How Google Trends Can Help You Learn More About Your Visitors

When you develop a domain you might think that you know everything about your visitors however this is often far from the truth. Luckily Google does know a lot about your visitors (or your target visitors) and their free trends tool can help you quickly see who your target visitor really is. Google trends is simply looking at the keyword so you’ll want to give it the specific keyword (or keywords) you would like to target. Right now I’m working hard on Kayaking.org so thought I’d share some of the data here.

For Kayaking.org I would like to know who the typical visitor is that searches for “kayaking” on Google – by entering this keyword into Google trends I can immediately see the top cities where this search traffic comes from:

kayaking_cities

As you can see the top two cities are Vancouver and Auckland…I would have never guessed that – would you? Along with ranking the cities that most frequently search for the term you can also see a search volume map along with specific events that drove the searches:

kayaking_trends_graph(Click to view full size)

This chart can help you better understand which news events really impact your niche and drive search traffic to your target keywords. You can also try to uncover some potential seasonality patterns that you might not be able to see from your domain’s traffic alone.

Google trends is a simple tool that can help you learn a lot about who your site should target, it’s completely free, and chances are you’ve never used it before! So if you’re focusing on development and trying to find-out how to best target your visitors, Google trends could be the tool that helps you take your site to the next level!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton