Written by Fernando Maciá
In early August 2008, Google launched the ‘Insights for Search’ tool, a new application to facilitate the consultation of the most popular searches in its search engine. This tool is a very advanced evolution of the Google Trends tool that previously gave us clues to the popularity of certain keywords.
Entering a keyword in ‘Google Insight for Search’ will bring up related keywords as well as tell us how popular the keyword is over time and in which countries and regions it is used.
For example, if I type the word “car”, the tool tells me that the most popular related keywords in the last 4 years are “car rental”, “car insurance”, “buy car”.
With Google Insights we can filter the query by country, sub-region, time periods and categories. For example, we can know which are the most searched words in Google by users who live in Asturias and who have made a search between January and March 2008.
Another feature of Google Insights is that we can compare several keywords to identify their popularity and trends. For example, we can consult the evolution of the word “0 km car” versus the word “used car” over the last 4 years.
In addition to indicating the most popular keywords related to a topic, it also indicates which keywords have registered a significant decrease or increase in their use in search engines. In this way we can monitor keywords that are losing or gaining strength over time.
Google Insights allows us to measure, among other things, the following areas of interest:
- Seasonality of a keyword: By having a wide range of data dating back to 2004, we can identify seasonal patterns that repeat over these 4 years for a given keyword.
- Brand studies: By comparing different brand names we can identify their popularity in the vocabulary of search engine users.
- Use of keywords by regions: For the local positioning of our web page it is essential to know which are the keywords most used by the potential clients geographically closest to my company. We can also find out exactly which keywords are used in other geographic markets of interest.
Between the Google AdWords Suggestion Tool and Google Insights we have the almost perfect market research to know which search phrases are used by our potential customers on Google.
