I have started doing a new round of keyword research using the DP keyword tool and Wordtracker's free trial and am getting confused by the results I am getting. Wordtracker may return a very attractive KEI analysis for a phrase and quote it as having a decent amount of search traffic, but when I then turn to Overture and double check things the traffic for that phrase is horrible. Another thing that is confusing me is whether or not keyword order matters much in these tools. For example, the phrase "vietnam timeline" might have lots of traffic in Overture, but when using the DP tool "timeline vietnam" comes back even better. Is there a rule of thumb for verifying your keyword search results across the various tools to make sure you are selecting the right keyword choices?
If there is a rule, it would be this. Search traffic on Google and Yahoo track almost the same, but with different volumes. If you use Yahoo to obtain ~100 keywords and "paste" them into Google and Yahoo, run the estimation tools, you will get a list of search estimates. Now run them in a PPC campaign on both Google and Yahoo, and the result are not even close. In reviewing this question, we came up with the following guess as to why. First, click fraud. Second, repeated use of the Search "Go" button to go back to the orginal search results after clicking on a link. Therefore, any value returned by the estimation tool is BS and is only good to put the list in a "sort order". Hope this helps Jim Catanich
I always use the keyword suggestion tool from seobook.com . What this tool does is gathering many other keyword tools, and gives me a total estimated amount of searches, it targeted by country.