It takes a lot to get me giddy as a little girl.  When my parents gave me a TV for my 12th birthday I said, “Thank you.”.  When they gave me my first starter car I said, “Cool. Thanks.”. My mom asked me if anything ever got me excited.  She clearly didn’t know what a data freak I am.

The SEM community has had a big data hole when Yahoo stopped updating their Keyword Selector Tool.  In grand Yahoo tradition, however, they totally missed the value of supporting, and being a friend to, their customers.  First, they stopped updating their tool.  Then they pulled it behind their PPC wall so only “paying” customers had access to it.”Hey Yahoo! Have you ever hear of a good faith gesture?”Apparently Google has.  They’ve responded by opening up real data to everyone one.  Not only does this befriend the SEM community, but it keeps Google’s brand out in front of their potential customers  …something that Yahoo clearly hasn’t “gotten” yet.But I digress…The obvious reason this is exciting is the availability of real data.  Seeing that “tampa” has high volume and “tampa florida” has above average volume doesn’t tell you a whole lot.  It basically tells you how to prioritize.  Now, however, we can see the real opportunity around keywords.As a business, this allows you to do a lot of things like:

• See HOW MUCH more important one keyword is than another - not just that it IS more important than another.
• Estimate actual PPC costs - Now you can go back and tell your customer that “You can spend $X per month” or “The search volume won’t support your budget.  Let’s expand into ___.”
• Determine if certain Niches are worth exploring.
• …And much more.

When compared with Yahoo’s current tool (see below), Google’s tool provides much more meaningful data.  Yahoo: “tampa fl”receives 62K - 559K searches per month.  Huh??  What’s that +/- 1,000,000,000%?  How are supposed to any more with that than the bar data we previously got from Google?  One thing Yahoo does have, however, is gradiation.  So much pretty value.;-)

Anyway…  I have high hopes for Google (and take back every bad thing I said).  We’ll see how this evolves overtime.  My fear is that they will take the data back down at one point, but I don’t really see that happening.

Categories: Yahoo! Search Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Pay-Per-Click ~ ~ Trackback