The Google Trends SEO experiment
Question: What have Australian F1 driver Mark Webber and Michael Jackson’s autopsy picture (yuk!) got in common?
Answer: They are both current top search queries on Google.
How did we know? Simple, we used a couple of Google tools: Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. They are free, simple to use SEO tools on the internet to help you research the popularity of particular keywords on Google.
Google Trends measures how many searches have been done for specified search terms in relation to the total number of Google searches done over time. The results are then presented as a graph. The Hot Trends tool shows which search terms and keyword phrases are popular right now and is updated hourly. ‘Michael Jackson autopsy picture’ was the 4th most popular search term at the time of writing – a rather gruesome insight into what intrigues the US internet audience.
Google Insights shows which top keyword phrases, or ones that are rising in popularity, are being used over a specified period of time and where. So, for example, you could find out at which point in the year people are searching for beach holidays and compare the results by region. At the time of writing ‘Webber’ was the number 2 rising search term on Google Insights for Australian internet users, reflecting the Australian driver’s recent Formula 1 success.
A word of caution though: The use of random hot keywords may net a larger volume of visitors than usual to your site, but they are likely to achieve a high bounce rate once visitors realise that your site does not contain the information they are looking for. In addition, Google Trends only really highlights the keyword phrases that are most popular in the USA. Remember too that the keywords that are most popular today or this week may not be as popular next week and so your article may not have as much longevity as it might otherwise have if it were targetting a more long term keyword, i.e. that people might search for in the future. Try to use a keyword that is relevant to the subject matter of your website.
Which leads us to the purpose of this blog post: After publishing this post we will be keeping an eye on the amount and type of traffic – if any – it gets as a result of using these two popular keywords. Watch this space….
Tags: Google trends, SEO
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