Let’s say you want to check out the competition. You want to see the states where your competitor’s products are most popular. One way to do that is to commission a market research study. Depending on the product, that could be expensive and the results difficult to obtain.

Or you could go to Google Search Insights and in 2 minutes get a quick and dirty snapshot, state by state, of product popularity.

Google Search Insights is a goldmine of data. And its use doesn’t need to be limited to competitor products.

Let’s say you are a Web designer, and you want to know if you should be offering templates and set-up services for certain software applications.

To show you how to use the Google Search Insights data, I tried an experiment. I checked Google Search Insights for two software applications: WordPress and AMember.

WordPress, no surprise, is pretty popular all over the United States (the deeper blue the color, the more searches in that geographic area):

You can see, however, that WordPress is more popular in certain states than others, as judged by the number of searches using that word. California, Utah, Washington and Oregon have had the most searches since 2004.

Depending on which state your Web design business is located in, this could be helpful. It could be helpful even if you primarily market over the Web. For instance, if you were considering optimizing your business website for a local location, or wanted to run pay-per-click ad campaigns to advertise your services, or were considering which conferences and public events to exhibit at, this kind of geographical information could be a useful data point.

Google also breaks down the information by identifying specific search terms. Knowing those search terms is itself helpful.

But perhaps WordPress wasn’t the best example, because it is wildly popular all over the U.S. Let’s take an up-and-coming application that is less well known, a membership site software application called AMember.

Now you see a very different picture — here the popularity is clustered in about 10 states, including Colorado, California, Texas, Florida and some others. This may give you good insights into how and where to market your development services for AMember.

Google Search Insights is certainly not the ONLY piece of intelligence you would use. The information has built-in limitations — for instance, it is based on search volume, not actual buying behavior. But as a rough indicator of public interest and demand, it’s useful information. And it’s free and only takes a few minutes to get.

You can run this kind of test with any product or online software application. You can also break it down by time period, and see growth trends over time, too. You can also compare popularity of an app in different countries all over the world.

How you use this data has endless possibilities — for instance, use it to determine the popularity of collaborative tools used in the workplace. Your imagination is the limit.

Go to Google Search Insights to run your own tests and experiments.

(Hat tip to Aaron Wall for the idea, who pointed out Google Search Insights in his SEOBook Community.)