I only use (atm) the free version of Wordtracker but the numbers I am seeing are vastly different then what overture says wrt montly search count. Does anyone have any opinion/advice on how to best use these sites? Should more attention be given to one over the other? I am trying to find a few keywords to target and not sure what the best tool to use is. Use Overture? Use Wordtracker? Use something else? Thanks!
i prefer to use overture because its for a broader range (i believe) and make up for more of a percentage of internet users.
Thanks just-4-teens. One thing I notice about overture is it doesn't differentiate between plural and singular. Which makes it trickier in some cases. I also see horrible different results, for example: Search term=las vegas tee times wordtracker - 166/day overture - 12.5/day se-tools.com - 45/day Makes it real hard to determine which keywords to target IMO.
yep i agree that why i just use one and hope for the best maybe you could also see what search term pull in the most reults on the search engines that might help pick the popular one sout?
i think wordtracker has highly suspect results. It totally missed some basic keyword cobinations for a floral website i checked keywords for. It found words pertaining to "flowers" but totally missed "florist" i dont think its worth a subscription.
You've got understand where each of these services get their results. Overture is a Pay Per Click service so I have always thought that their results are badly skewed towards commercial keywords. Also their primary market is the United States and I believe their results reflect the American search habits. Wordtracker on the other hand is a compilation of results from what are known as the meta search engines. I can't tell you exactly which these are, but I think they do not have Overtures commercial or American bias. In any case neither of these reflect all the searches done on any given keyword phrase, because Google's search traffic isn't included in either. So what do they tell you then? They tell you the relative popularity of keyword phrases or search terms. Depending on the audience that you want to attract you should decide which service you want to be influenced by. If you want to attract A predominantly US audience to a commercial site use Overture. If you want a more international and general interest audience I'd go with Wordtracker.
I would have to go with Overture as the more dominant tool. Wordtracker only tracks meta search engines coming from Dogpile and MetaCrawler, which don't represent a large search engine share of searches done on the Internet. Overture's tool pools its results from Yahoo! network of partners, which is a very broad spectrum of searches, including the Y! search engine, which is #2 in market share for searches done on the internet. As for the plural/singular battle. I alwasy tackle that on the plural level. My opinion on that is by default, you're going to be targeting the singular attribute when targeting the plural form. Also go with gut feelings.
I've also noticed that that tool fails to add 's' to words checked in the Overture results. Makes it tough to see whether the singular term is better than the plural. Ian