WordTracker relevance for UK

[kapow]

I have just discovered WordTracker (via WMW). It looks great but I am very concerned about UK relevance. I am a UK Website Designer and most of my clients' websites need key words with a competitive edge on UK Search Engines e.g.
- Landscape Gardening
- Aromatherapy

1. How relevant is WordTracker for UK?
2. Is there an alternative? (I know about UK GoTo)

[WebGuerrilla]

Hi Kapow,

I'm afreaid that WT is fairly U.S. centric, primarily due to the data sources they use. While you may be able to get good data for the specific terms you mentioned, WT might vary well miss the endless numbers of linguistic variations that exist simply due to the fact that a very small amount of the UK population use Dogpile and Metacrawler to search for information.

I've heard that they are working on deals that would allow you to search data from regional engines, but I don't have any details. I would suggest that you send them an email asking them about their future plans regarding the U.K. I would think it would be a fairly high priority since they themselves are a U.K. based company.

[kapow]

Thanks.
I did email WordTracker, this was there reply:
'It will take as long as it takes to get a UK search engine on our side. I can't give you a specific date, but it will be some months from now. As a workaround, why not use the UK Goto keyword tool'.

I would really like to know any more opinions/understanding on how relevant WordTracker is for the UK for terms that are equally UK and US
(e.g. not: sneakers, cup-cakes, gas, etc).

Lets take 'homeopathic remedies' for example
Would anyone like to hazard a guess at the % that UK might represent in WordTracker results.

[WebGuerrilla]

I think they only way you could do that would be to try and determine what percentage of InfoSpace users are in the U.K. I've been all over all the InfoSpace properties looking for visitor data broken down by country, but I haven't been able to find any. If you nhad that data, you could come up with a rough estimate of how many of the searches contained in the database were conducted by U.K. residents.

You might want to try and contact InfoSpace U.K. [infospace.com] and ask them about keyword based advertising on InfoSpace sites. They might very well be able to provide you with search counts by geographical regions. Comparing those numbers to WT counts would not only give you an idea of the percentage of U.K. users that contribute to the database, it would also allow you to see if there are any significant differences in search behavior.

[kapow]

Thanks again.

Its all a bit complicated if your not in the US :(

[tonic]

and what is behind wordtracker ?? the system make calls to web sites but which ones ??

(simply to make the same thing but freely and for other languages than us-english) ..