More Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Weirdness
I’ve been doing keyword research for a client and found this little gem of a bug (feature?) in the Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. Try searching on “space background” and compare the results to what you find with “space backgrounds”. Note the first result in each case (as of May 31, 2006) shows 70,799 searches. Well, that’s as we’d expect since it stems plurals. But look at the keyword: one includes “my” and the other doesn’t. The popularity of “My Space” is being combined with the results. Not a surprise on the one hand, but it could be very misleading on the other. It is very odd however that it should show “my” in one case and not the other.
If you are only using Overture’s tool, you could be getting a very misleading picture of search engine user behavior. I highly recommend using a service like WordTracker to at least augment this data. An even better technique is to use AdWords with exact and phrase matching (broad matching provides data that can be as misleading as Overture’s).
Pick a feed
