GoogleFIGHT! “Website” vs “Web Site”
Posted by Gul Khan in Measurement on July 7th, 2008
While I was writing my previous post about the PetrolWatch Customer Satisfaction Survey results, the text editor kept prompting me that the spelling was “web site” and not “website”. My first reaction was to get on to Google Trends or Googlefight and find out how the rest of the world was spelling it. Here’s how it works:
STEP 1: Go to www.google.com/trends and key in “website, web site” into the text box
Step 2: And the winner is…
If you look at the two lines above the time line, you will see more people search for “website” compared with “web site”. End of argument. I’ll just add “website” to my dictionary. On occasion, we do use this technique in our website development work, especially in areas where we need fast customer insights about which is the most appropriate label to use for navigation, page titles, links and so on.
Why is this important?
Well, if you care about your search engine rankings, you do want to make sure that your keywords match the most popular keywords that your customers are using. For those of you who have had experience designing and managing websites, you will know that finding the right label and wording can sometimes be a nightmare task:
- “Should we call it “cheap flights” or “low fares”? (This example was used by Gerry McGovern in one of his web seminars which I had the pleasure of attending)
- “Point and shoot camera” or “point and click camera”?
In the past, we were in the dark about what is the correct label to use. Now we have free tools at our disposal that give us instant insights.
Googlefight
I’ll show you another tool called Googlefight. It is pretty much the same thing as Google Trends, just funnier and without the trends:
Simply enter the keywords that you want to compare and “make a fight”. You’ll actually see two guy fighting it out on the screen. I couldn’t capture it fast enough but you can try it out for yourself. In this case, we compared “point and shoot camera” with “point and click camera”:
Does it impact online sales?
The bottom line is that if you use the label “point and click camera”, you’re exposing yourself to 8.4 million more search results. For any website that sells these stuff, this number must be staggering. I decided to investigate further and I did a search for “point and click camera” and I found this website called ciao! on the top three of the first page of Google. If you look closely at the title below, you can see that they use the term “point and click”:
According to Googlefight, 1.5 million people would have probably seen ciao’s listing on Google. But what about the other 9.9 million who searched for “point and shoot”? I couldn’t find ciao! listed in the first three pages of the Google search results page based on this keyword.
Dominate both “shoot” and “click”
In my opinion, ciao! should consider creating pages for both these keywords. There are 9.9 million people who search for “point and shoot”. Surely that would have an impact on their online revenues?? Naturally, we have to offset this with the higher cost and effort to get this page listed on the first page of Google based on the “pont and shoot” keyword but it may well be worth the effort. It would be interesting to find out how their online sales for this camera (or their entire website for that matter) would be affected by such an exercise.
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July 10th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Interesting, Gul. The approach you suggest is great, though I feel there is a misunderstanding of demand and supply here. 9.9 million search results is an indication of the number of websites that use the words “point and shoot camera” [ie. supply side] and not the number of searches made by searchers. Of course, one could argue that a large proportion of the people who used “point and shoot camera” might have done so based on some keyword research of their own which showed greater demand for that particular usage, but the GoogleFight numbers by themselves cannot lead us to that conclusion.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Thanks Manoj! I learnt something new today. I just assumed that Googlefight showed the demand. I stand corrected
So to clear it all up, Google Trends shows the number of keyword searches and Googlefight shows the number of websites with these keywords.
August 27th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Thanks for the tip, Gul. Uisng the tool is a useful way to get the ‘right’ terminology. In a way, it goes to show how language usage evolves with changing trends in society.
August 27th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Hi Serena
You’re absolutely right. In fact, you can also use it to find the popularity of websites, personalities, products, etc.
Have a look at this graph:
Facebook vs. Myspace vs. Youtube vs. Wikipedia
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