Joe Hayes {dot} Org

Where have I been? Well, extremely busy with local projects and folks breathing down my neck to get things done. Eh, good problem to have I guess. Been so busy actually I just now got a chance to read through some of my favorite blogs, namely Matt Cutts (head of the spam team at Google) – and I came accross a post late last month about Google Trends.

Basically, it offers a free service similar to that of Alexa,  Quantcast or Compete - of which the latter has been my primary indicator of competitor’s traffic. Neither one, however, including Google Trends is going to give you an accurate measure of traffic but for the most part they’d all give you a good comparison. Note that I’m referring to trends on “websites” not “searches” – which is also useful in it’s own regards.

I personally am going to prefer the use of Google Trends now, over Compete for traffic analysis, mainly because Google is the main source of traffic for most websites and would be a great way to measure the potential of websites you’re doing SEO work for.

One of the drawbacks of the new Google Trends service, unfortunately, leave new or low traffic websites drawing a blank with no data showed. Apparently there is some sort of threshold a website must reach before the allmighty “G” will spend resources to track it. Another is that you don’t really get much data, like search terms etc. for your competitors as with some of the other services, but again in my opinion it’s the most valuable indicator of search traffic – at least from Google.

One thing I really like is the “Also searched for” and “Also visited” data… once again this is very simple and very limited – but very accurate information based on the traffic levels Google delivers.  And something important to point out is that, if you sign into Google, you’ll see estimated traffic numbers on the Y axis of the graph… which seems to be about 70% of the actual unique visitors the handful of sites I checked actually receive.

One question that keeps coming to mind is… where does Google get this information? It’s no secret they track clickthroughs on their search results (the redirect link gives that away), but do they also get data from their famous Toolbar?

Overall, I like the tool very much. While the data is not as comprehensive as it’s competitors (discussed earlier), I believe what little is shown is very accurate (at least for comparisons) and a very valuable SEO tool if you know how to use it. I suppose it’s at least good for determining the traffic potential for niches you’re working on.