THE WORLD OF SEO

November 19th, 2010 by Jo

Yahoo’s new tool ‘Yahoo Clues’ is a really useful tool for looking at search trends for keywords. Is this Yahoo trying to offer a viable alternative to Google’s Insights for Search? This isn’t a direct comparison between the two but instead just my first impressions of this new tool and how useful (or not) it may be for SEO.

Currently only available for U.S. search results, with Yahoo Clues you are able to look at the trends for one search term or compare two terms directly. There are three different time periods by which you can view the data – today, past 7 days and the past 30 days.  Information is updated hourly so users know that the data they are seeing is up to date.

One thing when struck me when using the tool for the first time was that the past 7 and 30 day viewing options could be marked with more increments so that you know exactly what search volume you are getting when, rather than only being able to see every other day when viewing data for the past 7 days and, rather unhelpfully, every 10 days when on the last 30 days break down.

The demographics section can be broken down into age and gender.  Age is broken down in to 6 age different groups below 24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64 and above 65.  There is a 3rd option where you can compare both.  This is particularly useful if you have a target audience as you can see what percentage is looking at a particular search term and what else they are searching for (however this option is only available for some terms).

Income is broken down into 4 sections so you can find out the category your targeted SEO keywords are reaching the most and then target them in an appropriate way.

The location section shows the 10 most popular US states that the search queries originate from, which you can then break down further so you can see which areas in the state are searching for it the most.

Search flow and related searches looks like it could be really useful to find out what other keywords to target.  The search flow shows the terms people searched for before and after the term you are looking at and the related searches shows other keyword that are useful to your term.

Although currently to us UK SEOs, Yahoo Clues is little more than a decent idea, I believe it could be a really useful tool if rolled out globally to include country-specific statistics and information. Giving us the choice of using Google Insights as well as Yahoo Clues can only be good news for search marketers and their clients.

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