For the past several years Google has been offering Zeitgeist – the very name is fascinating to me due to the many years I lived in Germany. Zeit means time and geist is commonly translated as ghost – however the term Zeitgeist means something more akin to ‘the spirit of the moment’ – or the cultural climate of an era.

The era part is the only thing that remains of Zeitgeist. Archives exist and run up through the middle of May 2007, which is when it was replaced by Hot Trends, an exciting change from the perspective of a web developer/marketer.

Zeitgeist, though an interesting reference, showed spikes and troughs in the normal lay of the land of search queries – they focused on extreme changes in trends, and that’s just not terribly useful for your average website.

Hot Trends, on the other hand, is HOT! While on the front page of Hot Trends, you will still find a hold over in the tradition of Zeitgeist, it’s the “Search Trends” box at the top where things start to get really exciting!

Before I elaborate on what Hot Trends can do, let me illustrate it’s usefulness with a story:

I live in a small town close to Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin – billed as “the water park capitol of the world” (I am *not* making this up!) Friends of mine own and run one of the B&B’s in Wisconsin Dells and at one point they asked me for some help with their website.

I started by sitting down to tweak the index page of their website and was immediately hit with the question “what is the common name for this product?” I mean I know it’s a B&B and I know that *I* would do a search for “Wisconsin Dells B&B” but what about the other 6 billion people in the world? Are they anal? Would they look for “Bed and Breakfast”? Would they use and “&” or would they say “B and B”. This incident was almost 10 years ago, and I’m sorry to say, but at that time I had to GUESS, and until very recently, the correct answer to that question always haunted me…

Here is the beauty of Hot Trends – not only will it tell you the trends for a term (you can type in “bed and breakfast” (without the quotes) and it will show you the trending over time – a cool piece of info in and of itself… But Hot Trends will also COMPARE different terms and show you exactly how they stack up!

As if that weren’t enough, the left most column under the graph gives information about regional queries and who they stack up. This graph also shows you that “b&b” is the most favored of the three terms by the Irish. All the terms are queried pretty much equally in the UK. Italy does not use “b and b” (makes sense, since “and” is not Italian). And, finally, that most of the folks in the US are well… maybe I should have rephrased the term I used earlier in the article… <grin>

Also you can derive from this column that B&B’s in general are more often queried in Europe than in the US – with the most country querying most frequently at the top and dropping significantly by the time you get to Denmark.

The middle column shows you that Dublin is the city most interested in a B&B and that they are most likely to search for the term “b&b”

And in the far right column we have … Wait a minute! How can Italy be at the top for languages and yet in Regions we have two English speaking countries that out rank them?

Digging into their documentation I found that they “normalize” the data. This means that they divide all the queries for a keyword by the total number of queries. Let’s take Regions as an example; Google will take the total number of queries for “b&b” registered for IP’s in Ireland and divide it by the total number of all queries registered for IP’s in Ireland and find out that proportionally the Irish query for “b&b” more than any other region.

However, when we look at Languages, proportionally speaking, b&b gets queried most by folks who have their language set to the Italian flavor of Google!

I have more… much more… stay tuned and we will get into some incredibly advanced ideas as we combine Google Synonyms and Trends to discover where you should be focusing your efforts – as well as pointing out some of the problems with their “normalization” equations – and in the end, we’ll be able to tell our Inn Keepers exactly where they should be spending their time and money both on SEO and PPC.

~ Sue Bell
www.themezoom.com

Read Part II

Vertical Market Research