Today Google announced the launch of Google Insights, based on their Trends technology, the tool is aimed at advertisers according to CNet, but I would say that the community most interested in this will be all of us Search Engine Optimizers.
I have been playing with this exciting new Google release all afternoon, and it definitely has some useful functionality. My initial thoughts on what I have discovered playing with it today can be seen below.
Breakout searches
This little section is really useful for those of us targetting the here and now. Enter in any search term, and you will get information on which keywords are currently hotting up in this sector.
For example, a search on the keyword ‘car’ gives the following top three breakout searches:
| 1. | car parking games | +2450% |
| 2. | car giant | +140% |
| 3. | electric car | +90% |
If you’re in the automobile blogging niche, then it seems electric cars might be an area to concentrate on.
However, you will notice that the top two aren’t specifically relevant to you - this is where the next feature comes in to play.
Category filtering
The category filter in the search term allows you to filter out terms that may overlap with the niche you are interested in, but are not directly relevant. For example, if you are interested in hedging from a financial point of view not a gardening one, you can select ‘Finance & Insurance’ from the category dropdown to remove anything to do with shears and power tools from your search term data.
Geographical search patterns
Want to know what’s hot in Holland, or breaking out in Britain? Simply select the relevant regional filter and away you go - particularly useful if you are targetting a website at a particular regional market.
Search Trends over time
Using this option, you can look at data over any period from since records began (2004 if you were wondering) to the last month (you can search current month, but the data set doesn’t seem large enough to give much relevant data).
I’m sure this tool is going to prove more and more crucial to my day to day SEO activities in the coming months - any further little nuggets of information we discover will be shared here!
In the meantime, let us know what your thoughts are in the comments!
Tool looks really good at first glance, although I don’t understand why there isn’t a ‘more’ link at the bottom of the top 10 results (and the breakout results) so that we can see what ranks in positions 11-20 etc.
It seems to me that this is a fairly basic bit of functionality that they ought to be able to accomplish really easily…
agree with that - let’s hope Google are keeping an eye on the buzz surrounding this, and sort that out!
Clicking through on the search terms listed gives you a kind of proxy of this - OK, there’s no way of knowing where in the overall rank they would be, but you can see relative importance of the ’sub-terms’ of the top 10