If you have not seen Google Trends yet, better get over there right now and sniff around.
It is exactly like Zeitgeist but you can type in any term that you want and see a whole lot of really cool data.For example.... Search for Deer Hunting and you can see that folks start searching heavy for it in June and then the search volume peaks at the start of the season in November. Good marketing data here for when to promote stuff on your site.
In addition to these charts you can see news articles that might drive search. That is what the flags sticking up off of the trend line correspond to. (The Zeitgeist example of Rosa Parks - search volume driven by Black History Month and the news of her death.)
Also you can see histograms of what cities or what regions are the sources of big search volume. Search for "groundhog day" and you can see clearly that it is a big Pennsylvania thing.
Another, you can see how long hot news items drive search.
Go check it out and give us some of your best ideas on how we can use this to make money or improve our websites.
I will use it to decide when to start some of my homepage advertising and what geographic areas to target for some of my products.
Uh, why is searching for "Anna Nicole Smith" so popular in Delhi, India? Crap regions data, indeed...or is it? I always knew she was big in India! I knew it!
https://www.google.com/trends?q=anna+nicole+smith
The Regions data is crap, utterly useless.
And the tool itself is cool, but it's only half-valuable with no numbers attached to it. It's nice to compare one term against another to see which is searched more often (and when), but you need to know ... is this 50 searches a day I'm looking at, or 5,000 searches a day?
What I find interesting is there is an increase in searches for SEO and a deciline on the phrases "search engine optimization" - does this mean people have excepted the TLA of SEO and no longer refer to it as search enigne optimization.
Of course, in the news section "search engine optimization" is on the incline.
I just has a meeting today at Google Canada and they seemed very pleased with this new tool.
I'll be sure to add it to my list of resources and take for what it is, just another tool to help make educated decisions.
Or does it mean more people calling themselves SEOs doing more searches to see how they rank on the acronym? :-)
https://www.google.com/trends?q=SEO%2Csearch+e... Take a look at the news items next to the graph.. somehow i think a search for 'seo' isnt necessarily 'search engine optimization'....
RIGHT!
Check this comparison...
https://www.google.com/trends?q=search+engine+...
Some countries (spelling with "z") are making fewer searches while the "s" spelling countries are constant.
This is pretty cool of course it would be NICE if the graphs had numbers on them. Its nice to know that term xyz hits a valley in may and peaks in september but to know the actual number of both the peak and the valley would make it all a lot more useful. Makes one wonder WHY they do not show actual numbers,
Jack
SO much for my Three Letter Acronym theory.
Just goes to show you what happens when you use all those keyword search estimators. Sure SEO comes up a lot, but is it about search engines or about baseball?
I am particularly impressed with the news overlays! Here are a few interesting instances where media/ current events clearly impacted search.
1. Tom Cruise 2. Softwood Lumber 3. Katrina
Why is the top Region for the Katrina search "Philippines"? We are getting suspicious about the Regions data.
Perhaps the interest in Katrina from the Philippines is not that unusual. When you consider that in the Philippines; Petroleum Refining is a major industry, the United States is their second largest export partner (18%), and 40% of people live below the poverty line... an increase in gas prices as a result of Hurricane Katrina could certainly generate significant interest.
Does anyone else care to spot a parallel or challenge my rationale?
check https://www.google.com/trends?q=phentermine do you really think thousands of fat women in russia are doing phentermine searches LOL hmm .. i wonder who could be generating these searches
They are buying it for their husbands!
Something is really bothering me... lots of terms that I search for have declining search volume over each of the past two years. Try "hiking" or "physics". Lots of one word terms have declining volume.
Do you think that is because searchers are now typing in more specific queries? This argues for the long tail - or maybe something else is at play. (Surely people still go hiking and like physics?). Rand, what do you think?
Also.... "SEO" is on a powerclimb... but "Search Engine Optimization" is declining. Is "SEO" entering common language as people learn about the topic and move from the formal term to the slang? (added... oops, gotta be careful... Seo is somebody's name).
I am seeing the same thing across the board for my search terms. I posted a blog on it earlier today. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% decline for the past 2 years just doesn't seem right. It's a really cool tool, but if we are viewing innacurate data, I would say it's just about worthless.
My conclusion was either more specific search terms (unlikely for such a huge decline over a short period of time), Innaccurate Data (most likely the case), or the search volume actually went down (I have a really hard time believing this one.)
That's pretty neat. I especially like the fact that it gives you a glimpse on regional searches. I work with some clients from New Zealand, Spain and Argentina, and I always struggle to know about search volumes in these markets. Nows this tool won't tell me the search volumes but many times knowing that there's not enough volume to make a chart is quite revealing on itself. Also by comparing it with words for which I do know volumes, I pretty much end up with the full picture. Almost.
And the insight you get about patterns most of the times you would know about it intuitively, but it can be quite revealing on occasions. For example I found out that no one cared about Katie Holmes before she started dating with Tom.... or that whenever Mr Cruise feels he is being left in the dark, he can talk about scientology and he the spike in searches will occur.
One thing it would be good is to have the option to view results across a longer timespan... I would even pat for that. I hear Hitwise also offer a similar service but they are too pricey for my taste :p
Certainly does show that the term, seo is on the climb... Also take a look at the trend search for just google.. https://www.google.com/trends?q=google&ctab=0&... Is googletalk really that popular?
It's a pretty neat tool for those running PPC campaigns. However, I don't think we should rely too much on the regions option, which really seems to be from the reality IMO.
Great tool. Neat to compare totally different keyword phrases. What a competitive tool. If you know traffic in one area....gives you a visual sense of a totally new area.
G reported that this is somewhat based on formulas. With web traffic growing...seeing some phrases decline over time from year to year is a mystery to be determined.
As far as seo on a growth trend....looks to me like news about baseball is the spike that works!!! LOL Dave
I LOVE THIS!!!