Popular Searches Revealed

This is always a fun time of year for me, when the search engines release their most popular searches during the past 11 or 12 months. I saw Google’s Marissa Mayer on the Today Show earlier this week, speaking with Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera about how Michael Jackson, Twitter, Hulu, Facebook, and Hi5 were among the fastest rising searches on their engine in 2009. Lady Gaga topped the list for image searches, while swine flu and celebrities were the most common “news searches” (think Susan Boyle, Rihanna, Jon and Kate).

Yahoo had their “Year in Review” and other engines like Ask and Bing echoed many of the same findings. I think most of us would be shocked (or maybe not) to know which phrases are actually the most searched each year. Let’s just say, Meredith would really blush and Al Roker would crack a joke about how Google knows too much about his personal search history.

While it’s fun to learn which phrases people are typing into all those little search boxes, it is much more useful to know how people are searching for your own company, or for the products and services you offer. There are a number of ways to discover this information, and one of the easiest is by having a search box on your own website. If you don’t already have one, Google provides the code that allows you install one for free. Once in place, you can learn more about how people are searching once they reach your website.

If you want to know what people are searching for before they make it to your website, there are some free tools you can try. Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Google Search based Keyword Tool, and the WordStream Free Keyword Tool are some I would suggest for starters. They all work pretty much the same way. Simply enter a keyword phrase and you can get data estimates related to how often the phrase gets searched either globally or within a local region. You will also get similar data on many related search phrases. (Another option is to use the real time keyword suggestion tool called Google Suggest.)

Mining through your web stats is another great way to learn more about how your potential customers are searching. Just look for the report or tab that gives you “keywords by search engine”.

Last month, our keyword research uncovered the fact that SEM Des Moines was a popular search for a service we offered, but we hadn’t targeted that phrase yet. After a couple of minor tweaks, people can now find us on the first page of Google for that query. That’s the value of knowing how people are looking for you online - even if you’re not as popular as Zhu Zhu Pets!