DeadFly Online Marketing

I love Google Trends. Any time I am marketing a web site it is one of the tools I use for great information. When marketing a website one of the major questions I want answered is; what is the amount of traffic for a particular search term, and is that traffic increasing or not? Now firstly understand that the data from Google Trends should not be used as the only measurement - it is only one tool that can be used to estimate traffic for certain phrases.

And now Google have made it even better by letting you compare the traffic on websites - but more of that later.

This image shows the data for four different search terms. The data is worldwide and gives very little information, the only interesting fact is there are less searches for “web design” over the time scale of the graph, and increasing numbers for SEO. The reason for this decline I guess is that searchers will search more for web design + location.

Target a Region

The second graph adds information that allows me to target a region. I have used “Ring of Kerry” at the start to force Google trends to give me results based on Ireland - this is where I live. I don’t own the number one site for “Ring of Kerry” - though I do own a site that ranks at number 10 for one of the pages for this search term. Therefore doing the maths I can work backwards to a rough estimate of the number of visitors for the other search terms.

However I do own various sites that list at number 1 for various search terms and I can check inside analytics how many visitors I get for those search terms, therefore I can then see an estimate of how many visitors “ring of Kerry” is worth at the number 1 spot on Google by comparing those two key phrases. Having that information allows me to know what “web design” or “seo” is worth in visitor numbers. I find the results surprisingly accurate.

Double Check

However having made mistakes before in targeting particular phrases then to finally get to number 1 and find that I had lost money and was never likely to get it back, I double check the figures with Wordtracker even though it is less accurate than Trends. I also check with Google Adwords traffic estimator which is a bit more accurate than Wordtracker. Lastly the second best way to check the stats is to run an Adwords campaign for a while; the best way to know the traffic stats is by being at number one for that search term.

Running an Adwords campaign for a while can be costly depending on your search words, however if you are sinking a lot of capital or time into a project and you are depending on search traffic for your visitors it is worthwhile.

You can play around with Google trends and reduce the region to Ireland only, or to Dublin only - however once you do this the numbers are less reliable. A larger region and bigger numbers provide better stats I have found.

Google Trends for Websites

This is a brand new part of Google Trends and so far I have been only able to check it using my own and client sites. It does seem to be accurate on the bar graphs at the bottom, though the main graph doesn’t appear to populate well for smaller sites - but it is new.

I searched for “Irish Jobs” and I have taken the top five from the search results to compare them in Google trends for Websites. (irishjobs.ie, jobs.ie, loadzajobs.ie, eirjobs.com, recruitireland.com) What the graph shows is who has the most visitors and peaks when people look for jobs; it is easy to see that visitors numbers are down in December and jump again in January - to be expected in this market.

What use is this information?

Once again I can drop a website into the search bar and see a comparison, great if I know numbers from a website. I trust this information less so far and it has less functionality than Google Trends for search terms.

Watch the Competition

However I can compare a website with the competing sites in the same niche and see who has the most traffic. Then I can query their site using the likes of SEO Digger and get a list of their keywords and where they rank for them - that has quite a few uses. I can then take the keywords and run them through the above and see if I can compete for them.

Essentially though Google is letting more and more commercially sensitive information be publicly available. They also list where they collect the information that they use in Trends. Google Trends for terms have come a long way and hopefully the same will happen with Trends for Websites. One disclaimer that Google adds to the information is that these products come from Google Labs; my disclaimer - don’t use it as your only source of information.

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