Track search demand for your brand and category

Category demand is the total monthly search volume for the searches a buyer makes when they need what you sell but haven't picked a product yet. The hard part is choosing those searches well, because the total is only as meaningful as the list behind it.

Kite builds the list from the words your buyers use, which aren't always the words your team uses. A company that calls its product a "revenue operations platform" might find that buyers mostly search for "sales pipeline software" or "CRM for small business." Kite starts from the problems your customers describe and the category you compete in, then uses DataForSEO's related searches and keyword ideas to find the phrasings people actually type, along with how often each one is searched.

Kite then sorts the searches into a few themes and checks what each search is for. A project management company might end up with one theme for general searches like "project management software," one for team-specific searches like "task tracker for marketing teams," and one for the planning views buyers ask for, like "Gantt chart tool." Kite leaves out searches that share your words but not your buyers. "Project manager salary" has plenty of volume, but nobody searching it is shopping for software.

You can add searches you care about or remove ones that don't fit. Once you approve the list, Kite keeps it fixed, because a list that changes every month makes the trend meaningless.

Kite answers this question by comparing each month's search volume with the same month a year earlier. DataForSEO keeps monthly search volume going back several years, so Kite can show you a long history on the first day instead of waiting months to collect it.

The year-over-year comparison matters because most categories have seasons. Searches for tax software spike every spring. Searches for fitness apps jump in January and fade by March. If you compare March with January, it looks like your market is collapsing when it's only following its usual calendar. Comparing March with last March shows whether this year's season is bigger or smaller than the last one. Kite also adds up the most recent twelve months and compares that total with the twelve months before it, which smooths out any single strange month.

Kite reads the trend for each theme separately, because a category rarely moves as one block. Overall searches for "email marketing software" might be flat while searches for "email marketing for Shopify" grow 40 percent. That second number is the useful one, because it points at a group of buyers whose needs are growing faster than the market around them.

Kite also tells you how much to trust each number. Search volumes are monthly estimates based on Google's data, and the most recent month usually isn't available yet. Small searches with a few dozen monthly searches jump around from month to month, so Kite judges those by their direction over a year rather than any single month. By default Kite checks searches in the United States, and it can check another country when that's where your buyers are.

Kite tracks branded search volume by pulling the monthly history for every common way people search for your company. That usually includes your company name, your name written as one word, your website address, and your website address with a space where the dot goes. People type all of these, and the totals can differ a lot.

Kite also checks whether your name means something else. A bakery called Crumb can't learn much from searches for "crumb," because most of those people are looking for a recipe. In cases like that, Kite tracks the versions that clearly mean your company, such as "Crumb bakery" or "crumbbakery.com," and tells you why it left the plain name out.

When you connect Google Search Console, Kite adds a first-party view. Search Console records the searches where your site appeared in Google's results, with clicks and impressions for each one, and keeps about 16 months of history. Kite separates the searches that include your brand name from everything else and reads the branded impressions month by month. Your site almost always appears first when someone searches your name, so branded impressions follow branded search demand closely. If DataForSEO's estimate and your Search Console numbers move in the same direction, you can trust the trend. If they disagree, Kite tells you and explains which one is more likely to be right.

Branded search volume is one of the most practical measures of brand awareness, because people only search for a company they've heard of. Kite turns it into an awareness measure by putting it next to two other numbers.

The first is your competitors' branded searches. Kite pulls the same monthly history for each competitor in your wiki and works out your share of search, which is your branded search volume divided by the total branded search volume for you and your competitors together. If your branded searches grew 15 percent but your main competitor's grew 60 percent, your awareness fell behind even though your own number went up. Marketing researchers, most notably Les Binet, have found that share of search tends to move before market share does, which makes it an early sign of where a market is heading. For more on the measure itself, see What Is Share of Search, and How Do You Measure It for Your Brand? Coming soon .

The second is the size of your category. Comparing your branded searches with your category searches shows how much of the market already knows your name. If your category gets 40,000 searches a month and your brand gets 400, there's a lot of room for awareness to grow, and Kite will weigh that when it plans your marketing.

Kite also lines up changes in branded searches with the work your team did. It knows the launches, campaigns, and press coverage recorded in your wiki and on your initiatives board, so it can tell you when a jump in branded searches came the month after a product launch, or when a podcast appearance left no trace at all. That makes branded search a way to judge awareness work that's otherwise hard to measure.

Search demand changes slowly, so a monthly check is the right rhythm. You can ask Kite to run the same check every month and deliver it where you want it: a Slack channel, an email, or a conversation in the Kite web app. Each update shows how your category themes, your branded searches, and your share of search moved since the last one, along with Kite's explanation of why. If you'd rather keep the numbers in one place, Kite can build a dashboard at a stable link that refreshes its data whenever you open it.

The numbers also feed Kite's own work. When a theme in your category is growing, Kite can research the searches inside it, plan the pages your site is missing, write them in your brand voice, and publish them after you approve, either on a site Kite hosts or through your connected content system. When your category has a strong season, Kite can schedule the related content to go out ahead of the peak instead of during it. And when branded searches rise after a launch, Kite can check that people searching your name find a homepage and search listing that make it easy to take the next step.