Google has developed a useful tool for keyword marketing campaigns called, Google Insights for Search. This tool is valuable for analyzing search trends related to high performance keywords and improving related to search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising (PPC) results. You can review the search volume patterns for different regions, categories, and time periods. Once you enter in a keyword phrase the tool displays a trend graph based on search volumes, a graph related to Regional Interest, a list of Top Searches and and corresponding list of Rising Searches.
Let me outline how our company is using this tool to help our clients. We have a few clients in the industry of global positioning systems (GPS). One is a manufacture of industrial hardware and applications, www.novatel.com and the other is a retail seller of mobile GPS units for consumers, www.gpscentral.ca. For both clients we are preparing a “gap analysis” to determine how their website is ranking for terms related to “gps”.
Note: The following data is aggregated industry related data, not data specific to GPSCentral.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Our analysis for companies like GPSCentral is a typically along the following lines:
- Enter the search term “gps”
- Adjust the filters to your specific interest: Web Search / Canada / All subregions / Last 12 months / All Categories to get the resulting page and graph
- Click on News headlines to see related news
- Click on Forecast get future trends (you must select 2004 – present for this function to be available)
If you login using your Gmail account you can get additional detail related to search volumes. When logged in, the y-axis becomes a percentage scale with 0 being zero and 100 being the highest volume during the selected time period.
For the gap analysis example, our next step is to review the Top Searches and Rising Searches and determine how the website is performing for these specific terms. For example, the top search term listed is “gps garmin”. When we look at Google.ca we can see that the website is performing well for this term – 2nd and 3rd positions. The website is also listed on the first page of Google.ca for the next 4 terms including “garmin”, “gps canada”, “magellan gps”, and “magellan”. But when we search for the 6th term on the list, “gps review”, www.GPSCentral.ca is not listed in the first 10 pages – room for improvement.
By using the “site” command in Google we can quickly determine that a pages has not been specifically optimized for “gps review”. A few pages on the website contain this term but none of the pages have “gps review” in the title of the web pages.
At this stage we have a few options:
- Select one of the existing pages and optimize the page for this term.
- Develop some new optimized content and add that page to the site.
- Start a linking campaign to improve the performance of the existing page or the new page
We haven’t started yet, but we will over the next few weeks.
Contact me if you have comments, questions or suggestions.
Jeff Nelson
