A real world example of why paying attention to Google Trends is important
In October I wanted to try and spend some time performing SEO and SEM on single blog post to see how far my efforts could go with content unrelated to the overall theme of my site. As is probably obvious this site’s purpose is for a web consulting business. However, the blog has topics that go far beyond the scope of these projects, from personal experiences to guest bloggers on Sith.
To begin with I took a look at what was trending on Google search from checking out google.com/trends and noticed at the time that conversations around Fake News were on the rise. I then began searching this topic and visiting various sites talking about the issues of fake news, satire sites and sites that seemed to post quotes from people calling the president a muslim extremist.
The articles in questions were coming up with a flurry of comments, though my immediate attention was drawn to the lists of sites being reported. It was full of inconsistencies and duplicate sites mentioned.
So I began by cleaning up the list, rewriting a new intro, adjusting my meta data and then shared the site to my Facebook and Twitter users who constantly post links from these news sources.
The results were that since January this list post of fake news sites has generated 35,401 pageviews the vast majority from Facebook, though a significant 8,133 from Google. Not surprisingly there were only 62 pageviews from Yahoo and 43 from Bing.
The take-a-way for us here is that it didn’t really matter that the content wasn’t original or particularly informative, but rather a hot topic being debated that had a large enough bandwagon for me to jump on. All the more reason or those of you out there in SEO land to pay attention to Google Trends.
Update 10/30/15: The Fake News post has now generated over 122,374 pageviews since Jan 1 2015.