When designing an ecommerce store, you must perform keyword research to determine how best to target your desired niche market. Many people use either the freely available Google keyword tool or a commercial tool such as Market Samurai or Keyword Elite to identify keyword phrases with adequate search volumes. The Google Insights resource can be a valuable complement to one of these basic keyword research tools. Google Insights provides data about the global distribution and seasonal variation for the number of searches of a chosen keyword phrase in a simple graphical format that is not readily available elsewhere.
Global map of search volume. Google Insights provides a clear graphical readout of the volume of searches for your selected term in different countries around the world. Some keyword tools may be set up to give global vs. local search volumes by default. However, it is important to understand the geographical origin of your seekers. In fact, this is critical for marketing physical vs. information products since it may be too expensive to ship customer orders for physical goods overseas. You may unexpectedly find that a keyword phrase is utilized almost exclusively in the US but not, say, Australia or that most of the searches for another phrase originate in the UK but not the US.
Seasonal variation of search volume. Google Insights also provides a simple chart illustrating the number of searches over time since 2004. This is important since the search volumes for certain keyword phrases can have strong seasonal fluctuations. For example, "helicopter toys" sounds like a reliably generic search term. You might imagine that searches would be down during cool weather apart from Christmas and rise during warmer weather. Or, perhaps the searches would be reliably flat through the year with some increase during the Christmas season.
In fact, the search volume can be as much as 5 times higher around Christmas than it is at other times of the year. A number of other keyword phrases that contain the word "toy" have a similar search pattern. If you were to open up your keyword tool in January and examine local searches for these terms during the previous month, you might think from the number of searches that you found a gold mine. This could lead you to initiate a marketing effort around them, only to later wind up wondering why things are not working so well as you had hoped.
The Google Insights tool is, in my opinion, under appreciated by new ecommerce marketers. Part of the reason for this may simply be that it is not so well known as the Google AdWords keyword tool. If you decide to try using Google Insights-and I hope you do-be sure to be signed in with your free Google account. This is not mandatory, but there is certain information (such as numbers on graphs) visible when you are logged in that you will not see otherwise.
Source by Jody White
