Yesterday Google released Google Insights for Search a wicked tool that lets you track & compare search volume for keywords by time, region/country and category.
There are so many uses for this tool!
- Find out popular terms for your advertising messages, this may change my country/region and this tool will be able to show you that!
- New market research - use the tool to quickly scan and find potential new markets for your product or service.
- Planning seasonal changes, the yearly trend view can you give you some expectations around seasonal traffic changes.
- Track PR - you can use the keyword comparator to see how your brand is tracking in relation to your competitors. You can see search spikes in relation to any recent PR you or your competitor has done. The list goes on!
Here are a few examples I’ve been playing around with. Lately I’ve been taking Bikram ‘Hot’ Yoga classes (crazy I know!) so I was wondering where Bikram is most popular around the world. Funnily enough New Zealand is second behind the States for regional interest and has higher interest than Canada where I’m currently taking my classes:
Google Insights for Search, Bikram Yoga Results
Let’s try another search a little closer to home - Small Business Accounting. As I expected New Zealand is top for this search term - go Xero! Interestingly, South Africa is close behind, a new market for them perhaps?
Small Business Accounting, Google Insights Results
Tags: Google, Google Insights, SEM, Tools
Google Insights for Search is indeed a good tool to play around with and get some extra data and will appeal greatly to those of us that don’t have access to more comprehensive market research–which is probably 99% of us – but I’d caution building your entire marketing campaign around the data provided by Google Insights.
For example, I checked for iPhone on Google Insights for Search and what i got is that there’s more interest for the iPhone in Trinidad and Tobago than in the United States. I guess not