What’s popular in SEO?

As an experiment last week, I tweeted President Donald Trump. I got the expected spike in the number of tweets, around 430 thousand impressions, which I never ordinarily get. The numbers here aren’t the important point. The reason I did this was to find out what would happen, and it led me to looking into what other ways we can use Google Trends data to improve business.

We know Amazon is coming to Australia sometime this year and is bringing with it two-hour delivery and the whole box and dice. We also know that Amazon accounts for well over 40% of the online sales in the US. Here in the office, that started us talking about the biggest online retailers in Australia. We did a Google Trends search and found that two of our biggest e-commerce sites, Big W and Kogan, ranked similar to Amazon in the number of searches. Once Amazon’s here, what’s that going to do to the rankings of those other two brands? We’ll be watching.

Another way to use Google Trends is to find out where you should be concentrating your efforts. Do a search on social media networks and you’ll find that Facebook leads the pack by a fair distance. Interest in Facebook has held steadily higher over time.

I did another search on an Australian politician who’s splitting off and forming his own party. We found that, despite big news stories about him, he’s still ranking near the bottom of a list of prominent politicians.

The bottom line is that you can find a lot of useful information about your industry via Google Trends: where you should be focusing your SEO efforts for the future, what’s popular now, and the topics that should be watched.

This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au. 

Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne