There are free tools out there that will give you an insight as to what people are typing into those search engines everyday.

The tools that we will be using are Wordtracker and Overture. They both provide information on what "users" are searching for. When you enter in a word or phrase, these tools will tell you how many times that word or phrase was searched last month.

There is a site that provides the information from these tools free of charge. You can find it here.

Open up the link above in a new window or tab and Let's do an example search of the word "God". You should now see two lists of what searches contained the word God last month and how many times each search was conducted a day on average. Go ahead and play around with the tool a bit to get a feel for how it works.

Notice that the two lists are not exact matches but show some similarities. That is because they are getting their search data from different sources.

A couple of important things to note. Overture, the list on the right, combines the plural and single form of terms. Do a keyword search for the word "car" and you will see what I mean. Notice Overture shows only the singular version in the results when in fact it is combining the searches for both "car" and "cars". Also Overture does not necessarily show the exact order in which words were entered into the search engine. It may show "tea iced" when we know people actually typed in "iced tea". You may have already noticed that Overture also omits linking words like "and".

Wordtracker, the list on the left, does a pretty good job of showing the words people searched for just as they were typed in. It is a good idea to compare both results to get a better understanding of what people are actually searching for.

Feel free to leave questions or comments.