Hi everybody, recently I was cleaning my projects folder and stumbled upon a script that gathers data from Google suggestions. It was made a while ago. So I thought about turning it into a web app (I know they exist already) and adding some extra features like excluding some keywords or gathering keyword difficulty on the fly (from, say, Ubersuggest), and adding some other features that are lacking from other similar tools. Would you personally use it? If you would but you need some special features, feel free to post it here, I'll see if I can do it because I want to make the tool useful, not to make it just... to make it, you know. Thanks
So, Google search shows recently popular search items. So you want to scrape that? What benefit would it have? How could the info be used? Just curious.
Yes, correct - as you said, search hints show recently popular search items. The benefit is pretty simple: it can give some insights into what people really search for. First of all, it can walk you from just keywords to long-tail keywords (because it scrapes some related queries as well). Second, combined with the keyword difficulty and volume it can highlight some interesting queries or give you an understanding of which terms to use and how to build your SEO strategy. And third, it can help to find some content ideas that are really within the users' interest.
I have 3 websites which you can see in my footer. I would use it for choosing key word phrases for my web pages and for google advertising maybe. I think you need to collect them over time and put them in a database. Then you can produce some kind of list of what is popular but under utilized. Like if lots of people are searching on a 3 word phrase but no websites seem to already be targeting that, then that would be a great title to put on a website and sprinkle in the h1 tags for organic searches, and someone could also put them in their google advertising phrases for exact matches. So you need 2 inputs. What are common searches and which of those are not very competitive. To see if they are under utilized you could do a google search using some automation and see if the websites that come up are not close matches to the phrase. If someone then creates a page that uses that phrase a lot they would show up top, which is search engine gold if that phrase is searched on a lot. I kind of doubt Google doesn't already have all this figured out though. When you put phrases into their advertising engine they often say "underutilized" so they ignore it. However, that only means that phrase won't work for advertising but it can still work for organic hits. It is actually annoying that Google Advertising works like this. What they are doing is saying, "Hey there is no competition for this phrase so we can't charge a lot for it. Why would we show you at the top of the page for pennies." I bet this was something that developed over time. Probably in the early days of Google adwords you could put the weirdest phrase on the planet in there, say exact match, and if someone happened to type that in you are at the top for pennies a click. So, if there isn't going to be an action for that phrase that drives the price up to like 25 cents or even a dollar a click then they don't want to deal with you. Annoying! Only silver lining is that maybe organic search doesn't work like this. That I know of, or maybe they just ignore "weird" phrases for that too so that you only show up for "known competitive phrases" and will be way down that page if you don't match for them. I doubt this is the case for organic though because there would be no way I could search on error messages from software for example. Regardless, we really need some search engine/advertising competitors in a bad way. Maybe with an AI spider you could just run millions of phrases through them and find holes in their armor so to speak. A hole would be a phrase that a lot of people search on but that there is no competition for. Of course that hole will never show up in their "frequently searched on list" because they know about those so we are kind of back where we started. So how do you find what people are searching on without Google knowing? That is where they have a big advantage over us. They have all the data.
@phoenixtropicals Wow! Thank you so much for such a detailed answer! Yes, totally agree. Paid ads indeed are what companies are interested in. But for sure, it's annoying. Absolutely! Paid ads are useful, but organic traffic is... eternal So they can attract different users in different ways. Maybe, it would be nice to collect some data from the paid ads and use it in the summary too. Thank you again! I want to find at least 5-10 people who are interested in this tool because it will take some time for me to repurpose it into the web app, so I want to make sure that it is useful. So if you don't mind, I'll contact you when/if I find enough people and share some details and the link for you to test and use it. And to gather some feedback P.S. sorry, I wanted to like your reply, but didn't find the Like button