SEO - How to use Google Trends to find keywords for your site
Google trends is a powerful tool to identify the keywords to choose for your SEO effort - It gives crucial insights into keyword selection. Keyword selection is one of the most important aspect of the SEO effort for your site. I will take example of silver jewelry site trying to freeze on keywords that should be used to construct the title and other meta tags like keywords, keyphrase, description and abstract. The first step is to brainstorm yourself about the keywords that you can think of in your domain. For this example what comes to mind are keywords like Silver Jewelry, Silver Ring, Silver Rings, Silver Necklace, Silver Bracelet, Sterling Silver, Sterling Silver Jewelry, charm bracelet, silver earrings, silver anklet, stud earrings and so on(Create a list of atleast 50 keywords in your domain). Second step is to refine these keywords further by looking at your comepting site. Quick google search on keywords above will tell you the sites that are indexed first on the above keywords - Check out the keywords in their meta tags and pick the ones that you missed out in your brainstorming. You can also use tools like Overture, Google Adwords to help you out with this process to identify keywords(I will cover these tools in a seperate post). Now comes the power of google trends. Do a comparison of keywords in google trends to identify how each one ranks to other one -basically form a relative hierarchy.
Notice in the image the comparison done between silver jewelry, silver ring, sterling silver, silver bracelet, silver necklace. The top most is the orange curve of sterling silver. Now what does this really mean ? It means that the graph represents relative searches that happen on google that contain these two words "Sterling" and "Silver" - Even if you were to reverse the order of keyword "Silver Sterling" you would still get the same curve(as that of sterling silver). To elaborate searches made on Sterling Silver Necklace would add a count to "Sterling Silver" keyword in the curve, same for "Sterling Necklace in Silver"(Notice even though Sterling and Silver dont appear together it still counts). See the filled black box in the image that allows you to drill down into the geography that you are doing business in, once you drill down you can even see the city level search data comparison thereby giving you the power to go at a local level to optimize your keywords. You can also drill down on the time period and subregion. The Black box outlined shows the news that have come on the keyword topics entered by you. Each of A,B,C etc before the news is also color coded helping you identify which news related wot which keyword. You will also see correlation between those dates and spikes in the news graph(the bottom graph). When news comes out you will see the spikes moving up. Dates are also visible when the news came out. Do this exercise for every keyword you identify and form a stack rank of all keywords that you found. Google Trends allows you to do 5 at a time. Keep on removing keywords out and adding a couple each time and fitting them in stack where they come - If they conflict in position with the ones you removed do a seperate search for those two in google trends to see the winner and give each one a stack rank finally. One of a very important way to look at it is to identify whether to use plural or singular in keywords for eg. should i use "Silver Ring" or "Silver Rings" - Google trends will make all this comparison a cake walk for you. The beauty of the graph is the simple graphical representation that speaks to you clearly the trend ! Once you have done the stack rank its time for you to start creating your title, Keywords, Description, H1, H2, H3, and H4. It goes without saying that the top most stacked words are the ones you would look for using in your title and H1. Now remember one thing dont use those top stacked keywords blindly for the page - See if the page has content that matches those keywords. If not then that keyword would be useful in other related page in your site(effort wont go waste :)). Now with the identified keywords start forming sentences that make sense to human mind (You are not designing the site for google bot but for the users !) - Make sentences using the keywords chosen and create your title, description etc. In Keywords and Key phrase make sure to use all forms of the keyword that you had initially started with. You can stuff the keywords and keyphrases(Though google now does not give importance to these - gone are the days web1.0 days when it was easy to rank high using keywords :)). I just loved google trends and the power along with simplicity of it to choose the right keywords in my SEO effort. Google just beats all when it comes to presentation of data !
By Salman Mansoor
Research & Development Department
Neon Solutions.net
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