As promised, here’s a follow up to last month’s experiment with Google Hot Trends. In my previous post, I explained how Hot Trends let’s you see what terms people are currently searching for on the web – which can be helpful to your search engine optimization efforts because if you know what people are looking for online, you can tailor your website content and blog posts to their interests.

On June 9th, folks were searching for all sorts of terms; I chose to focus on two terms – “tree with purple flowers” and “Spanish port.” I wrote about these terms in my blog post and then tracked our web statistics to see if those terms drew increased traffic to our site and blog. Indeed, we saw increased traffic. Out of the top 10 search phrases, 3 of them were related to “tree with purple flowers” and “Spanish port.” That’s all fine and dandy, but my experiment begs a few questions:

1. Will your site get more traffic if you talk about the terms listed in Hot Trends? Yes it probably will, but…

2. Is it the TARGETED traffic you want from people who actually care about your products, services, or organization? No, not if you’re a web and multimedia company talking about purple flowers, which have nothing to do our customers’needs or pains.

3. OK, so how can I use Hot Trends to write relevant site content and blog entries and hopefully get better search engine ranking? Here’s how:

On Friday, June 29, 2007, several of the top 100 keyphrases in Hot Trends were related to Facebook (the online social networking hub). That day Facebook suffered a lot of extended downtime, and people were searching the web to figure out what was going on and why they couldn’t access one of their favorite sites. I could use this search trend to my advantage by writing about a related topic as follows:

1. I could write about building an online community (using Facebook, Myspace, and a bazillion other examples). I could talk about how to plan, create, and market that community, and point out the importance of making sure that community is secure, not filled with spam, and scalable.

2. OR I could write an edgier post about how Facebook (and others like it) seem more like popularity contests than real “communities” where people connect deeply, care about each other, fight for a common cause, and strive to improve the world around them.

Either way, these posts (both of which I may write in the near future) would benefit our company and our search engine ranking because they would speak to the needs of my company’s target audience (organizations who want to build and/or improve their own online communities) AND they would also help position me as an expert in my field AND they would be relevant to the terms people are searching on Google. Sounds like a win-win-win to me ;-)

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