Yahoo! Keyword Selector Tool

As part of my site redesign plan, I decided to do some research on keywords. The first one I tried was Yahoo’s. Yahoo! Has a tool called “Keyword Selector Tool” that gives information on related searches that include your term and also the number of times that term was searched for during the last month. When I first built my site, I had assumed that important keywords would be “Psychotherapy” and “Atlanta”. I didn’t really need a large or a wide audience, but I did need for people wanting a therapist in Atlanta to be able to find me.

I entered “psychotherapy” in the Keyword Selector Tool. There had been 34053 searches for “psychotherapy” in January, 2007. The related terms were interesting. Many of them were things like “theory and practice of . . . “ which probably represented students and/or researches looking for resources. Others were things like “the complete adult treatment planner” which probably represented other clinicians looking for resources.

Then I entered “psychotherapy Atlanta” and “psychotherapy in Atlanta, Ga” and was surprised to find that NO one had searched for either of those terms in January, 2007. Hmm. I have some work to do here. The keywords I have been trying to promote for my site aren’t ones that people search for.

I tried “psychologist”. 102454 searches in January. Now we’re getting somewhere. Evidently people search for the word “psychologist” almost 3 times more than they search for psychotherapy. And also, many of the people who do search for the term psychotherapy are other professionals, which isn’t the audience I hope to target. Hey! And 586 people searched for “psychologist Atlanta”! Here’s another thing that surprised me – only 28 people searched for “psychologist in Atlanta” which suggests that most people are computer saavy enough to know that you don’t have to list all the little words when you do a search.

NicheBot

I decided to compare the results I got on Yahoo!’s Keyword Selector Tool with other similar tools. I went to NicheBot and frankly, I was so confused and turned off by their site that I left in frustration after about 15 minutes of poking around. It’s VERY wordy and looks like spam. Sort of hard to take it seriously even though it’s supposed to have a good reputation. Every time I clicked on one of their tools (and they have a wide variety), I got a page wanting me to log in. That’s cool – I was willing to do that – but when I clicked on the link to register, the page was totally overwhelming. Just for fun, I copied it and put it into a Word doc. Turned out to be 26 pages and over 12,300 + words. I have no idea what that page (or rather, those 26 pages) were trying to tell me. I left the site and decided to move on to WordTracker.

WordTracker

Ah. WordTracker is like a soothing balm after NicheBot. The site looks professional and right up top and easy to see is a “Take a Free Trial” link. I have to admit I feel a bit of trepidation when I see that they, too, want me to sign up. However, they assure me that they won’t bombard me with email and their site looks pretty respectable so I take the plunge.

I am not disappointed. WordTracker’s goal seems to be to help me find words that are related to my keywords. I entered “psychotherapy” and got this list of related keywords:

1. psychotherapy
2. therapy
3. psychology
4. Psychotherapy
5. mental health
6. therapist
7. psychiatry
8. counseling
9. psychologist
10. depression
11. psychotherapist
12. anxiety
13. family therapy
14. trauma
15. Depression

Clicking on the various terms on the list confirms that people search for “psychology” (1811 Dogpile & Metacrawler searches in the last 90 days) more than “psychotherapy” (222 similar searches). Also, “psychologist” got 540 hits.

This has been an extremely helpful exercise and one I wouldn’t have thought to do on my own. Basically, I learned that the keywords I thought might bring me the most hits were a bit off-track, AND I got a good idea of which ones to try instead.