Refining Keywords – Google Insights for Search

The second half of the Google tools we’ll be using is called Google Insights for Search. This tool shows valuable comparisons between keywords and will help narrow down which term out of a selection that would be best to use.

So from the earlier list of words put together I now have several words that are comparable search terms for which I’m only going to (initially) have one page on, so I have to decide which term is the best to begin with.

Writing a page on how to become a poker affiliate may give me these 5 terms to write about.

poker affiliate, poker affiliate program, poker affiliate site, internet poker affiliate, become a poker affiliate

I’m now going to put these words into the tool and use the figures it gives me.

For this we’re going to use the default comparison settings to compare search terms

Compare by Search Terms

Next put the terms into the search box (add more by clicking the add search term link).

Search Terms

The drop down menus on the right allow searches to be refined by territory or date and can be further specified by category.

Insights Filter

Hit the search button and Google will return a bunch of data. In this instance poker affiliate is the runaway most popular term.

Affiliate Results

The phrase poker affiliate actually forms parts of the other searches so it’s not surprising that it’s the most popular. The numbers given here are relative figures and you have to be signed into Google to see them. Having gone through this now I realise that this isn’t the best example I could have gone with, but there’ll often be times when the figures you manage to pull out aren’t perfect.

The next section graphs interest over time so you can see if a search term is increasing or decreasing in popularity as well as get an idea of any seasonality in the term.

Search Term Graph

The flags on the graph relate to the other half of this section which shows news results. This helps you when trying to make sense of spikes or troughs.

News Results

Whilst there’s no flag next to the big spike mid-2006  (as well as smaller spikes for the other terms) it’s probably a safe assumption that it was to do with the WSOP. Whether this was a specific poker affiliate offer or something to with Joe Hachem’s win the year before or Jamie Gold’s win that year is unclear but were it important this graph means you can investigate further.

The next section the results show are the popular locations for these searches, both as text and as a map. Again the numbers given are relative. You can select the map by keyword entered.

Territory Heat Map

The last part again helps refine search results as it gives more related search terms from the terms that were originally entered. If a terms shows up for severl of the keyword terms then it’s always possible to add or remove terms from the top and compare again.

Related Terms

The final part helps you get the jump on competition slightly as it shows searches that are increasing in popularity, often competitors won’t be targeting those terms yet so you can create content to capture those searches quickly.

Rising Searches

From this I now know that my page about how to make money as a poker affiliate will focus just on the term poker affiliate. Okay, no shock there, but it’s a process.

I’ll be going into more depth with this tool again later but for further reading check out the options on the page from Google about sorting into categories, seasonality and geographic distribution.

Insights Help