You may have heard the bad news already: Overture’s Keyword Tool is no longer supported and has been removed from their website. It is dead. All of the tools which were relying on their data will become obsolete or have to search for a new source of keyword data (one of these tools was Jeff Alderson’s very popular Adword Analyzer).
You can read the whole story here:
www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/search-marketing/39752.html
Their tool was never very reliable (the number of searches always was inflated because of the many tools which were accessing their database for keyword research) but gave a quick overview about the rough popularity of a keyword. Personally, I have not been affected by the disappearance of this tool as many others. Reason: My tool of choice has always been Wordtracker. And exactly these Wordtracker guys have a new replacement for Overture’s Keyword Tool:
But you won’t find all the details in there. These search numbers won’t help you that much if you don’t know how many search results there are for any given term – this data will be used to calculate the so called KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index).
In other words, the KEI will tell you how easy it is to get a top spot in the search engines for certain keywords. Of course, the less search results and the more searches per month, the better your chances of reaching that top spot. The best way to get this KEI number is to either get a subscription to Wordtracker or to use NicheBot V.2.
Personally, I’ve just changed to NicheBot V.2 because it already has the Wordtracker data included and even more than that: It also shows you the results from Keyword Discovery, another very popular keyword tool. The subscription fee is much lower than for Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery itself – at least, if you’re not a “power user”. In case you’re doing keyword research just every few days then NicheBot is just perfect.
Keyword research is the first and most important step in developing virtual real estate websites and if you’re focussing on the wrong keywords, you won’t be making any money. And this is a very usual mistake many beginners are making. They focus on the keywords which have the highest search counts and thus are not an easy target because all the website owners within that niche will be optimizing their sites for these keywords.
It’s much better and easier if you focus on the 3 and 4 word phrases as a lower number of people will create websites for them. You might have a lower search count for those as well but that will not be that important if you focus on dozens of those phrases. These lower numbers will add up quickly.
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