3 Cool Google Tools
As many of you know, I love Google. Here is a new Beta product for searching that you may find helpful, especially in terms of keywords.
Cool Tool #1: Google Insights for Search
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#
This tool gives you all kinds of information about any keyword/phrase in which you are interested. You'll find out how searches for that keyword/phrase peak and ebb over time, where geographically your search is most popular, and what other keyword/phrases are used to conduct similar searches.
For example, at the time of this writing, we tested the tool using the phrases: "Web analytics" and "Web metrics". The use of the phrase"Web analytics" has increased dramatically over the past four years while the use of the phrase "Web metrics" has decreased.
How can you harness all this data? Suppose you're trying to figure out which product attribute to emphasize in an ad or on your website? As an example, this tool could help you figure out what's more important to your audience: reliability, safety or price. Type in your terms, and see which ones resonate more with Google's searchers.
Need more advice? Google gives you a great how-to guide here:
http://www.google.com/support/insights/bin/answer.py?
answer=96693&topic=13973
Cool Tool #2: Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trends
This tool shows you what the most popular searches on Google are in any given hour, plus a list of related news articles and blog posts that support the rise and fall of the traffic surges.
You can click on any of the keywords to learn more, including the hourly volume of searches, whether popularity is going up or down and (in some cases) where geographically the majority of the searches are coming from.
You can also put in your own keywords to see where your topic of choice stands over a selected period of time. We used the phrase, “email marketing”, over the past 30 days and saw that search interest surged weekly on Wednesdays and had severe dips on Saturdays and Sundays. The single highest peaks per week were tied into the publishing of press releases and articles on the topic, and the links to those resources were available for your perusal.
Cool Tool #3: Google Trends for Websites
http://trends.google.com/websites
This tool shows you the number of daily unique visitors to a specific site over your chosen period of time. The analysis details what regions visitors came from, what related sites they visited and the search terms those visitors have in common.
This tool does not work for sites with low traffic volume. However, it is a useful tool anytime you want to check out your overall business category, assess a potential online ad buy with a particular property or keep tabs on your largest competitors. |
