I’m a big fan of Niche Research, in fact, they don’t call me ‘That Son of a Niche’ for nothing! I do a lot of it and so tools like what Google has put together here are great time savers and provide very useful data. I have been using Google Trends for quite awhile now to do Niche Research, but they have just released some new functionality that will blow your mind and give you a massive boost in competing in any niche you may be involved in.

Trends for Websites

So what they have done, is added a section called ‘Trends for Websites‘

In this portion of Google Trends you can now type in URL’s of your competitors for example, and it will compare them, but what’s really powerful about this new functionality is that it allows you to see where your competitor’s customers are visiting and where they go once they get there.  This gives you an insight into how customers visiting a particular kind of site are navigating when looking for certain products and services.

This trend data is compiled from multiple sources and isn’t strictly from Google’s own search data and is aggregated from millions of users.  One other caveat for this new functionality within Google Trends for Websites is that not all websites can be searched using this new tool and is only going to work for sites that are currently getting significant traffic.

Head on over to Trends for Websites and follow along with what I’m going to describe here.

Now, if you’ve done research online to help you not only build better websites, but also used it to find out where your competitors are getting their traffic, you will instantly see how powerful this new section really is.

So, as you can see from the pic below, I did a search in “Google Trends for Websites” using apple.com and dell.com by separating the URL’s with a comma.  Keep in mind that you’re not limited to just two URL’s (you can search up to 5) by just separating them with a comma.  I would not recommend doing more than a few in this case however because it will tend to obscure the other results that we are looking for in the ‘Also Visited’ and ‘Also Searched For’ columns.

If you look at the upper right hand corner of the blue title area, you can select the region and also specify the timeframe that you want to look at.  This is so powerful because you can even have it show you the results of the past 30 days, months, year(s) or even all years.

Once you have that set you can then examine the results and drill down even further into the ‘Subregions’, but also the ‘Also Visited’ and ‘Also Searched For’ columns to get a further refinement of the results shown.  Some of the results you can glean from this is very interesting, depending on the sites you are searching.

So, let me ask you something; do you think you could use this information to help Optimize your niche websites to get boat loads of highly targeted traffic?

So what else can this data show you?

Well, here are just a few suggestions:

• The “Subregions” area can show you what locations are getting the most traffic for these sites, all the way down to the state level.
• Provides data which indicates where their customers are navigating to once they reached their site.
• Indicates what their customers searched for once they reached the sites location, providing you valuable data on the behavior of their customers as a whole.
• And much, much more.

Just think about this for a few minutes and you can come up with other even more valuable pieces that can be extracted from this data.

One of the things I would really like to see Google do here is to actually add the number(s) for these searches shown, just like they do now within the Adwords keyword tool, instead of only providing the bar graph.  I’d also like to see them compile data for all websites (within reason) instead of only providing data for those getting millions of unique visitors. In any case, I think you’ll agree this is extremely powerful information and I for one really appreciate Google adding this functionality.  Not only is it going to benefit your own website optimization, but it is an excellent Niche research tool if used with that in mind.

See What The World Is Searching For

Google isn’t done yet.  They have also added a new section called ‘Google Insights for Search’ that allows you to analyze worldwide Google searches that will show you results which will indicate the interest by searchers over a specific timeframe.  It will list the top searches, top rising searches and even has a worldwide graphical heat map that shows the search volume index for all the different regions, subregions and cities.

I’ll be doing a detailed write up of how you can use this information to not only give your own websites a boost, but also to help you identify profitable Niche areas which you can capitalize on.

For more information about these tools and detailed instructions for how they work, check out the Google Insights for Search Help Center and the Google Trends for Websites Help area.

Talk to you all soon and become your own Son of a Niche!

This is great news for everyone who does business online and needs to do Keyword Research because now Google Adwords Keyword tool generates actual numbers for the search volume of any keyword.

Previously, Google’s Keyword Search tool only showed a small graphic to depict the actual search volume for any keyword that looked like the graphic below:

RMB (Right Mouse Button) on image below and select View Image

This is how the tool use to show it’s search volumes, which to be perfectly honest, it was not very helpful from a research standpoint and we had to use other keyword research tools in order to see the actual keyword search volume numbers.

That has all changed now and Google is now showing actual search volume numbers for the keywords along with the graph view as shown below:

RMB (Right Mouse Button) on image below and select View Image

It’s not perfect yet since a lot of the keywords still don’t have Search Volume numbers, but I’m sure that every day that goes by, we will begin to see all keyword terms populated with the keyword Volume numbers.

This truly is great news for everyone since you will no longer need to pay for accurate keyword research volume numbers through any of the paid keyword search tools.

This of course may not be good news if you are in the business of selling keyword research tools, but for the internet Marketer, it’s great step in the right direction.

You can check out the new tool format here at the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool

Thanks Google!!

Well, you will probably get 20 different answers if you were to ask 20 different people. This particular subject is so broad that there companies who spend all of their time doing only this for their customers. One of the things that makes this particular subject so difficult to manage is that each search engine has their own set of rules for optimizing against their algorithms, so if you setup your pages to be optimized against one particular search engine, you may not be optimized for the others. This doesn’t mean that you won’t be in a good position in most of the top search engines, it just means that there are differing rules for each. For example, some search engines rely on Meta tags, where others don’t put very much weight on them but you should still optimize your meta tags simply becasue some do use them.

Although I’m going to discuss specifically how to optimize for Google, I will be recommending other areas of optimization which will help with all the other search engines as well. You may be asking yourself, “Now wait a minute, we haven’t spent time talking about website development?”, and you’re right, but this was by design because a big part of designing your website has to revolve around Search Engine Optimization. If you know anything about SEO, then you know what I’m talking about. If you’re new to all of this, don’t worry, I’m going to explain this in as much detail as I possibly can over the next week or so. There is a saying in the internet marketing world and that is, you need to follow the 80/20 rule. What does this mean? It means that if you intend to be successful in marketing any product or service online, you need to spend 80% of your time driving traffic to your sites and only 20% on the details/technology/website design etc.. Spending to much time on website design (the way it looks) is one of the biggest areas that most new people stumble on and you should instead focus on adding great content to your website and then make sure to drive traffic to your site. One of the best ways to do this early on is to make sure you follow the things we are going to discuss here on SEO.

Following are some of the areas which we will discuss over the coming week(s) concerning Search Engine Optimization:

• Optimizing your websites for Search Engine Optimization
• The top Search Engines
• Submitting your Websites to Search Engines
• Submitting to Search Engine Directories
• How long does it take to see Search Engine Listing results?
• What are the most important areas of SEO to concentrate on?
• What are keywords and why are they important?
• What is keyword density, frequency, prominence and proximity and how do they affect my rankings?
• What are Meta Tags and how should they be used?
• What is Linking and how does it affect my Search Engine Ranking?
• Domain Names and SEO importance

And much much more…

<< SEO Top Level Category – SEO Website Content – Part 2 >>