With Christmas 2007 coming to an end most webmasters are thinking about how best to promote their sites in 2008. Many people are also doing a bit of forward thinking and writing a strategy for next Christmas.
Check Google Trends to see if any of the hot terms from this year are likely to come up again next year. Use these to predict next years terms. For instance if a new toy comes out that requires web activation make sure you rank highly for the activation url.
Imagine if your affiliate site ranked for the www.zune.net/setup page and had some links to Zune accessories.
Some of these terms are very easy to rank for with a bit of planning. Most navigational queries have only limited competition.
What search terms will be popular over New Year? The Google Trends data doesn’t go back that far but it will be interesting to see the results.
Wordtracker have announced that they will launch a UK only option to their keyword database later this month.
“The new UK service will provide essential keyword research for:
- UK websites serving the local market
- Businesses wishing to target the UK (the world’s fifth largest economy)
- Search engine optimization companies and design agencies with UK clients”
This looks to be an excellent addition to Wordtracker, allowing users to choose from global and UK only searches. Earlier this week I posted about which free keyword research tool to use, writing about how I found Overture’s UK keyword tool to be very useful, now it looks like they’ll be a good keyword tool to compare UK search popularity figures with.
This has been an important week for free keyword research tools, Overture’s tool has been unavailable for the last few days (now back online) while Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery have both released free versions of their own keyword research tools. So now there seems to be much more choice to find the best keywords, but which tool is best to use?
Overture
I’ve been using the Overture keyword tool for over a year and while the responsiveness has sometimes been very slow I have generally been quite pleased with the results. The search count has been lower than I expected as these figures are only based upon Yahoo! queries from the previous month and occasionally some strange long-tail results appear, such as the “beer college college…” result above but overall this gives a good idea about the popularity of keywords. Another advantage I like is how you can search to find the popular keywords in the UK using the Overture UK tool.
Wordtracker
My first impression of using the Wordtracker keyword tool is that I’ve found the search figures to be very low for most terms, this is calculated using Netapplications.com which only account for 0.63% of searches and as a result this gives a rough idea of the popular keyword searches but really needs to be based upon a wider range of searches to provide more accurate results.
KeywordDiscovery
I’ve only briefly used Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery tool but I have been very impressed with the results returned. The accuracy of search figures looks to be much greater than both the Overture and Wordtracker keyword tools, mainly because search data is collected from all major search engines.
Overall I find KeywordDiscovery to provide the most accurate results and search terms but would also suggest comparing results over a couple of keyword tools to make sure your not missing out on some valuable long-tail keywords. Personally I would probably compare the KeywordDiscovery results with the Overture UK list to check that the British have the same search trends.
Google Trends or the AdWords keyword tool could also be useful options, but I’d prefer to use tools which combine keyword suggestions with search stats (although the AdWords does display a search volume indicator) so I normally wouldn’t use these as regularly. What does everyone else think, which keyword tools do you prefer to use?
Aaron Wall has just posted that Wordtracker have launched new free version of their keyword tool.
Mike Mindel from Wordtracker commented about this to confirm that “We’re offering 100 results free, adult filtered with drill down into the long tail.”
This is excellent timing as the Overture keyword tool has been regularly unavailable for the last couple of days, although Yahoo! have confirmed that this has not gone but “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 but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.”
Here is the Wordtracker keyword tool, this looks to be an excellent way to quickly find the popularity of search terms, based upon Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com figures, and I especially like the way you can easily drilldown to the long tail results, as Mike said.
