Get More Traffic Using Google Insights for Search

Matt Mehlhope — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:19:01 +0000

With its debut in August of 2008, Google Insights for Search became a readily adapted research tool by search marketing experts but has remained somewhat of a mystery to the general website or blog owner. Google Insights for Search allows you to see how the popularity of search terms has changed over the years and shows you potential avenues for driving relevant traffic to your website.

Find Rising Trends

When searching for terms relevant to your website, blog, company, industry, etc., Insights for Search will not only show you the relative popularity of your search terms, but it will unveil the most popular and fastest rising searches related to what you entered. Knowing the rising search trends in your industry puts a plethora of untapped search phrase markets at your fingertips. You can continue to drill down into the rising searches to find additional niches that you can target for large traffic increases of relevant visitors.

Target Your Findings

The most immediate way to target and benefit from these newly popular search phrases is through PPC marketing. Within hours of doing your research you can have several, targeted PPC advertisements live on the big search engines. In addition, you will be able to benefit from low cost-per-click values since there is very little bid competition in these markets. The result of targeting the trending terms is a low cost advertising campaign that will direct highly relevant traffic to your website.

In addition to the PPC marketing, you can implement on-page SEO that will establish your website as an authority for these low-competition searches. As the searches gain popularity, so will your website’s traffic. A caveat to on-page SEO is that you do NOT want to start changing your primary SEO keywords every time you want to target a trend. If you change your primary content too much, you can unintentionally damage your current search engine rankings. Instead, write blog posts, continue to link build, and perhaps even add additional pages where appropriate with these new search phrases in mind.

An Example

Below is a quick video that will demonstrate the various features of the tool and a practical example of how you can find and target rising search terms.

Google Insights for Search is a highly valuable research tool when you want to find trends over a few years or a few days. What are some of the interesting trends you’ve noticed in your industry?

Video: Amazing Feature Bing Maps has that Google Doesn't

Matt Mehlhope — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:20:39 +0000

Using Google Maps is incredibly useful for almost any mapping situation, but there’s some information that you just can’t get from a satellite or street view. Last week I was heading to an unfamiliar part of downtown and needed to find a place to park but ended up driving around for an extra 15 minutes because I had no idea where to go. My iPhone equipped with GPS and Google Maps is usually an all-encompassing solution when traveling, but it was surprisingly Bing Maps that would have helped me the most.

Bing Maps’ Bird’s Eye View

As you can see in the video, by utilizing both Google’s Street View and Bing’s 360° Bird’s Eye View you can find exactly where you want to go when mapping out your travels. Having the ability to rotate around an area at an angled top-down view is incredibly valuable to see a lot of the critical information about a location. Surprisingly, many people are unaware of this feature since Google Maps dominates the online-mapping market and can be implemented into so many mobile devices where people need it most.

To use Bing’s Bird’s Eye View

Go to Bing Maps and find the location you want to travel to, then select Bird’s Eye View.

Select Bird's Eye View from the Aerial drop down menu

With Bird’s Eye View enabled, you can freely rotate around a location and see it from all angles:

Click the rotation buttons to rotate around a location

I hope this helps you in your future travels, enjoy!