Google Insights For Search

A while ago someone sent me a link to a new section from google called Insights for search. Its in beta at the moment and I dismissed it as an alternative to their keyword analysis tool and filled it in my bookmarks for future use. Whilst looking around today I found the bookmark for the pages and thought I would take a look and see what it actually can do.

First Impressions

On loading the screen it doesn’t look all that interesting so I began by running through some keywords through the pages. I started with computer support since that’s a current site I am trying to market to a wider audience, changed the filter to UK and pressed search. Great, it gives me a graph of search hits, a map of what areas search most and a forecast, but its of no more use than the keyword analysis tool.

On closer inspection though it is quite different. Its more of a tool for marketing folk to compare different search terms. So for my IT company I stuck with computer support and also added another search term of IT Support (not the most exciting terms but it’s a good test). The results given show the trends of search patterns and show that if I had to choose between two terms, IT support would be a better option than computer support for marketing.

Further Information

Suppose am starting a new campaign, we are a small company and there is no reason to market the whole country. Say no one in my region (I’m using England for this section) searches for Computer Support, they could look for IT Support or PC help, you can filter the results down and take a closer look by clicking England and then the Town/City option. This changes the graph and the results in order to show. Looking at the data returned it would be more worthwhile to market IT support compared to the other search terms.


Link to News Stories

Leaving the IT support company for a moment and looking at something which has been in the news quite a lot recently is mobile phones. Nokia always used to be the phone to have when I was a lad and now we have the iPhone so I wonder what the trends are like one these? I’ve added in HTC just to see what that ones like.

The graph shows that there is a steady decline of searches for Nokia and the iPhone has increased to more than Nokia. HTC is meandering along the bottom of the graph. Looking over the results there are large peaks where the iPhone traffic has increased. On the screen there is a option for news headlines on checking this you can see the traffic increase when the iPhone has a news article (and the other items for that matter) so it shows that if something is in the news search ranking increase.

A better explaination of the service can be found at google's pages for this. I don't know if its any use to me yet in SEO terms, but I will keep it updated.

Links

Google Exmplaination Of Insights Search Service
Google Insights For Search Service