Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

SEARCH DATA: A POWERFUL SOURCE OF MARKET RESEARCH

With all the searching your potential customers are doing, you can gain a great deal of information about exactly what they’re looking for.

And we get more than just a list of queries from search data. We can find out what searchers looked for next, where they were searching from, and what they were searching for most.

Using Keyword Research for Market Insights

As you saw with BetterCamera, you can use keyword research to determine the keywords with the highest query volumes, which have the most competition and which are most likely to attract searchers to your site and turn them into customers.

How Keyword Research Is Valuable

• You gain insight into what searches have the highest volume (and can bring the most traffic).
• You get data on the competitive landscape of each query category.
• You learn the language of the customer, so you can better engage them (in clicking on the search result, staying on the page, and converting).
• You can better prioritize features and content additions based on expected traffic lifts.

Predicting Future Trends

But how reliable are search data in predicting future trends and influencing business decisions? The Google research team has spent a great deal of time considering this. As the team noted in its blog:

Having predictable trends for a search query or for a group of queries could have interesting ramifications. One could forecast the trends into the future, and use it as a “best guess” for various ...