Keyword selection is critical to search engine marketing. Get the wrong keywords, your online business is doomed. Find the right keywords and you will generate a large amount of targeted traffic to your website via search engines.
There have been discussions in webmaster forums why are Overture’s search query results so different than Wordtracker’s? For example, at the time of this writing, a search query for the keyword phrase “internet marketing” returned 342,848 searches in the last 60 days for Overture and 2,356 for Wordtracker. Now, which one is more accurate?
Opening
It is a pay per click search engine. According to Overture, its search statistics for previous months are compiled from its partners, which include AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN Search, HotBot, and All the Web. So Overture’s stats are broad based because it has a larger network.
However, your data has some drawbacks.
1. There is no distinction between …
For. Singular and plural terms.
You have to find out if the navigators are looking for the singular or plural form of the keyword.
B. Upper and lower case.
vs. Human inquiries and automated inquiries.
Queries made by automatic bid optimizers, ranking and position monitors, and link popularity analyzers are recorded as visits.
2. Duplicate searches
For example, a person searching for a particular keyword phrase on Yahoo and then on MSN would be recorded as 2 results.
Wordtracker
It is a keyword generator and analyzer, and does not have direct access to the databases of the major search engines. Wordtracker gets a lot of the data from its parser from Meta-crawler and Dogpile, which are meta search engines. Metacrawler and Dogpile search major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, and Ask Jeeves, and get the best results.
Wordtracker data, mostly collected from Metacrawler and Dogpile, represents only a small percentage of total Internet searches.
Wordtracker has about 350 million searches over a continuous 8-week cycle (Source: Search Engine Workshops Weblog, June 30, 2005). Now for some math. 350 million searches over 56 days would average 6.25 million searches per day. Google, with a 36 percent share of Internet traffic (Source: comScore qSearch, July 2005), records about 112 million searches per day (Source: Top Ten list, Wordtracker). So compared to total internet searches, Wordtracker accounts for just 2 percent.
When Wordtracker returns zero queries for a particular search phrase, it doesn’t mean that no one is searching for it on the Internet.
However, with Wordtracker, automated queries are not added to searches and duplicate searches are eliminated. Search terms in the singular and plural, uppercase and lowercase are distinguished except for keywords where singular, plural, lowercase, or uppercase have similar meanings, for example, “keyword” and “keywords.”
Overture or Wordtracker?
For Overture, the figures are inflated, while for Wordtracker they are not reported. However, these are useful tools for keyword research and selection. Use these figures as guides, and not as absolute values, to make comparisons in your choice of keywords.
For example, if keyphrase 1 has 10,000 searches on Overture and keyphrase 2 has 2000 searches, then it is obvious that keyphrase 1 would generate more traffic if your web page is optimized correctly. But don’t expect 10,000 visitors with keyphrase 1.
I’ve read on webmaster forums of people selecting keywords based on the promising number of searches on Overture, optimizing their website, and reaching the top 10 positions in the major search engines, but seeing very little traffic.
In my opinion, if you are comparing popularity between keywords or key phrases, Overture will do the job. If you’re selecting keywords or keyword phrases to start an online business, or advertising on pay-per-click engines, conventional wisdom would tell you that Wordtracker is a better option. Better to set lower expectations based on lower numbers and be pleasantly surprised when things turn out differently.
