In my work as an SEO (search engine optimizer), I use keyword search popularity tools on a daily basis. Using Google Trends, for example, I 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 (August 27, 2008), for example, include the following:
- “bill clinton speech,”
- “joe biden speech”
- “register to vote online,”
not to mention
- “mccain vp”
- “obama kisses jill biden”
Other free search or terminology trend tools include Google Insights for Search, Facebook Lexicon, and Trendistic (for Twitter), among others.
Corporations and businesses are wise to keyword research, and the most on-the-ball ones use search trend tools as part of their search engine optimization repertoire. By showing what people are searching for, these tools 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 or Google Insights.
In this blog, I look at search 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 thanks for reading!
- The Google Pollster
The Google Pollster is Gradiva Couzin, founding partner at Gravity Search Marketing LLC. Contact gradiva at yourseoplan.com.