It’s been almost three years since Google launched one of the most useful tools ever devised to help small-business owners plan more effective advertising campaigns for local, online search. Yet this free and insanely useful tool called Google Insights for Search, or GIS, remains a well-kept secret among a handful of search geeks, corporate quants and marketing academics.
Too bad. GIS has the potential to be a local business owner’s dream tool for analyzing search-volume patterns across specific regions, product and service categories and time frames. For example, it lets you see how search volume by specific keywords and phrases is distributed across cities and regions and compare what’s happening now for any time periods you select going back to 2004.
With search-engine marketing becoming more competitive and expensive for small business, being smarter about it and spending online-marketing money effectively is more important than ever.
This kind of self-serve market research does require some work. But the GIS tool makes it easy for even the most data-phobic among us to interpret the numbers.
The system offers projects of where the graph will go over the next 12 months, making it a handy forecasting tool as well.
For example, is you chart searches for “orthodontist,” “pediatric dentist” and “teeth whitening” in Chicago over the last five years, you’d discover the following (among many other things):
• Online searches for pediatric dentists in Chicago have increased from 24 to about 31 on the index scale, or about 29 percent.
• But teeth whitening jumped from 46 to 75 (63 percent) and searches for orthodontists went from 66 to 99, a 50 percent leap.
Here are three general areas to explore on the GIS tool:
• Categories. Here you can focus and compare the search information you retrieve to specific categories such as automotive, food and drink, beauty and personal care, health, home and garden, real estate, travel and many others.
• Seasonality. By looking at search trends during specific seasons (summer; back-to-school, Thanksgiving, etc.), you can better anticipate demand for whatever your business sells and plan or budget accordingly.
• Geographic targeting. This GIS component offers great potential to help you know where to find customers by looking at how search volume is distributed across cities and areas. This would be of particular help in targeting new locations. •
Daniel Kehrer can be reached at
editor@bizbest.com.
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