Google Insights, formerly known as Google Trends, is an often overlooked tool while conducting SEO and keyword research. Unlike most of the search related products that Google releases, you don’t have to have a Software Engineering degree in order to comprehend it.
It provides valuable SEO information on what keywords people are searching for and provides hard data on popular related terms and upcoming trends, and can even forecast search volume based on past data. You can specify by categories, location or time period, and all your results are displayed in a nice, easy-to-read visual format.
For prospective businesses, Google Insights can be used to test the waters to see if your product has any demand or interest online, and what keywords you should be targeting.
Insights can also educate you about popular and upcoming searches that may be more relevant to your business. You can also search by region, in order to see which areas you should be focusing more on.
For existing businesses, Google Insights can show you whether you’re targeting the right keywords and focusing your time and money on the right areas. Search data goes all the way back to 2004, so you can determine whether your terms are on an upward or a downward trend, and the difference in seasonal interest. Using Google Insights can give you a thorough understanding as to how a particular Keyword has moved over time, week by week or over years.
For example, this search compares the three search terms “costume hire“, “fancy dress” and “fancy dress hire“.
From viewing the data, we can determine that “fancy dress” is the most popular search term in Australia, followed by “costume hire” and trailed by “fancy dress hire”.
The number of people who search for those terms has remained consistent with repeating rises and falls since 2004. Interest peaks in October due to Halloween, and gradually trails off until January.
Insights can determine the popularity of search terms by state, useful to those who only operate in regional areas. For example if you were a costume hire shop based in Queensland, aiming for the search term “costume hire” would be more lucrative, however in NSW “fancy dress” is a much more popular term. Just from one search, a multitude of objective marketing information has been displayed, all for free.
Google Insights can be both the inspiration for new business ventures and an objective way to gauge the success of your SEO strategies. Providing the raw data that SEO operators crave, Insights is an intuitive program that condenses and extraordinary amount of data into nice, obvious graphics and allows you to not only gauge the popularity of a particular search term, but to compare the success of similar search terms against each other.
You can play with Google Insights for search here.
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