If you have an understanding of Search Engine Optimisation at all, you will realise that keywords are important, and most website owners even have an idea (or think they do) of the keywords that are most important for their sites. However, in all my dealings with clients it is very rare that I come across a client who understands just how critical it really is to identify the best keywords to target for optimisation.
I almost always recommend Keyword Analysis as the starting point for any Optimisation Campaign. However, too many times, this recommended activity is ignored by clients because they “already know the best keywords“.
In most cases the outcome of a Keyword Analysis will include the clients pet keyword phrases as important phrases, but almost always it will also highlight a bunch of other keywords which are just as, or even more important (in terms of search volumes or conversion rates) than those originally identified by the client.
I can’t stress enough how important identifying your primary target keyword phrases is – if you get this wrong at the start, you can spend a great deal of time and effort optimising your site for keywords that were never likely to result in high volumes of sales or inquiries.
There is a great deal to undertaking Keyword Research properly, and lots of factors that influence how useful a particular keyword might be to you. There are many tools, techniques and strategies that can be used for keyword analysis, and many of these are complicated, technical and even tedious, but one tool I would like to cover in the rest of this post is actually quite fun to have a “play” with and provides useful insights into how keywords are used on Google.
The tool I would like to introduce is called Google Insights for Search – which has been around now for quite some time, and is effectively Google Trends on steroids, as it provides a great deal more information and functionality.
Google Insights for Search
Google Insights offers a way to view and compare trends in searches for specific Keyword phrases undertaken on Google. Whilst it does not show actual search volumes, Insights does give a good indication of relative volumes, making it very useful to compare keywords. Data is provided in a graphical format – making it very easy to spot trends in the data – particularly seasonal trends, or trends in user search behavior which may not otherwise be obvious or even expected.
For example a keyword such as Christmas shows a fairly predictable search pattern with a massive peak each year in December. Whereas the result for pumpkin is perhaps a little less predictable, with significant search peaks in October each year – which upon a little reflection coincides with Halloween.
With insights you are also able to apply a variety of filters to help focus the data on location, time or category. For example the result for pumpkin in Australia shows a very different result to that above (for the default – worldwide searches) – there is clearly still a seasonal trend, however it is not as dramatic, and is around June each year – the middle of the Aussie winter – people looking up pumpkin soup recipes perhaps ?
Insights also allow you to compare the relative search volumes of different keyword phrases, for example runescape vs world of warcraft or even search engine optimisation vs search engine optimization in Australia. And with this type of data we start to see some of the real value of using Google Insights for Search.
With Insights it becomes pretty easy to make informed decisions about the relevance of specific keyword phrases. By comparing phrases and looking at how search volumes vary over time you can determine not only which keywords are likely to be important, but at what times of the year you can expect demand to increase (or decline) and hence which of your products or services you are best to promote and when.
In this post I have just touched on some of the features of Insights – there are many other functions that can help you get a clearer picture of keyword usage. You should also keep in mind that this data is based on Google searches only – but as Google has a very signficant share of the search market, it is likely to be your biggest source of search traffic anyway. You should also be careful about how you interpret the data (particularly if you dig a bit deeper into regions and related search terms), as it is fairly easy to make incorrect speculations about what the data means.
I suggest that you start using Insights with keywords that you are fairly familiar with, and have a go at interpreting those trends and patterns before moving onto other phrases.
If you’d like any assistance with Keyword Analysis or Search Engine Optimisation, please feel free to contact us for a chat.
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