By David Patrishkoff
Many professionals are fans of various techniques like Six Sigma, Lean, Directed Evolution TRIZ, operational excellence and other business initiatives that they might deem as logical and compelling. Some people prefer individual improvement initiatives and others appreciate elegant combinations of business improvement initiatives. Have you ever wondered if you are alone in your favorite collection of improvement techniques and how many others share your opinions and interests? This article will give you the answer to that question for 22 popular business improvement initiatives and provide you the tools to answer that question on your own with real Google search data and free Google analysis tools.
Google analysis tools can track the popularity of any key word or key phrase, including individual and hybrid Business Improvement Initiatives based on current and historical data for Google searches. Why should we use Google data for analysis? Well it is because they are used for about 85% of all searches on the internet, worldwide. Here are 2 examples of data collection and analysis that can be carried out with Google tools:
- The average number of monthly worldwide Google searches during 2011 for 22 different business initiative key words / phrases.
- The multi-year trends (2004-2011) in monthly worldwide Google searches for 22 different business initiative key words/phrases.
I selected 22 business initiatives for this analysis. In case you are interested in a different mix of initiatives than I chose, I will show you how to do that analysis yourself with some of the Google analysis tools available. This will give you a chance to start 2012 by comparing your opinions against some data to make sure you can compare your perceptions against reality. Be aware that in this short article, I am showing you just a small part of my research project and only a few of Google’s analysis tools. I do not attempt to interpret the data shown here but to just offer thought provoking raw and ranked data for your consideration. Some of my deeper analysis of this data will be posted in future articles and blogs.
1) Keyword Analysis Topic #1: The average number of monthly worldwide Google searches during 2011 for 22 different business initiative key words/phrases.
You can do this analysis with the Google Keyword Tool Box. In that Tool Box, click on the Google Keyword Tool. An example of how to fill out this box to get the number of average monthly searches for the keyword “Six Sigma” worldwide and for the USA is shown below.
The above analysis tool tells us that the global monthly average for the past 12 months of searches for “Six Sigma” was 1 million. The US monthly average number of searches for “Six Sigma” was 368,000.
The chart below shows the monthly worldwide popularity in 2011 for keyword searches in Google for 22 different business initiatives. This data was captured from the Google Keyword Tool.
The numbers for the above chart were captured for the “Business and Industrial Category” and only include the number of searches for “Desktop and Laptop Devices”, since an “all web search” category is not available for this tool. The above chart ranks the most popular of the 22 keywords entered for worldwide searches. This worldwide search can also be narrowed down to look at any individual country keyword popularity for Google searches.
2) Keyword Analysis Topic #2: The multi-year trends (2004-2011) in monthly worldwide Google searches for 22 different business initiative key words/phrases.
Trend charts are important because the previously listed monthly average charts can be misleading, especially if the data is trending throughout the year or over several years. Google offers a variety of ways to determine keyword search popularity over time: Google Trends, Google Insights for Search and Google Correlate, which are all interesting analysis methods you might want to explore in 2012. It can help to take the guesswork out of what direction things are headed and can help determine which keywords correlate with other keywords.
The chart below shows how to fill out the Google Insights for Search window if you were interesting in comparing the popularity for the top 5 following keywords on the previous graph: Lean, Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, Total Quality Management and TRIZ from 2004 – the present day, which was Jan 3, 2012 for this example. Be careful in making conclusions about a full current month if you only have a few days of data for it, as is the case here for January, 2012. You can only enter a maximum of 5 terms at a time in this tool. This tool gives you a variety of graphs, some of which are shown here. Different search criteria can be chosen to meet your research needs. If you have a Google account, the numbers will be shown on the graphs as displayed below.
The “Totals” in the top right area of the above graph are relative numbers, not actual search numbers. The above graph shows that search term “Six Sigma” dropped below “Lean” in 2008 and continues that drop in popularity. The key word Lean appears to be quite stable for this “business and industrial” category but that might not be the case for other categories. The other 3 keywords on the graph (Balanced Scorecard, Total Quality Management and TRIZ) are so much lower in popularity than Lean and Six Sigma that it is hard to see their trends on the graph. To see what they really look like, make a chart with each of those key phrases on their own chart. The regional interest chart and map shows us that Denmark has the most interest in Lean while India has much more interest in Six Sigma compared to other countries.
The next “Google Insights for Search” generated chart shown below displays the search results for the only 5 key phrases of the 22 that had a slight or strong uptrend ever since 2004 for “all categories”. All other search terms or words had a flat or declining trend. The trends of each initiative can be seen if they are charted separately. Be aware that when you enter a search term that does not have many search results, Google might not make a chart from that data.
The table below shows the results of such analysis on the 22 chosen keywords. The keywords listed higher on the table are in an uptrend. The keyword “Lean” is very popular with a slight down trend in its popularity as a search keyword ever since 2004. The further down on the table that a keyword is listed, the more severe the downtrend in popularity over time for that key word/phrase. Lean Six Sigma has the most impressive uptrend since 2004. It is still lagging the keyword “Lean” in total popularity but it is showing an impressive uptrend.
In summary, Google offers some analytical tools to help you find out what is a popular search phrase on Google for the world or a specific area. Popularity of a search phrase does not mean that it is the right thing to do or the best path to follow, it just tells us what is the most popular search term. Every business has to take such information and decide how to interpret this information and make the appropriate decisions that meet their business goals. This article was just intended to start such a discussion, not conclude it.
The chart below is an active Google Trends chart that you can interact with to include your desired parameters. If you select "edit", you can change the keywords to be charted. If you select "max" for the time frame, the chart will be updated with Google search data starting in 2004. The drop down arrow will allow you to select different countries for the search analysis. If you select a search term with little data, Google might not create a chart for that term. You can only select a maximum of 5 key words/phrases for the analysis. The numbers on the Y-Axis are just relative numbers for the search results and do not represent actual amounts of searches for the search terms.
Keep in mind that the shorter the key phrase search, such as “Lean”, the more that search could include other topics that might have nothing to do with your targeted topic of interest. Searching for acronyms like TQM (Total Quality Management) and BSC (Balanced Scorecard) are also risky since these acronyms stand for many different things and not just for the topic you are interested in.
About the Author: David Patrishkoff is President of E3 Extreme Enterprise Efficiency® LLC. He has trained 3,000+ professionals, worldwide from over 55 different industries in Lean, Six Sigma and other advanced problem solving techniques. His proven specialty is the resolution of highly diverse “Mission Impossible” issues for organizations. Visit his website for training, coaching and consulting services: http://www.eeefficiency.com
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