Overture has a keyword selector tool that allows people to do searches against data from the previous months data from the Yahoo search engine, so you can get an idea of what people have been searching for, to give you an idea of what people may be searching on.

Plugging a word or phrase into the tool gives back a list of all results that contain that word or phrasei.e. if you type in ‘tiger’ you’ll see results ordered by the number of searches performed in the previous month - 1st is ‘tiger’ 2nd is ‘detroit tiger’, 3rd is ‘tiger woods’.

So what are people searching for locally? Well one way to find out is to type in a city name and see what people have been searching for (since Yahoo does not allow geotargeting, all local searches must be qualified by adding the location to the search query). For a test I typed in Denver, San Francisco, Atlanta and Chicago, and looked at the results. They were actually fairly consistent with the majority of the highly searched terms across those markets being brand names of cars, although it seems that the further west you go, the more other searches pushed those searches out of the top 10 (Atlanta had car searches in 8 out of the top 10 searches. Chicago 7/10, Denver 4/10, and San Francisco 4/10), also interesting to note was the number of people that were searching for craigslist in each market. The table below shows the postition in each of these markets for these search terms for the month of July.

So it looks like, if you want to do local targeting that you should definitely involve Auto Dealers in your plan…