Google Trends keeps getting better and better. The “Hot List” will show Today’s Hot List on the home page, and if you click on More Hot Trends, you will get the Top 100 list for that days searches. Using Google Trends has been a great injection to many SEOs when doing competitive analysis … but with the Hot Trends, you can target hot searches right now via PPC and capitalize on short term bursts of traffic.
Make sure you know that this is not the “most popular” searches for the day, these are the searches that had the highest “surge” which is mainly due to a news release or an event. Clicking on the term will open a new window which will outline the latest postings on the subject which will help you gather why the phrase is hot.
If dig … just a little, you can find great buys on traffic in your industry with a hot new trend, and usually just a little creativity is needed to spin it in the right direction for you to capitalize on it!
The negative on this right now is that Bloggers are using this information to create Blog posts about the subject in hopes of being listed in the references section in order to get more traffic. I would love to see an analysis on this to measure the ROI on this tactic. I would estimate it would be quite low.
One of my favorite features is that it will tell you the countries that target the keyword phrase the most, so you can ensure if you go after a short-term phrase, you are writing in the language that dominates the queries. It wouldn’t make sense to target a phrase that people in Italy hit most often when the site is written in Japanese. The geo-targeting can be quite useful when looking to do a PPC campaign, but I still feel the demographic information over at MSN adCenter is a lot better.
Addition: A member informed me that Yahoo! had a similar function called Yahoo! Buzz and that it should be mentioned here. Fine, I will mention it, however, it is not in the same class as what Google has put together, despite Google’s limitations in this space. You can just tell the information is “washed” by editors. I would much rather have my data raw thank you.
The main reason I started the SEO Revolution was out of frustration. Frustration at all of the lies and misconceptions that are posted in forums, given as advice in teleconferences, and even taught in live workshops. "So why didn't all of this work?" " Why wasn't my site successful?" " Why am I still stuck in a rut?" 