I was recently befuddled when I embarked on some keyword research and found the Google External Keyword Tool was showing only 11 months of data. My client was adamant that I take trends for the prior month into consideration.
Without prior month data in the Google Keyword Tool, I felt like Popeye without spinach. Now what? As I started muttering curses to Google under my breath, it occurred to me to check Google Insights.
Google Insights for Search allows you to compare search volume patterns “across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.” In my case, I was interested in seeing how search patterns changed over time. Data in Insights is up-to-date, not just to the prior month, but up to the current day.
The caveat is Insights doesn’t provide absolute numbers. The data is normalized and displayed on a scale of 1 – 100, thereby giving you relative trend comparisons, rather than absolute search volumes or absolute comparisons.
Absolute data would be nice, but my foremost interest was in how search terms were trending based on recent news coverage. Plus, by combining the somewhat outdated absolute search volumes I received from the Google External Keyword Tool with the up-to-date relative trends from Google Insights, I could nail down some reasonable recommendations for the client.
Above, is a graph I generated from Google Insights. I cropped out the legend, which decodes what each of the colored lines represents, to protect the anonymity of my client. But that decoding wouldn’t add much here anyway.
Each line in the graph represents a different search term. You can see how relative search volumes for those terms have changed over the past 12 months.
- A few of the terms peaked in March
- The blue term spiked again in April
- In late December, the blue and orange terms had another spike
Based on this, I was able to inform the client which terms were heating up again in Google searches. To get an idea of not only the relative volume, but the actual volume for December, I looked at absolute search volumes (from the External Keyword Tool) for earlier months and scaled relative December data accordingly.
There is one simplification in the description above compared to my actual method. Prior to comparing terms with Insights I grouped all keywords under consideration (roughly 200) into 8 themes. I then chose a representative keyword for each theme by identifying the keyword within that theme with the highest average absolute search volume for the past year (according to the External Keyword Tool). So in the graph above, I was actually comparing themes based on the representative keywords.
Some other nice Google Insights features, which I didn’t use here, but could come in handy:
- You’ll notice a “News Headlines” checkbox above the graph in my screenshot above. Click this and Google will correlate various points of time in the graph with news stories.
- A “Regional Interest” section appears below the graph and compares interest levels by country or sub-region. I did a test comparing “chevy volt” and “nissan leaf” searches for the last 90 days and this feature revealed Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana to be hot for the Chevy Volt, but Hawaii, Washington and Oregon hot for the Nissan Leaf.
- A “Rising Searches” section tells you which searches have experienced growth in the given time period, as compared to the preceding time period. For example, “chevy volt price” (+140%), “nissan leaf mileage” (+100%) and “nissan leaf mpg” (+70%) were the top 3 for the chevy volt / nissan leaf comparison.
Give it a whirl yourself: Google Insights for Search
