Using Google’s Insights for Search

Google’s excellent Insights for Search tool allows you to compare search volume patterns for a number of search terms across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. Whether you’re an advertising agency, a small business owner, a multinational corporation, or an academic researcher, Insights for Search can help you gauge interest in relevant search terms.

Insights can help you determine which search queries might product the best results for your business. For example, when comparing 2 or more different search terms in this tool, it’s easy to see a comparison between interest levels. Although this can’t be used as a primary keyword research tool, Insights for Search does help to provide more background information for search engine marketers to help them understand the profile of a market, which in turn can be a crucial element of a Google Ads (AdWords) campaign strategy.

Insights can also be used to determine seasonality of search traffic. For example, it can show at which time in the year there are the most searches for a particular product or service. By producing a comparison across a number of previous years, the results can be fairly consistent. This information can be vital in the planning of resources, such as advertising budget or staffing requirements.

Another useful function of Insights is the ability to create brand associations. This is done by applying the category filter which narrows the data down to just the selected category. So a computer company, for example, could determine what the related and rising searches are for desktop PCs, hence allowing it to understand competitors’ offers and how to compete with, or differentiate from, that brand.

Finally, Insights can be useful in determining a new market, or where to target existing marketing campaign. By entering search terms within the regional interest section, the results of the volumes can be displayed across global, country, suburb, or city views. Using this form of targeting can save companies revenue from entering into a wrong market, or marketing in a region where there is little interest in its product or service.

Google states that the tool is designed for general analysis of search volume patterns. To get some reliable results from this tool, you do need to compare search terms that attract quite high volumes of activity, or terms that have a similar search volumes so that the charting provides meaningful data.

However, if you’ve not yet tried it, Insights is worth a look and you might find some surprising results! If you’d like any help with this tool or need further information, please get in touch.

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