Remember the Yahoo Overture keyword selector tool?  It was an easy way to plug in a keyword and get a figure on estimated traffic for the prior month. Towards the end of its life, it was usually a month or two behind and then finally, Yahoo just abandoned it.  Hmm - product abandonment.  That seems to happen a lot at Yahoo.  Anyway, with all its faults, the Overture Keyword Tools was a quick handy way to get some idea of how much traffic any given keyword might yield in any given month.  When Yahoo took that away, it left us pretty much without anything among the big 3 search engines.

Perry Marshall’s email the other day alerted me to the fact that Google Adwords now does what Overture used to do (and much better of course). It shows the prior month volume and also an estimate average monthly volume.  Below is a screen shot where I used the keyword “home based business”.

Since Google owns approximately 70% of all search engine traffic these days, you can easily  apply a simple formula to estimate traffic for all the net.

You have to have an Adwords account to use this, but who doesn’t have an Adwords account now days?  You get to the tool by logging into your account, choosing TOOLS, then KEYWORD TOOL.  Psst: Google, you really should charge for this! This is good stuff!
Google Keyword Tool