN results anyways I believe.

[peter_d]

Wordtracker data comes from a couple of meta-search engines, Dogpile and Metacrawler.

I believe they extrapolate the data to get their figures. They are estimates based on a calculation.

[Dustin07]

there appears to be some truth there... I grabbed this from a quick trial:

Searching...100 row(s) returned
Taken from all Dogpile & Metacrawler queries over the last 90 days.
Your trial results have been filtered to remove adult words.

Although I'm not sure the use of this then if it's not traffic related:

We will now compare each of these keywords with MSN, a major search engine. In the full subscription you may access all major engines.

I guess that's just when looking for competitors? Which in the long run, there would be no need for the extended version then because eventually all the search engines will find damn near all the same sites... right?

[peter_d]

Perhaps they are cross-matching the data as I've described above?

WordTracker have this to say in their manual about their data sources:

"We get our data from metacrawlers, rather than the search engines themselves. After all, the metacrawlers contain the results from the search engines.

To be fair we do make an assumption. We assume that people will search for the same things regardless of whether they use a search engine like Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) or a metacrawler like Metacrawler. The argument can be raised that many new people who have just joined the internet wouldn't know a metacrawler if it jumped out at them. But then... it works both ways. There are many portals which use metacrawlers for searching the web (www.cnet.com for example).

We believe that a user (especially a new user) would see a search box as a search box. It matters not the technology underneath. Also remember that a metacrawler uses the major search engines for its results!

In any case, we have found a great deal of similarity between the results from search engines and metacrawlers. Concrete examples can be found by comparing our top 100 lists to those of Altavista, Lycos, Searchterms.com, Searchwords.com and an analysis of 1 billion top Altavista searches from 1999.

The other great thing about metacrawler results is that we do not have to contend with the skew from people using software robots checking keyword positions. All in all, it works out pretty well!"

[Kasparoff]

Originally Posted by Dustin07

I use the overture tool... it's so/so.


and James statement about domains is true. While hyphens aren't pretty... they are a better choice in terms of SEO. John did a post about it a LONG time ago and I reference once a week. I'll bring it up again in 7 days.

I am surprised Overture Tool is still around. It experienced heavy traffic load in the past and once was down for a while. When you mentioned it again, I visited them and yes, they are still alive.

[temyong]

Overture is still the tools I use, It always update great tool.

[Dustin07]

thanks for the follow up post Peter, makes sense.

Kasparoff, I remember when the tool sucked. They seem to have either fixed it.. or enough people gave up on it where it just doesn't matter, lol. It has worked without issue for a while now.

[Web Gazelle]

I don't look at the impressions as numbers I would expect to get for top rankings but I look at them as a way to determine what search terms get more searches than others. It gives me a good idea of what terms I should target. I use the DP suggestion tool and the Google Adwords tool to choose what terms to target.

[zokiii]

And also use google trends to see of course trends

I use it all the time