The death of Yahoo!s Overture spelled disappointment for millions of Internet marketers and left us with no hope for free competing tools with WordTracker. But it didn’t mean there was no hope at all.
Recently, Yahoo! has announced some new keyword research tools, but they aren’t as good as Overture was in its hey-day. They really aren’t as good as Overture was near its demise, but they’re OK. They’re a nice try.
Yahoo! has assembled a list of keywords for marketers within specific industries. The industries represented include:
- Apparel
- Automotive
- Education
- Finance
- Health Care
- Home Improvement
- Legal Services
- Travel
- Wireless
The problem is the lists are general keywords that may or may not relate to your specific business, which means that you are building a niche website within these industries you’ll still have to do your own keyword research. Furthermore, the lists don’t provide any information that will help you make decisions about relevance and value of each keyword. They are just lists of keywords.
If your business doesn’t fall into any of these broad categories then you’ll have to start from scratch. Sorry.
This is a worthy effort by Yahoo!, but I’d say these lists will only benefit people who are very new to search engine optimization and paid search marketing. They won’t help veterans at all. Still, a place to start when you have no clue on where you should start is at least something. And that’s what Yahoo! deserves kudos for, if anything.
Learn more about the keyword lists here.
