In my work as an SEO (search engine optimizer), I use Google Trends on a daily basis. With Google Trends, you can see a chart showing how many people searched for a given term over time. The charts go back to 2004, but you can also zoom in on the most recent 12 months or 30 days. Charts can be generated for world-wide search, or specific countries and regions. Google Trends also provides a list of “hot searches” for the current day, updated every half-hour or so. The hot searches at the time of this writing, for example, include the following:
- “bill clinton speech,”
- “joe biden speech”
- “register to vote online,”
not to mention
- “bo biden”
- “mccain vp”
- “obama kisses jill biden”
Corporations and businesses are wise to keyword research, and the most on-the-ball ones use Google Trends as an tool in search engine optimization. By showing what people are searching for, the tool can help us gain insights into what’s on people’s minds, and by extension, what is important to them.
There are other, more quantitative keyword research tools, including Google AdWords, Keyword Discovery, and Wordtracker, that can give even more detail on what people are searching for. This is important if you wish to drill down into less common phrases that may not have enough traffic to show up in Google Trends.
My plan for this blog is to look at these trends from a pollster’s perspective: what are people searching for? What are folks in Ohio asking about? What are folks in the South wondering about? What terminology is being used? Stay tuned, and feel free to post your questions in the comments below!
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