Anticipating Keyword Trends Apply the Power of Old-Fashioned Marketing Research to Keywords for Search Engine Optimization	Visited: 1417 4.0/5.0 (4 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Bob Shawgo May 16, 2006

Bob Shawgo

Shawgo, a graduate of Brigham Young University, has spent the last 15 years in marketing and sales throughout North America. He has created successful marketing initiatives in everything from grass-roots start-ups to Inc. 500 companies to publicly traded enterprises. He is a participating member of the American Marketing Association and the author of several methodologies on effective marketing and sales. When he's not spending time with his wife and kids or riding horses, his great thrill in life is seeing clients realize their dreams.

Bob Shawgo has written 2 articles for PromotionWorld.

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At the risk of dating myself, I’ll say that I’m an old copywriter who learned web development through On-the-Job-Scramble (similar to on-the-job-training but without the training). Before I started building web sites and writing copy for the web, before I even heard about SEO or SEM, I read about the power of keywords from another old ad man named Ogilvy. No, he didn’t call them keywords, but he did make a point of choosing the right words to sell. He is, perhaps, the father of modern advertising research. He believed that the message was king and that it couldn’t rule until it resonated well with the target audience. He would test ad copy, changing a word here and phrase there until he got to the selling message.

The selling message, of course, isn’t one that just gets people’s interest in general. It is one that gets the interest of people who want to buy. Advertising research doesn’t just test whether people like a particular ad, it tests against a group of people who have been identified as potential buyers. In traditional advertising, this is segmentation. Segmentation is hugely important to advertising buyers because it allows them to align message broadcast to the viewing habits of the most likely buyers. On the web, we have segmentation that is much more refined. It doesn’t rely on Neilson ratings. On the web, users self-segment by what they search for. What they search for also tells us about their buying intentions.

Anticipating keyword trends is the modern way of creating readership that is most likely to buy and rising to the top of the search engine through early entry. But how do you anticipate keyword trends? The answer to that also lies back in the annals of advertising history. You keep your ear to the ground, listen for the local buzz, get the scoop. You listen to customers and then react before the competition. Anticipatory keywords are the ones that are just hitting the streets, just coming into fashion. This is where you can bank traffic because competitors will not update quickly enough.

In 2000, Smoothie shops were hot. Smoothies in restaurants were becoming the rage. I helped a little known housewares company launch the Smoothie Maker. Since smoothie makers were a new category, a new phrase on the street, we built the term heavily into the corporate site and even built a Smoothie Maker specific site to help capture traffic. We shot to the top of the search engines for that phrase and tripled their web sales. We did it by listening to customers and moving ahead of the trend.

The best anticipatory keywords come when we really do our homework. The first thing to do is listen to customers to come up with a list of candidates. Next you can tap into a new tool on Google – Google Trends at www.google.com/trends. This wonderful tool allows you to compare search term usage over time. Since it only shows graphs without numeric data, it works best when you compare search terms. Try a comparison like “advertising, marketing” and you will see how the two compare over time and by region. The point of intelligence that revolves around anticipating keywords comes at the end of the graph. Is the most recent trend moving up or down and how steep is the line (the rate of change).

For some examples of old verses new, put in “suv, hybrid” it’s amazing how historical trends correspond with gas price increases. You can take your key words and get an idea not only whether people are using them as search terms, but whether they have been used for a long time and if the terms are becoming more popular.

The second part of using good anticipatory keywords on your site has to do with sell through. Tracking who comes in and what they do on your site is paramount to knowing if your keywords are drawing the segment you want. Performance once they reach your site depends greatly on how well you communicate your selling message, but it also depends on whether you are attracting the right kind of people. If you’re really trying to succeed with your website, you’ll follow another great advertising mantra: Research, test, execute, research, test, execute . . .