Google Search Insights Shows Interest In Financial Planning Over Time

I've been doing some research into state of the art web search analytic tools to refine our own marketing campaigns here at AdviceAmerica. Google has an insanely interesting tool now called Search Insights which tells marketers how the relative search trends for a particular keyword or concept varies over time, and to a (much) lesser extent what might be impacting those trends. You can even get trend insights for keywords based on seasonality, or geographic distribution (city, country, whatever). 

I know a lot of financial advisors are ramping up their social media marketing along with taking advantage of online search marketing (to the extent their firms allow), but this is not a how-to for SEO analysis. What I found interesting was what happened when I analyzed the trends in search on the keyword "financial planning" to see how consumer interest may have changed over time. You can get the full results or dig for other insights yourself here. Here's the main trend report:

The chart is a relative scale from 0-100, so we aren't looking at absolute search numbers, but the relative frequence of "financial planning" searches compared to all other searches over time. From a relative peak of 100 it has steadily drifted downward so that the percentage of searches for "financial planning" is only about 40% of what it was five years ago. (I won't go into details about what the letters mean, and believe me, I'm no expert on this stuff, but it looks like Google Labs has some more work to do. If you link to the page to try it yourself, I think you'll see what I mean).

Fortunately, I attribute this less to an overall decline in the interest of financial planning, but that the web has gotten much more cluttered with less relevant stuff and with more access by kids, so that while the percentage trend is down, I'm quite confident that the overall search volume must be going up. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader to prove anecdotally, since Google doesn't provide search volumes here.

One definate trend worth noting is the spike each year from a low at the end of the year up to a new higher value in January. People obviously aren't interested in financial planning as we head into the holidays and Xmas shopping takes over, but come January, paralleling the trend for people going on a diet, I guess, people start searching out financial planners to get the new year back in order. This is a profound and consistent seasonal effect, which I guess you could anticipate, but I haven't seen so clearly demonstrated with factual evidence like here.

Another cool datapoint is where is "financial planning" the hottest right now? Go ahead take a guess. According to the map below, its Australia:

And if you follow this link, to drill down slightly further, you find that the hottest region is the island of Tasmania. Go figure!

Anyway, like a lot of Google tools, the amount of interesting insights that can be gained are overwhelming, IF you've got the time to play around and experiment. Let me know if you find some other interesting insights for the financial planning market or your practice overall.

Comments

[Susan Weiner]

Very interesting. You'd think financial planning searches would increase with market turmoil. It would be interesting if you could get data on actual numbers of searches.

[Kim25SERENA]

Some time ago, I did need to buy a good house for my corporation but I did not have enough money and couldn't purchase anything. Thank goodness my mother suggested to try to take the business loans at reliable bank. Thence, I did so and was happy with my commercial loan.