If you haven’t already checked out Google Insights For Search, you really should. Like Google Trends, this awesome tool allows you to figure out how a search query’s popularity has trended over time and compare the trends between these search queries.

But Insights For Search takes this functionality a step further, allowing you to find top searches by location, time range, or any combination thereof.   You can also see the top search terms that include a keyword of your choice. Insights will also make projections of future trends.

While it’s kind of fun to know that “Michigan” is the most popular search term in Michigan (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#geo=US-MI&cmpt=geo), it isn’t immediately apparent how you would use this kind of information to improve your AdWords account.

Here’s an example we ran into recently when we were able to use Insights For Search to inform the way we built out an AdWords account for a client:

The Detroit metro area is home to a large and vibrant Arab community. According to the 2000 census, Arab-Americans comprised 30% of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. Our client, naturally, wondered if we should be targeting the Arabic language and creating Arabic keyword lists since they wanted to target this region. Google Insights for Search to the rescue!

We ran keyword searches within Google Insights and compared the several common terms based on the top searches in Iraq and Lebanon (since Dearborn’s Arab population is primarily composed of Iraqi and Lebanese immigrants or their descendants). In this Insights For Search chart, you’ll find the terms “photos” (blue), “games” (red), and “ramadan” (orange) in Arabic graphed to show their relative popularity in the US. We also tested some terms like “soccer” and “flights” that we thought might be popular, but they were not popular enough to register results.
The states that seem to have a lot of people doing Arabic language searches are Virginia, California, North Carolina, and Florida. According to the last US census, the only state in that group with a larger Arab community than Michigan is California.

It’s possible there aren’t a significant amount of Arabic language searches in Michigan because the Arab population here is longer-standing, much of which immigrated during the first half of the twentieth century. It’s also possible that many of the Lebanese Arabs might prefer to search in French over Arabic, since Lebanon uses both languages, and American keyboards are better-suited to French than Arabic.

Whatever the reason members of the Arab community in Michigan do not search in Arabic, the important question has already been answered – it seems that it is not worth the rather significant investment of time and money to translate keyword lists to Arabic when targeting the Dearborn area.

Tags: Google, Google AdWords, Google Insights for Search, Google Trends, Keywords