San Francisco — Anyone having a website knows how important their Google search rankings are. However, many sites maintain that these measurement services have incorrect data for them, and that has not helped by the fact that all of the services seem to have different data.
Marketers and site owners can now rejoice as Google Inc. offers deeper access to the underlying figures for users’ Web searches, with the relative popularity and seasonality of search terms thanks to an expansion of Google’s Trends service.
Google Trends, a service Google started two years ago as an entertaining but limited way to track searched-for keywords, has unveiled a new tool for inquiring minds looking to find out more on any given site. Like tracking services Compete and Alexa which use tool bars to grab user data, Google Trends now lets you pop in specific domains and compare basic traffic information about any .com site (or .tv, .biz, .net, and so on) using nothing more than organic user searches.
The service marks a notable openness for Google, which is privy to keeping its data locked up tight. Google’s service gathers its numbers a bit differently than other traffic comparison sites. It looks at the search volume for a site, anonymous Google Analytics statistics and “other third-party market research,” which again, seems a bit vague for a site trying to put out credible data.
Included are daily traffic numbers in users (sent from Google search), where in the world the users are coming from, and related sites that were either searched for or visited in that same session. All of this information is color coded, and up to five sites at a time can be pitted head-to-head, with bar graphs and charts for each.
Besides, like most of Google’s tools, Google Trends for Websites is free. Simply sign in, and type a site’s address (or more than one address, if you want), and you will get to see a graph representing its daily unique visitor count over a period of time. Sites those people “also visited” and “also searched for” are listed, along with proportional traffic bars, as well.
“One of the more interesting uses for this is comparing sites with traffic that surges around product releases.”
Now Google is giving users the ability to search across terms in its database, instantly chart how they compare to other search terms, and then export the underlying numerical data into a common spreadsheet format to compare with other data.
This seems to offer all sorts of opportunities for competitor research, ally-making, and general site-to-site comparisons.
On the Webmaster Central Blog, R. J. Pittman writes, “Keep in mind that Trends for Websites is a Google Labs product and that we are experimenting with ways to improve the quality of the data. Because data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources you rely on for web traffic information.”
“Still, we believe that a lot of people have just found a new way to spend the impending weekend.”