Tools For Search Marketers Not Getting Better

I was doing some keyword analysis for a client today and was really racking my brain trying to find some good search tools. Not only was I was I unable to use some of my favorites from past years but the ones I did use gave spotty if not deceiving results.

Google
Google’s muti-billion dollar business is build on the conception that everyday small businesses have all of the tools to make a buck on the web through advertising on search engines. While this is still true, that ship is pulling up anchor and slowly sailing away. Keyword prices keep going up and the competition has gotten extreme in many industries. Still though Google’s toolbox inside AdWords gives you some nice discovery and comparative analysis tools. I also really like Google Trends can but find the tool frustrating with the slow updating ability. Why can digg provide real-time updates like on digg stack but Google takes 2 months to update that unlabled trend graph? They do offer some nice daily trend info if you use the links at the bottom (but I am not looking for information on Randy Moss’ latest flub up). It is also unusable for niche industry words which I am guessing don’t have enough search volume to give the graph any meat. The keywords I was looking at though had about 5k searches a month from what I could tell in my AdWords account so it would be nice to see some data! Likewise wouldn’t you think a term like “search engine optimization” has enough volume to be tracked by Google Trends?

Yahoo!
What to say except if Yahoo! is going to try to carve out more of the SEM market they should really give their customers some tools to help them make educated decisions. The only tool that I liked was killed almost a year ago and they haven’t put anything in its place. Too bad. RIP Overture Keyword Inventory Tool… why are you still in Google SERPs?

MSN
Microsoft’s adCenter has taken a very proactive approach creating an entire microsite devoted towards education and discovery. Its too bad that the infomation is misleading at best and at times very innacurate. I tested the keyword forecast tool and noticed that MSN likes to tell you they are predicting a SPIKE in the keyword search volume in the next few months. Better pump up your budgets to account for this insightful prediction! Oh wait why are they suggesting a spike in the keyword football? Doesn’t the NFL season end in two weeks, hmm something is fishy here.

Others
What can I say, they all dissapoint! Trellian, Keyword Discovery, Web CEO, Nichebot etc… None offered the kind of data I was looking for. It seemed I needed to be searching for mass market items like TVs and cars to have these tools be any real value.

How about you? What are your experiences with todays SEM toolset landscape ?