Knowing what keywords to go after with SEO can be difficult. Some words may have a lot of competition. Some words may not be used frequently in searches by your target market. Luckily, Google has provided us with a useful tool for analyzing what keywords to target for your website.
Google Insights is a tool developed by Google. It is a pretty simple to use website. You add search terms and then choose history specifics. In turn, when you click search, it sends you results of the historical trends of these search terms.
For example, which word is more frequently search, “lawyer” or “attorney”? Here is a Google Insights historical comparison of the two words. As you can see attorney has consistently been the more frequently searched word on Google.
But what to do with these numbers? This is where it can be tricky. You also have to think about how competitive the words you want to use are on search engines. This means, which search term are you going to be able to crack into the search results easier? This analysis can be done by searching google for the terms you want to go after and thinking about how big the sites you first find are. If you find a bunch of sites with high Alexa ratings (high traffic), odds are you are not going to be able to compete.
As you can see, SEO is complicated. I find it enjoyable to analyze. It’s like its own economic game where you have to consider all the angles. In fact, thats how I view most of web development. Just a game with a lot of angles.
