SEO & SEM: Google Puts Another Bullet in the Chamber with Insights for Search
|
Written By Noah Mallin | August 6, 2008 | Share This
|
|
The latest, Insights for Search (I4S to the kids?) is already a hit around the Reprise Media offices – allowing for quick and easy keyword research by geography and comparative volume. That being said, it’s not an adequate replacement for most of the popular keyword research tools for sale – yet. The difference lies in how far you are able to drill down to hard numbers and demographic data.
A good example of what Insights for Search can do is in comparing terms. Let’s say I had a website that collected film reviews. I might want to see how people actually search for reviews to make sure that I’m using the right keywords in my headlines or in a paid search campaign. I looked at a few similar phrases to see how they ranked: “Film Review”, “Movie Review”, “DVD Review” and “Cinema Review.”
Clearly “Movie Review” is a more common search term than the more hoity-toity “Film Review.” What was really fascinating was to compare them on a worldwide basis. Keep in mind, Google doesn’t show actual numbers (something one of the research tools that charges money will do), they just take the top ranking and give it a value of 100 and everything else is compared to that. The United States wasn’t top ranked for any of the terms. The top territory for “Film Review” was the United Kingdom (United States was only 16 on their scale of 100). Surprisingly, tops for “Movie Review” was India (US was 44). The best country for “Cinema Review” was the UK again (US was 16), not a surprise as “cinema” is a more common term across the pond, and the best for “DVD Review,” again in a surprise, was Australia (US was 73.)
Here’s where it can get a little tricky for the math impaired like myself. Even though the US was 73 out of 100 globally for “DVD Review” and just 44 out of 100 for “Movie Review”, within the US the latter term ranks substantially higher than the former. Fascinating stuff.
You can fine tune it to look at results on a city by city level – helpful if my theoretical website was aimed at a local audience. You can also specify by category, so if my search term is a broad one I can compare it to a narrower industry based group of searches.
I asked Mark Pilatowski, Reprise Media’s Manager of SEO what he thought the implications were for the search industry:
“It opens up a lot of information about keywords and markets that was previously unavailable or only available through paid tools.
This coupled with the real data being provided in Google’s keyword tool and trends data is pushing into the paid keyword tool market… they could make them obsolete eventually.”
Each one of Google’s offerings on their own – Google Trends, AdPlanner and AdWords tools – are relatively innocuous but as a bundle they look like a decisive push into greater control of the research tools search marketers use. Keyword Discovery and WordTracker are still useful tools but how long can they survive against a free suite of tools backed with Google’s data?
Topics: Advertising: Online, ECommerce, Google, Google: AdWords, SEM: Keyword Generation, SEO, Search: How-To, Search: Innovations, Search: News, Technology, Web Analytics |
This is great stuff — we love that they’re offering it for free… they just keep on coming with the new tools!