On the face of it, Trellian’s PrioritySubmit.com keyword research tool is quite cool. Paying subscribers can get a full year’s worth of historical keyword popularity data. Finally, a way to quantify the seasonality of various keyword markets!

However, I have to say after using it, I’m not real impressed. The main problem I have with it is that I just don’t find their data to be believable. Too many discrepencies, too many gaps. Let me show you some specifics…

For starters, witness a huge spike in searches for “Christmas shopping” mid-year. Then it’s relatively flat during the Christmas buying season?!? This next one leaves me totally incredulous: no activity whatsoever throughout the year for the search term “holiday shopping” except April, May, and, to a lesser extent, December. Finally, for the very popular search term “shopping,” the month of April appears to have been totally lost.

So, although the PrioritySubmit tool sounds good in theory, until their data starts looking a lot more credible, I’ll be relying on WordTracker, and Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool, for studying keyword popularity with search engine users. (In case you’re curious, according to Overture’s tool, keyword searches across Yahoo! and the rest of Overture’s network during the month of October for “Christmas shopping” was 13985, for “holiday shopping” was 2751, and for “shopping” was 2273098.)