Wednesday, November 19, 2008

What Do People Search For?

Google released an app they call Search-based Keyword Tool. Google says this tool “generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website” and in doing so, “helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns.” (Google AdWords already has a keywords tool. Google says as opposed to the existing tool, this new one “generates keyword ideas based on your website, and identifies those currently not being used in your AdWords account”.)

You can enter the domain of a website, and Google then tries to return a set of search phrases that may be of relevance to your site. Next to the search query, you’ll see an approximation of the number of monthly searches for this, the level of competition, a suggested bidding price if you want to advertise in Google results using AdWords, and the target page from which the keywords were extracted. (Checking with one of my sites, the phrases listed were already showing the identified target page in the top or top 5 spots at google.com, so advertising that using AdWords would probably be redundant.)

Added to entering a domain, you can also just enter a keyword. The keyphrase “comic book" for instance returned “draft comic book confidential”, “draft comic book manager”, “draft comic book issues” and more.

Even if you’re not interested in finding specific data related to your own website, you might get something out of browsing the categories directory of this tool to find out what people search for. I’ve dropped a couple of these lists into a tabbed Google spreadsheet, for categories like computer, consumer electronics, apparel and more (in all countries, for English searches), as included above. For instance, Google says there are an average of around 1,200,000 searches per month for the query baby names, 540,000 for adobe photoshop, 280,000 for calorie counter, and 440,000 for guitar hero 3.

[Via Search Engine Land.]

What Do People Search For ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2)

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