How to Leverage Customer Insight Trends Found in Search Data

Big data here, small data there – data is now collected everywhere. And the amount of data available from search engines, the “internet of things,” site analytics, POS systems, third-party sources and qualitative/quantitative research is piling up.

Google now processes more than 40,000 search queries every second, translating to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. That’s a lot of data, but just having access to all this data doesn’t mean that all marketers know how to sift through the data and find guiding insights to drive business results.

To succeed in the mountains of customer data, you must align your marketing strategy with guiding insights found while sifting through this data, leveraging your findings during the right stages of the customer buying cycle.

The job of a search engine is simple; to crawl and build an index of all content found online and then serve the most relevant content to a user who submits a search query (voice search included). As Moz puts it, “Search engines are answer machines. When a person performs an online search, the search engine scours its corpus of billions of documents and does two things: first, it returns only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query; second, it ranks those results according to the popularity of the websites serving the information. It is both relevance and popularity that the process of SEO is meant to influence.”

To continue to provide the best experience for its users, Google and the other guys, like Bing and Yahoo, have been using the search query data they collect to drive innovations such as custom mobile searches, the accelerated mobile project (AMP), personalization, localization, SIRI and voice search. This user data helps inform them (and us when used correctly) about user habits, intent and the language consumers use to find exactly what they’re looking for.

My two favorites from Google are their Trends and Keyword Planning tools.

Google Trends is an online search tool that lets marketers visually see in chart form how often specific keywords, phrases and subject matter have been queried over time by location and language. You can even compare the popularity of terms against one another to identify when certain diction, the choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing, is being used and favored.

Google’s Keyword Planning Tool is found within their AdWords interface and allows us to provide a phrase and see related terms, search volumes, and the level of paid search competition for visibility for these terms. If search volume is low in the results provided here, you know user query volume is low – or that you aren’t using the terminology you think your audience is using.

The bottom line is to know your customers and put their needs first. Using search trend insights allows you to uncover the myth of user intent, to let your strategy be built on data instead of assumptions. These insights will allow you to have the right messaging, assets, channels and timing to connect, engage and make an impact!