Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

According to this from Hitwise, searches for credit cards have doubled, presumably as people gear up for the holidays. Apparently this increase in searches happens in November every year.

Labels: hitwise, keywords

Logically, when I search for things, there are certain descriptive words I use to find what I am looking for. I might be looking for "low cost health insurance" or "cheap flights", or even "free music". Different people search differently of course, but there are definitely more popular trends or ways of describing what you're looking for. Bill Tancer from HitWise recently posted some data on his blog about the words people use to look for deals, discounts, and otherwise value-oriented search terms. A few clear trends emerged, including the fact that people search for "discount" when looking for consumer goods, "cheap" when searching for travel, and "free" when looking for electronic downloads, music, or other low priced items that could conceivably be offered for free. It's important to understand the way people search, because even though a cheap and discount travel might mean exactly the same thing, your choice of words can make a huge difference in traffic to your site. Do your keyword research and then check your log files to see how people are finding your site.

Labels: hitwise, keyword research, keywords

Since this blog is called Search Trends, and due to the industry I'm in (SEO), I am very interested in what people are searching for. Most of the time, my clients don't care about what the most popular searches are, they just care about the most popular searches for their industry. However, I find it very interesting to see what keywords people are searching for. Many search engines and social media sites offer up data showing the most popular searches.

Rand and friends over at SEOMoz have recently released another cool free tool, the Popular Searches tool that compiles popular search data from several data sources.

I like that this tool pulls from a variety of sources--blog search (technorati), web search (Yahoo, Google, AOL, Ask, Lycos), ecommerce (eBay and Amazon), social media (flickr, delicious). I'd like to see all this data somehow weighted and pooled into a single database that could be sorted and analyzed over specific time periods. It would be interesting to see search trends for specific products, or music bands, genres, etc. But it's definitely easier than going to each of these sites on your own to try to figure out what's hot.

Labels: keywords, popular searches, search trends

I noticed another reference the other day in Sean Ammirati's blog post quoting a Google engineer (Udi Manber) as saying that 20-25% of all searches on Google are unique--meaning that almost 1 out of 4 searches are for something that has never been searched for on Google. He also mentioned that searcher expectations and needs will continue to evolve. This makes for some interesting issues for the search engines as well as us search marketers. How can we optimize for keywords and phrases that people haven't even searched on yet?

We need to look at search in terms of relevancy and overall theme rather than exact keyword phrases. We need to provide quality content and products that will meet specific needs of the consumer, rather than just be "optimized" for a certain keyword.

Don't get me wrong, keywords are still important and will continue to be for a while, but we need to recognize the importance of being relevant outside of simple keyword phrases to build a long-term, sustainable business.

Labels: keywords, seo

I'm surprised this hasn't shown up in the news before now, but apparently, the governor of my good state of Utah just signed a Utah law last month that makes it illegal for search advertisers to bid on their competitors' trademarked keywords. (here's the law) There are obviously two sides to the argument--most advertisers want to bid on their competitors' keywords while not allowing competitors to do the same to them--but that's not the point of this post. The point is, it is a complete waste of the legislature's time (and my tax dollars) to create this law. It's a pointless law that won't ever hold up--it's an issue that has been rehashed so many times and will continue to be for as long as the search engines offer keyword advertising. My personal feeling is that there should be no restrictions on trademark bidding at all, but the search engines actually have somewhat strict and I think very fair guidelines as to how advertisers can bid on trademarked terms. What's the point of having a law that's only valid in Utah to disallow trademark bids? It's a law to fix something that isn't broken! It's stupid! What a joke.

In fact, it's going to cause a lot more problems and cost the Utah tax payers a lot of money as they go through legal battles to try to defend their stupid law, which is very annoying. Besides being annoying, it's getting more than a little embarrassing how clueless our legislature is when it comes to enacting lame Internet laws...as pointed out by Eric Goldman.

Unfortunately, we're living up the reputation we have as clueless hicks here in Utah.

Oh, yeah, it was slashdotted and I'm sure will be all over the news (at least the news/blogs I read) by tomorrow.

Labels: duh, keywords, laws, ppc, trademark, utah

I just noticed a comment from a few days ago on my post about the WordTracker free keyword tool. It was from Hilton at Trellian, the makers of Keyword Discovery. He mentioned that they have also jumped on bandwagon and are offering a free version of their tool. Well, it's about time. It's a good time to catch people's attention as Yahoo's tool is working only some of the time and may go down forever any day now (we'll see if it really happens) it's been 50/50 on whether it works for me the past couple weeks.

I've used Keyword Discovery for a while and I've been happy with it. The price of the paid version is more than WordTracker, but I like the ability to save a lot more projects and it's a lot more user friendly for building keyword lists. I have my doubts about the freshness of their data (is it really the most recent 12 months?), and I don't know exactly where their data is coming from. Their database of searches is pretty big--supposedly going back 12 months--but it's still a tiny sample compared to the total number of actual searches. This could cause issues of low searches or no searches for smaller niche keywords, but overall the tool does a pretty good job of offering up ideas on keywords to optimize your site for.

Also, I should mention one of the best aspects of this tool compared to the Overture tool is that they don't lump together misspellings and plurals. They show you the actual searches for words so you can see how people are actually searching.

Give the keyword tool a test drive

Labels: free tools, keyword research, keyworddiscovery, keywords