Using Google Insights To Grow Traffic And Create A Blogging Schedule

Uncategorized March 24, 2010 12 Comments




This is a guest post by Leo Fogarty who specializes in search engine optimisation and affiliate marketing.
There are many great blogs out there that address the issue of how to come up with content ideas for your blog, Krishna De offers 7 ideas for developing your business blog content plan” Darren Rowse How to Develop a Niche Blog Content Plan and even Niall has his very own How To Create An Effective Business Blog. Now all these posts offer great advice on content creation ideas that are basically summed up in the following:

See What Your Competitors or other blogs are doing
Ask your audience what topics they would like to see discussed
Write about subjects that you have a passion for

Getting Technical

Now I can’t and won’t argue with any of those recommendations but I still feel those answers fall short of giving you an actionable solution. Even when you have your list of topic ideas your still left with the problem, what topic should I write about first and in what order should I tackle the remainder?

You Don’t Set The Trend You Follow It

Even on Twitter and other social media platforms we’re advised to do such actions as retweet our content a few times throughout the day and night so all our followers in different time zones can have the opportunity to consume our glorious content. This is quite simply spotting a trend and adjusting our strategy for it (The trend being they get up when we go to bed). Also there are tools out there such as trendistic which will tell us what time is the most optimum to tweet certain topics such as “social media”

Analyzing Trends

The same logic of analyzing trends in social media can be applied to your blog content strategy as the examples below taken from Google Insights show that topics/keywords trends over a 3 year period in google:

Chutney

Business Management

Social Media

All of these topics follow the trends though the volumes each year may increase the trends usually remain constant.

What To Do Once You Have The Data?

How Do We Scale Keyword/Topic Trends into a large yearly plan? The answer is quite simply Google will do this for you. You should head over here and Google will give you two options,
1.Enter Your Keyword/Topic List
2.Enter A URL (usually you put in your own but in this case put in a competitors to see what keywords/topics they are targeting)

When Adwords returns the results, select the ” HTMLCONTROL Forms.HTML:Hidden.1 Choose columns to be displayed:” dropdown and select “Highest Volume Occurred In”

You will be shown a screen like :

Now simply export the results into excel and sort by “Highest Volume Occurred In”

Summary

Getting traffic to your blog is not the only battle that you should try and win and as the guys here and elsewhere constantly say creating good content is very important but there are some easy wins that you can focus on using these tools. This is a great way to plan your blog posts as it allows you to take advantage of trends and schedule your posts to publish just before the yearly search peak for your topic or key terms. Google provide all of this great free information so just make sure you go out there and use it.

Tags