How To Study Consumer Interests Using Google Search Engine
There are many ways you can study consumer interests to gauge demand for products or services and to get a feel for how to market your own services. This article addresses how you can use Google to stay on top of consumers interests.
Search Engines Offer A Wealth Of Free Consumer Information
Search engines are a great way to find businesses, but they are also a fast, free, powerful tool to use to find out about competing businesses and discover new business opportunities. Because more people use Google than any other single search engine, always start with Google. But do not discount the importance of also checking Yahoo!, AOL, and Bing.
For our fictitious business example, Google "dog walking services" (at this point do not put in a specific geographic location.) You are checking for overall competitiveness and to see if any businesses appear in the most prominent returns for "dog walking services." On April 11, 2010 Google returned the following results in my own query:
Results 1 - 10 of about 13,900,000 for dog walking services.
In the above search query, Google matched "dog walking services" with 13,900,000 with Internet results. Now, it is important to remember that no search engine will provide perfect matches to search queries. In my search, for example, Google only returned one actual dog walking business on page one - the rest were directories of pet sitters and walkers, and organizations of dog walkers.
Next, search for "dog walkers your location" (substitute your city and/or state for "your location.") In my home town, only three out of ten page one results on Google were for actual dog walking services.
The lack of multiple dog walking businesses appearing higher than directories and organizations is good news for dog walkers: It means there is currently wide-open opportunities to get into Google. Because Google wants to return queries with the best possible matches, with the right website marketing strategy and search engine optimization, more dog walking businesses could get into higher search engine results.
Visit Competing Websites
Be sure to visit any websites that show up in the top ten searches that would compete for website traffic. Visit every single one and spend time reading over these sites. Take notes: something is working for them or they would not be appearing on page one. Look to see what their page rank is, are they using social networks? Do they use an SEO company? Who created their website? Is the content fresh and informative?
Try to figure you what is making these sites successful in search engines and then adopt your own strategies to take these sites head on with search engine optimization, Internet marketing, and social network marketing.
If you come up with very few businesses or hits for your Google search terms there are three likely possibilities:
You Chose Poor Search Terms: Poor hits means your keywords are not meshing with popular language used on the web. It is better to adjust your keywords rather than to force new ones. For example, in 2008 I searched Google and found zero matches for "website cartography." Thinking I had found a nice new catchy phrase for my services I coined the phrase "web cartography services." But as of 2010, the term has still not caught on and is now being used by some other businesses to identify different types of services.
No Market: If there are no existing businesses coming up with your search terms (i.e., "fish tank remodeling" brings up a few articles and matches, but none for businesses that offer to remodel fish tanks. There is probably good reason for this: there is little to no market for these services.
Competing Businesses Are Not Properly Marketing To Search Engines: If your search is for something popular, like, "birthday party planning" and you only come up with articles and information and few businesses providing these services, you may have a great opportunity to cut in front of the information sites. Most small business owners toss up a website and then fail to optimize or market their websites, and therefore, are out there but do not show well in search engines.
