The more information you can gather when determining your most valuable keywords for SEO and SEM, the better. With IceRocket’s Blog Trend Tool, you have the ability to find out what is most popular in the blogosphere and view the trends for any keywords (comparing up to three at a time).
Google has a similar tool called Google Trends (see: Keeping Ahead of your Competition With Google Trends). However, Google’s tool focuses mainly on the search volume and news stories for keywords.
IceRocket.com now has a trend tool which allows you to see the popularity of your keywords over a period of time within the blogosphere.
At the end of this article, I give examples of how to use the two together.
Finding Out What is Most Popular in the Blogosphere
IceRocket’s Blog Trend Tool provides an easy way to find out what is most talked about by bloggers. They provide quick links to the most popular:
Using IceRocket Trends
Where Google Trends allows you to view over 3 years worth of trending data, IceRocket can only go back 3 months. However, having some data is still better than none.
IceRocket provides an easy way to enter and label the keywords you would like to view the trends for:
Although the tool is a little slow, the information you can get on your keywords is worth the wait. Using this tool with Google Trends to get a better image of the power of your keywords can prove to be extremely valuable.
Why is this information important?
Finding out which keywords are being discussed in the blogosphere helps you understand your competition and the possible buzz surrounding the keyword or phrase.
Unlike Google Trends, the IceRocket trend report gives you actual numbers for your keywords. In the above example, you can easily see how “word-of-mouth” jumped up in popularity, and at one point was mentioned in over .05% of all blogs.
Percentage of all blogs, what can I do with that?
As of April, 2007 there were over 70 million blogs, with 120,000 being created every day.
With this number in hand, you can easily figure the numbers from the IceRocket Blog Trend report. If the peak for “word-of-mouth” was .05% then 35,000 blogs mentioned that keyword at that point. IceRocket also conveniently provides you the average posts per day, average %, and total posts within the trend report’s time frame.
Think about it in terms of Supply and Demand!
This tool quantifies your competition! When the buzz is high, there are many other people writing with this keyword. This means, that you may have a lot of work to get high rankings in the search engines.
What you will want to find are keywords that have a high search volume (using Google Trends), and a low blogosphere buzz. Think about it as supply and demand. The search volume is the demand, and the blogosphere buzz is the supply.
When you have a high demand (lots of people searching), and you are one of the first to meet that demand with your supply (your web site, information or blog post), you have one of the best opportunities to achieve quality traffic who will convert into customers.
There’s enough here to write a whole article on the Supply and Demand of SEO and SEM (and there will probably be one coming!), but hopefully this gets you started in the right direction and gets some ideas popping.
Feel free to leave comments on how you use trends and where the value happens!
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