Epiphany Search Marketing Blog

The fact that Yahoo have ceased to update their Overture keyword suggestion tool has been known for several months. Overture US was last updated in January 07 and the UK data was last refreshed in May 07 and Yahoo have officially commented on their termination of support for the tool.

This morning however, it seems that the tool has become completely defunct as no terms return any search results. Does this mean the tool is officially dead ? Either way this throws a serious issue for the little guys who relied on the fact the Overture tool was free.

So what now ?

With Wordtracker now using UK data there is now a solid alternative at a cost. £15 per week / £29 per month / £149 per year. Having now used this tool with the UK data (I wouldn’t have recommended it to the UK market prior) I can say it is a sound investment and the billing structure makes it accessible to both big and small whether you want to cram all your keyword research into a single week or have the tool on hand all the time.

That being said, I for one would like to see the Overture tool reborn as it provided another angle to compare with Wordtracker and the more thorough you can be with your research, the better the results.

The latest in search engine figures have been released and they continue to show Google’s dominance in the UK and EU markets. Google have a 72.8% share of all EU searches, this figure is reportedly higher in the UK. This means that having efficient & effective Google Ad words campaigns is critical. With 72.8% of EU searches carried out on Google, ranking well is imperative.
An overwhelming share of searches are performed on Google, if your business is not present how will the +75% of UK internet searchers know your business exists?

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An interesting article in MarketWatch this week - they reckon that the vast majority of marketing budget holders not only acknowledge click fraud, but are unconcerned by it. This follows Google’s news last month that they did not charge advertisers for the clicks that they knew were placed fraudulently. But even the ones slipping through the net don’t seem to concern advertisers.

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Yahoo has recently released the search term figures for June they were as follows:

Dating 15%
Mortgage 14%
Ebay 12%
Car Insurance 12%
Flight 10%
Home Loan 9%
Music 8%
Credit Card 7%
Poker 7%
Food 6%

(figures from yahoo’s summer newsletter)

The big news is that dating is now the most searched term holding 15% of the searches. Finance related terms made up 42% of all searches done in June with mortgages dropping one place to second in the search term percentages, but still making up 14% of all searches.

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