Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2011. Google Trends has changed a lot since: it now shows relative search interest on a 0-100 scale, not the 0-2 values described in the last paragraph, and its filters and layout are different.
When we decide to build a website for our business, it’s vital to choose the right keywords to rank for. Online, less is sometimes more: targeting a larger number of keywords won’t necessarily give you better results, and pushing a more popular, general keyword won’t necessarily bring more customers to your business. We explain why below.
First and foremost, define your business’s area of operation, because the strategy changes depending on whether your company serves a local or a national market. Take the example of a law firm in Madrid (Spain). Even before checking which words are searched most online, common sense tells us that «abogados» (“lawyers”) will get far more searches than «abogados Madrid» (“lawyers Madrid”). To confirm this, we go to Google Trends and type the keywords we want to compare into the search box, separated by commas.
In the example we’re going to show, we used Abogados, abogados Madrid, Abogado Madrid (lawyers, lawyers Madrid, lawyer Madrid). We filter the results in the tool by country (Spain), by region (Madrid) and by year (2011), and look at the comparison.
In the resulting chart, each colored line represents one search term, and, as expected, plain «abogados» is searched more than the others. But it will also be the one with the most competition, so in this case we’d have a better chance of ranking higher if we target «abogados Madrid».
Google Trends usually shows values between 0 and 2, so anything above 1 signals a good level of searches. A term that hovers close to 0 won’t necessarily fail to bring results, because among those few searches, which could easily be thousands every month, we may find potential customers for our business.
Featured image: Macedo_Media, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
