Google Zeitgeist gives SEO professionals great insights

Using link-bait content is standard SEO practice and a great way to do this is to create articles on the latest hot topics. If you are writing quality content on the latest hot trends then you should naturally get traffic anyway as well as you use on page SEO effectively and if you use Social Media to drive traffic.

Twitter’s trending topics is one way to find out what hot topics at any time are, sometimes these change too quickly though. Google now though tells you what the trends for the last year have been; this allows you to create content that should stay popular for a little longer. On Googlezeitgeist.com SEO professionals can look at the fastest rising queries as well as the fastest falling letting you know what to avoid writing about too.

You can also see a number of other useful top tens, the fastest growing news story keywords, people, entertainment, consumer electronics, food and drink and sports related terms. You can even see these by region so you can make sure that you aren’t trying to get traffic to your UK site using articles about American Football players who few in the UK have a clue about let a lone will search for.

In the UK the hottest topic in 2011 was actually ‘Royal Wedding’, which was the fastest growing term of the year. Worldwide it was Rebecca Black and likewise in the USA showing just what a high proportion of searches on Google still come from the States.

Looking at the global top ten for sports related terms at number seven is ‘India Vs England’ a reference to the Cricket Test Match series between the two, big news in England but massive in India a country of around a Billion people who are increasingly accessing the internet. Another entry was ‘なでしこジャパン’ , the Japanese Women’s Soccer team who won the Women’s world Cup this year and there are a few other non English entries in the top tens shown. Whether these non English hot trends are an opportunity for English speaking SEO experts to get in more traffic from elsewhere is not clear.

What is clear and by no means surprising is the number of Apple related keywords, In the top 10 rising globally are Steve Jobs, Ipad 2 and I Phone 5 , which is yet to be released but was expected in September when the 4s was released instead. On the top ten for consumer electronics keywords Iphone 4S managed to come second despite no searches until September.

Some of the top tens will be useful for people doing SEO for particular types of sites, for example do you want to know what destinations people in Britain are looking for when planning their holidays? Well Vegas is first followed by New York.

Using Google Zeitgeist doesn’t replace full SEO keyword research but it can give you some good ideas, even if you then look for the long tail with related, less hotly contested, keywords.

Reference: Google Zeitgeist