Google Insights for Search

Google Insights for Search is a cool free tool Google offers which allows me to be doubly sure about a keyword before I dive in and start a campaign around it, or before I add a new page to my website which targets that keyword.

What Google Insights for Search does is allow you to see a snapshot of this history and trends of a keyword, and most importantly, how much traffic that keyword generates.

Google Insights can be misleading though…if you don’t have a good benchmark keyword then the data provided really doesn’t have any value…at least not for basing search volume estimates around.

For example, if you type in one keyword by itself without comparing it to a known value, the information you get is not relative to anything…

Here’s how I use Google Insights

I use a keyword I have information about as a benchmark. For this example I’m going to use the keyword “medusa costume”. I know for a fact that when a website ranks well for the keyword medusa costume, it makes money. I also know that this keyword has plenty of people searching for it over the course of the year (searches peak in Halloween).

I can use this data to guide me when I’m considering starting new SEO projects or targeting new keywords…let look at an example:

Let’s say that I was looking at building a new Adsense website and my goal was to make a few dollars a day. During keyword research let’s assume I stumbled upon the “contact lens” niche and upon digging deeper, discovered the keyword “blue contact lenses”.

I could quickly and easily compare the search volume of “blue contact lenses” to my benchmark “medusa costume” using the Google Insights for Search tool.

Check out the image below:

What you can see from the image above is that although “Medusa Costume” peaks during Halloween, over the course of an entire year “blue contact lenses” gets more traffic. The blue line represents the keyword “medusa costume” and the red line represents “blue contact lenses”.

But we can do better than this…take a look at the screenshot below:

This time I’ve compared the phrase matches of each keyword (see how each word is written with quotation marks around each). What this does is compare the number of people searching for each keyword use phrase match…this time we can see “medusa costume” comes out on top (winning by 9 to 7 – see the bar chart on the right hand side).

We can get even more detailed information though…

If I do a search using square brackets, I find the exact match search volume results. As you can see from the image above, there are actually more people searching for “blue contact lenses” than there are searching for “medusa costume” without any other words in the search phrase (winning 13 to 10).

This is all good information. In most cases you can get a good enough idea simply by comparing the search phrase you’re interested in with a benchmark search phrase (like “medusa costume”) without looking at phrase match and exact match data. It’s handy to know that if we want to we can drill deeper however.

I always use Google Insights for Search in combo with Market Samurai…I find these 2 tools give me the best “bird’s eye view” of the situation and make my decision making process so my easier. Try it for yourself and let me know how it works for you!

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