Back when I was helping direct online services at v-Fluence I recall a series of heated exchanges over the relative merits of Overture’s search term suggestion tool versus Wordtracker.  Now it all seems relatively minor but at the time, I argued rather passionately in favor of Overture’s search term suggestion tool because of my instinct that they were drawing query data from a larger sample and therefore had a smaller margin of error.  The opposing voice (which I concede was ultimately the voice of reason) argued that because the data from Overture was not as detail-oriented and granular it was not a viable option. 

After meeting with Wordtracker several years after this debate and discussing the relative merits of their data, I feel as though they are far and away the best solution in the industry.  Their entire business approach seems to be oriented around providing the highest degree of service to their customer at the best possible price. 

What especially stood out to me was when Mike Mindel (the CTO at Wordtracker) showed me a mashup he had been working on that correlated their data to Google trends, which he made freely available to anyone via their Web site as well as their free keyword suggestion tool.

Wordtracker’s Google Mashup 

As Mike walked me through some research results he had recently obtained, his eyes widened and he began gesticulating emphatically – and I suddenly realized that this was a guy who was truly engaged and passionate about the work he was doing. 

When I asked him how Wordtracker stacked up to the competition I felt as though Mike was candidly fielding my questions.  Moving forward, it seems like there is no real reason for me not to use Wordtracker for keyword research.