Maximizing “Trending” opportunities
Here’s a quick tip for Denver-area marketers to get some extra mileage out of hot “trending” topics for your inbound marketing efforts.
Hot, hot, hot!
All major search engines favor content that is fresh and that focuses on highly-trending keyword phrases. You can use this search engine focus to help grow your website’s popularity and your blog’s visibility.
For example, let’s say you are a natural green grocer and that a famous movie star loses 45 pounds on a diet solely of mixed greens. The story hits the newsstands, and suddenly everyone is searching for “mixed greens diet”.
If you knew that, you could add a few articles to your website and blog about the mixed greens diet. The search engines would see that you are providing content about that trend and quickly move you up in the rankings. You’d get a nice burst of traffic.
If only there were some way to check on trending phrases… hmmm
Using Google Trends
Oh, but wait, there is! It’s called “Google Trends.” Go to http://www.google.com/trends/ Type in any phrase and you will see whether search volumes are rising or falling for that phrase. The report even shows specific new stories and whether they affected search volumes.
The top part of the graph you will see is the Search Volume Index, the rise or fall in searches for that phrase. The bottom graph is the News References Volume, which tells you the amount of online media mentions for the phrase.
You can get more advanced reporting at www.google.com/insights/search/ (including seasonality, geography and categories).
You can also see the list of the top 100 hot phrases by clicking the “More Hot Searches” link.
Other Media
It also pays to stay current on TV, radio and print news. If a relevant story seems to be gaining a lot of ground, work it into your website and blog.
For instance, if you see on the news that Frank Bigstar is the movie star who lost 45 pounds on the mixed greens diet, you could mention his name here and there in your blog. Chance are that other readers watching the news will remember Frank’s name and diet, but probably not mixed greens. If you show up for “Frank Bigstar diet,” you’re set.
A word of caution: Be sure you look at whether the keyword phrase you are considering is really relevant to your business. For example, while mixed greens could mean for salad, it could also mean mixed green paint. After you identify a keyword, test it by putting it in Google and see what comes up. Make sure you don’t see a bunch of equally correct but totally irrelevant meanings ranking higher in the search results.
At the same time, remember that no keyword is 100 percent relevant. If more than half of the resulting “long-tail” phrases using that word are relevant to your business, you probably have a winner.
