SEO Tip: Google Insights for Search
We have shown you here how to use Google Sets and Google Trends. Now from Google’s Tel Aviv team comes the Google Insights for Search which is currently in Beta stage: http://www.google.com/insights/search
Rising searches are defined as searches that gained significant growth from the specific time period. This makes sense if you want to know what keywords people are looking for. It is also a good way to discover popular things that you might not be aware of (i.e. in my case it is red tube, item #4, further search lead me to a porn site!).
To zoom in on a specific locale, choose the country and specific location you want to analyze. In the example below I searched for Texas, USA:
The top searches included search engines, youtube, and shopping sites like ebay and craigslist. The result is too broad as expected, so let’s see if we can narrow it down to a specific category:
To do this, choose a category on the Filter panel. I chose Lifestyles for the example below:
The output is now a little more interesting:
The Google Insights let you see what people are searching for. The first time I used it, I chose last 90 days then I clicked the Search button. The output was a list of Rising Searches of the last 90 days:
To zoom in on a specific locale, choose the country and specific location you want to analyze. In the example below I searched for Texas, USA:
To do this, choose a category on the Filter panel. I chose Lifestyles for the example below:
The top 3 searches are bible, names, pregnancy. Top 5 entry is “baby names”, while top 10 is “babies r us”. From this alone, I can conclude that Texas could be a good market for companies who sell baby stuff.
Now for the Rising searches… at the top is Shelley Malil, she must be a celebrity or something… this proves my theory that I could be connected to the Internet for the most part of my entire day Digging and still miss a famous person that everyone else is searching for.
After a Wikipedia research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelley_Malil, I found out that Shelley Malil is not a woman but a man! He appeared in a movie called the 40 Year Old Virgin but people are digging him because he is a suspect for stabbing his ex-girlfriend at-least 20 times! Indeed gruesome but that is how he got to the top of the searched entries.
The best feature for me of this tool is it’s capability to map out the planet and color code the volume of search for a specific keyword. I typed in “Paris Hilton” and I got the interesting results below:
The darker the color of the map, the heavier the search interest. The Chinese seem to have less interest to Paris Hilton than the Australians. Makes sense, the Chinese have their own share of celebrities caught on their own homemade videos. From the list of countries, Honduras tops the list. Seems the Hondurans like to search for Paris Hilton more than the Americans.
Overall, Google Insights is a great tool for researchers and SEOs. The capability to view the regions (countries) and cities color coded by the search volume is an easy way to gain an insight to what locales are searching for any keyword. The capability to narrow a search via categories are very helpful on identifying a specific target market or audience.
Make sure to checkout our previous post on Google Trends and Google Sets:
