As you may well know there are many tools which Google provide that allow you to carry out a lot of tasks completely FREE from the comfort of your desk; one of these tools is called Google Insights. Now Google insights isn't a new tool by any means, in fact it's been around for quite some time but you would be amazed the amount of people who don't know about it or choose not to use it.

So what is Google Insights? Basically it's a tool which allows you to compare and analyse search volume and patterns for your specified search terms over a given period of time, area of the world or a specific category. Essentially what the information allows you to do is:

• See if a particular search term appears to be becoming more or less popular
• See the trend of increasing and decreasing popularity over a period of time for a specific search term
• See which geographical locations your particular search term is most used.
• See patterns as well as peaks and troughs at particular times of the year or within particular geographical locations.
• See search terms which are directly related to the term you have entered along with percentage stats indicating whether the search trend for that particular term is increasing or decreasing.

But how can you use this to your advantage? It's pretty simple really, if I have an idea for a niche area, for example 'Gas Grills', then I can simply visit Google insights below and type it into the Google insights engine which will return a set of results as we see in the screenshot below:

If we really wanted too we could also add multiple search terms to compare them side by side. Initially the information this will give me is the following:

Interest over time

Below you can see in the screenshot that I have got the overall trend of interest over time for the term 'Gas Grills', just looking at the trend from 2004 right through to 2009 I can see quite clearly that there has been a steady decrease over the last few years in the popularity for the term 'Gas Grills'. But in this instance that isn't the most important thing, if you look at the places I have circled you can see that there have been consistent peaks for the last 4-5 years around the middle of the year where the term 'Gas Grills' becomes hugely popular.

Now if you think about it logically this is what you would expect, right? Well yes, in this case you would but that's probably because it's a more obvious niche that I'm examining but you will be surprised some of the results you turn up when you go digging for other search terms. So from this initial information I know that if I wanted to build a site which was based around 'Gas Grills' then the best time to really start pushing it and advertising it would be the summer time or middle of the year, yes I may get some sales at each tale end of the year but the times I would be pushing the site would be the summer time.

Regional interest  for gas grills

The next peice of information which is really powerful is the regional interest information. What this basically gives us is a list of the places where the term 'Gas Grills' has been most popular. If you look at the screen shot below you will see that the area where this term is most popular is in the USA and if we were to click on the 'United States' link then we would be able to see the regions within the USA where this term is most popular. It therefore allows us to very closely GEO target if we wanted to, this is especially important if you were using PPC to promote your site, since you wouldn't try to display a campaign for the whole of the USA.

Search terms related to gas grills

The final piece of information which we can gather from this Google insights search are the related search terms. These are search terms which are directly related to the search term that you have entered into Google insights and so are great for giving you more ideas for further search terms or keyphrases which you can use in your keyword research.

The great thing that you will also see in this screenshot is the ability to see the percentage increase or decrease for the popularity of that search term, this gives you a great indication of terms or niche areas which are on the up. Again, as with geographical locations we can dig deeper down in these related search terms to find even more search terms , click on one of these terms and all of the aforemetioned data will be returned for that term.

In conclusion

If you weren't using Google insights to help with your niche/market research then I hope you will be now. It's a truely powerful tool which can give you a great starting point in any niche site build, the best thing of all is its completely FREE. So what are you waiting for? Start using Google insights today!

Visit Google Insights right here.

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