Yahoo! Search Assist as a Keyword Generator

This article by Rand over at SEOmoz got me to thinking about Search Assist, the new feature from Yahoo!:

SEOmoz | Yahoo! Leveraging "Content" for Queries

Can you tell I have SEOmoz in my feed reader? Anyway...

As a result of the article, I was looking at Yahoo! SERPs, wondering about implications for my company's PPC campaigns, when I realized that Rand's observations also apply to the entire Search Assist feature in Yahoo! SERPs.

Just to quickly provide some background, Yahoo! recently rolled out the new Search Assist feature, which is advertised prominently by a yellow "post-it note" graphic "hanging" down from the search bar on the Yahoo! homepage. On every SERP, you will see keyword suggestions closely related to your search term, displayed in a box that drops down from the search bar. Click any one, and you'll be taken to a new SERP that hopefully will serve your needs better than the one that you got from your initial keyword.

Basically, the article at SEOmoz was commenting on the fact that Yahoo! has started to place links to SERPs directly on their homepage, driving users to SERPs directly related to the content of the day. For example, one of today's blurbs on the Yahoo! homepage is entitled "Cleaning up 'Rat Island'". Below the blurb, there's a link that says, "find out how to get rid of rodents", which will take a user directly to a Yahoo! SERP for the keyword "how to get rid of rodents". Not surprisingly, the top ads that can be viewed here are mostly for pest control companies.

The thing that I noticed from this is how Yahoo!'s Search Assist feature also takes you to SERPs on pre-determined keywords. Rand rightly observes that if you want to beef up traffic on your blog or website, one good idea might be to keep track of what's showing over at the Yahoo! homepage, and bid on those keywords. However, with that in mind, my observation is that the entire Search Assist feature could be used as a kind of keyword generator for your PPC campaign. You should not only keep track of what SERPs Yahoo! links to from its homepage, but you should also keep track of what SERPs are possible from the Search Assist feature. For example, after looking at the blurb about rodents and doing a few clicks on the Search Assist feature, I was able to get the following 15 keywords:

how to get rid of rodents naturally
how to get rid of rodents rats
how to get rid of rodents bait
how to get rid of rodents in your attic
how to get rid of rodents in the attic
how to get rid of rodents home
how to get rid of rodents in attic
sonic mole chaser
mole chasers
solar mole chaser
windmill mole chaser
mole chaser windmill
electronic mole chaser
solar powered mole chaser
p3 mole chaser
p3 international mole chaser

Now, I know that some of these overlap, but most of them have no ads, or at least not very many. What's more, if there are ads, they don't seem to be that helpful. Basically, I'm saying that this is a new list of 15 keywords, and the ad space for all of them should be easy to penetrate. Savvy PPC managers should not only grab Yahoo!'s content-related SERPs, but they should also grab Yahoo!'s Search Assist-generated SERPs - which will probably guarantee a number of highly targeted impressions.