In the stock market, analysts and traders buy, sell and trade shares in companies based on the speculation of future earnings or declines. Stock pickers attempt to determine which investments will rise and fall based on publicly available information. Slate magazine recently pointed out that even the best stock pickers, however, are generally terrible at beating the market as a whole over the long term.
However, we in search have our own market from which to pick and choose rising stars - the daily demand for search queries. It's strange to me that this topic is so rarely discussed and that so few individuals in the search world talk about the power of "predictively picking keywords." In the search market, there's no rules against insider trading - if you know that ABC is running a special about whatever happened to Marianne from Gilligan's Island on Sunday, writing a blog entry or creating a landing page for that phrase isn't "insider trading," it's just smart keyword targeting. Similiarly, there's almost no downside to being wrong - you may waste a half hour putting together some content, but you won't lose money and even the worst predictions may pay off in the future.
If, as a savvy website operator or search marketer, you can anticipate trends in your field (or any field) from a query perspective, you stand to be exceptionally successful. First to market with a great piece of content on a subject can often mean that your resource becomes the reference "source" for future content pieces, meaning you can maintain the top position simply by being first (and thorough).
Some solid examples include creating pages or sites for:
- New television shows
- New books or films
- Artists whose popularity is rising (in any field)
- Current events
- Geographies that receive attention (particularly smaller towns, landmarks, etc.)
- Historical references or events
- New technologies or products
Has anyone played the keyword query prediction market lately? Any big ones to show for it? Please feel free to link out to references or examples of successes.
There is no real downside to creating a page for a particular current event or future topic. Especially if it is for forward predictions of your business. The worst that can happen is it doesn't get any traffic. 30 min wasted? So it sits on your site for a year. One more page for the spiders to crawl. If that topic becomes the next "hit" you are already way ahead of the competition.
I once wrote an article in my cash flow blog about Erika Sunnegardh-waitress for 20 years and then one day she was singing at the Metropolitan Opera in the lead of Fidelio. I mentioned her becasue it was a cool story but my blog got so many hits that I had to put up her web site address. The BBC called and interviewed me as well-so I discovered this by accident. Very powerful!
Willie Crawford really hit the nail on the head not so long ago. He had blogs setup for all the future hurricanes, pre-loaded with lots of useful content, contact information etc, 6 months before Wilma.
The big problem is, if the news is "huge", you quickly get over-shadowed by other news sources
How about compiling a list of celebrities that like to party (or are insanely popular) and setting up pages for each. Ex: "Britney Spears DUI"
How about finding popular or soon to be popular products with flash pages and setting up SEO pages to catch that traffic?
Was this post prompted by all the people who cashed in on the iPhone by any chance?
Predictive SEO was the basis for the following article I wrote a while ago:
https://www.searchengineguide.com/mintz/005184...
As I found out first-hand, one can say with absolute certainty that 1-2 American Idol contestants will become "web celebrities"...the key is backing the correct contestant(s).
It is that time of year again...
When working with clients, especially e-commerce companies, the number one "tactic" or "strategy" I use is to be first to have product X on their site before any of their competitors.
With Google trusting older domains (ie the one's that came first), it is natural to think that Google would trust the "page that came first."
Being the first to get a well optimized page index first definitely makes it difficult on others to "know you out" of your top rank(ing).
All good examples of what everyone should be doing in all aspects of SEO now. Not just predictive keyword research but in predictive SEO as Graywolf mentioned. Thinking ahead is a standard business practice and it seems the SEM/SEO industry is too caught up in algo chasing. (present company excluded of course)
I was one of the first to post an article on 302 redirects and other methods of hijacking web pages 2-3 years ago, based on experience with client's sites being hijacked, scarped and copied.
https://www.loriswebs.com/hijacking_web_pages.html
And the same happened with extricating client sites from bad hosts and internet scams which resulted in another article about the same time.
https://www.loriswebs.com/internethostingscams.html
Both articles are still ranking at the top of searches even though 302s aren't so much of a problem any more.
I'm now looking for another hot topic and thus I ended up on your blog :)
Rand - might this post be available on another URL to https://www.seomoz.org/blog/predicting-search-queries-before-demand-arrives? I read a great response to this on another blog, forgot to bookmark it, and now can't find it as technorati & Google both tell me that no-one links to this URL!
Has anyone had experience creating a market for a specific keyword? What I mean by this is creating a site or pages to rank for a specific non-competitive or new keyword phrase and then using other forms of online and traditional media to raise awareness and increase the searches for specific keyword. What forms of media have people used that have been successful (or unsuccessful forms to watch out for) in this approach?
For static websites it's a little tougher bit for blogs it's money in the bank.
My example? Two words. American Idol.
Well it's actually more than two key words but all tolled the searches for Katharine Mcphee, Kelly Pickler and Chris Daughtry were in the millions per month last summer. My servers were brought to their xeon processing knees several times. Although the adsense CPC for these terms were low, the cumulative effect was bringing in 5 figure checks for most of the summer and into the fall.
When you're a money grubbing blogger ho, like myself, you live and die on page views not quality traffic. I'm not selling a product I sell space so it works out just fine. And it's not even spamming!
We're always looking for new sources, specially large construction projects such a hotels, tourist destinations and commercial centers. So, from there, we should be able to find the "name" of the future complex, and be the first to register several domains in that name.
I'm currently developing a site about an interesting prescription drug that has not gotten final approval by the FDA. If it is approved and becomes a blockbuster, I will be a happy man.
Its time to get the blogs ready - the superbowl is near! The biggest marketing event of the year is upon us, and until recently the average business has no way to capitalize on this advertising bonanza.
If you want to predict some keywords and resulting traffic try "godaddy" "budwiser" "(insert any auto maker) truck" "Apple/major computer company" etc.
How about a top ten list of predicted superbowl advertisers/keywords?
https://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?pa...
Traffic from "predicted queries" is the chance for my forum. But I have some good examples: thread about TV show, which was popular last autumn (and have brought my a lot of visitors from Yandex /russian search engine/). Or thread about saddam hussein execution, called with misspelling - "sadam", but misspelled queries are also popular in the beginning of 2007 and this thread ranked very well.
I agree with you Rand, but I think it is more applicable to bigger ideas, bigger coming trends, or bigger products, then a single show or a single magazine article.
What about an upcoming revolutionary product, or something that will be released in a few months - planning for it now is a good idea.
am9905d's comment above shows the potential for capitalize on a big avalanche fad at the right time.
But picking up some upcoming concept on a Sunday and pushing it out on Tuesday might not work, unless you are very good with doing a internet media blitz, social media, press releases, forums, etc.
I had one but it was a short term one before Christmas. TMX Elmo made me an easy 6k (I didn't even build a site, I just had a few links pointed at the TMX Elmo page of an amazon affiliate shop before most people did)
I did two TMX Elmo stores the day I saw that search term in Google Zeitgeist...then I sat back and watched people swamp my sites. I still am getting Amazon sales for those stores...funny how something that you may think is dumb becomes quite profitable.
I created www.iphone-3d.com to get lots of natural links. Once the iphone starts selling the site will change to have some affiliate links.
predictive SEO anyone?
https://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/predictive-seo/ ...
However the danger is in setting up empty shell pages, in some relatively competitive spaces I've had some people narc on me. I had to do two reinclusions, watch the google referers to figure where they where going to figure out that was the problem, and go "beef up" the pages.
My bad, Michael... I normally have a good memory about these sorts of things.
Great idea and it kind of touches on the edge of a subject we have been banging our heads against the wall over.
We own a credit repair company (one of the few actual legitimate ones) and we’ve recently started a blog. Coming up with topics seems near impossible for us. There are 4 major laws that encompass this industry and they have been regurgitated millions of times via article hubs.
Being new to blogging, coming up with a new slant - or area of constant conversation is proving to be a real problem for us.
The thought has crossed our mind to be completely off topic from our core specialty, but one that is targeted for our demographics.
E.g. core audience is early 30’s, 30K per year household income.
Any thoughts or advice?
Thank you.
Yup, I've been doing "predictive SEO" for years. It's basically how I mistakenly stumbled across SEO. Get in before the crowd while the competition is scarce and wait for it to kick in.
EXAMPLE - On one of my websites (SmitHappens), I put up the Chicago Bears Super Bowl Shuffle video before the season even started, and now I've been getting a lot of searches the last couple weeks. (Please bear with lagging server problems, the website is on the front page of Digg and suffering from the Digg effect for another page.)
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&c...
is that you, smit? it's been a while since i shut down nerdysouth...
Sure, I do that all the time on my movie/TV site https://ScreenRant.com .
Actually just got done doing a bunch of posts this week reviewing movies from the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Once the movies go into theatrical release my reviews will already have been indexed for a few months.
Vic
I have a friend who plays in the celebrity sector. I keep telling him he needs to do these sorts of things. Every time any star couple gets together he need to make 3 pages. The break up page, the wedding page, and the baby page. They can be spaced out and be said to be rumors but if he had taken my advice he would have had Angeline / Brad baby page up probably close to a year before anyone else. Just a handful of links to those pages back then would have made it the oldest authority around.
This sounds so hilarious but it's true. That's the way to sieze the moment when something happens and people are looking for information.
Rand,
This is very true in the DRTV market. Our GT Media affiliates should know - if they pay attention to their newsletters - to be setting up some new Billy Blanks page because a new infomercial is coming out in the next few days.
If a direct marketing company is going to spend millions to get a product on television, set up interviews with talk shows, and send out video press releases to news stations - why not piggyback on their efforts?
One time I knew as an insider that one of my clients' (now the company I work for) products was going to be featured on Good Morning America the following week. Searches went through the roof that day, and a few people who took my advice were able to capture some pretty good revenue as a result of their quick action.
Often, it is the first one out of the gate who has the advantage, at least until the bigger sites catch on. That is one of the good things about running smaller affiliate websites. You can be more agile.
Great post - and yours too Michael!
PS: A friend and I were talking about this after Katrina. Did you hurricane names are picked in advance? One could set up a homeowners insurance page, or some such thing, for each: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames_text.html .... I never got around to playing with it, partially because it wouldn't sit well with me taking advantage of misery. But I did think the concept was interesting.
If one is creating a Webpage - it will take time for it to get spidered and cached - and even so, SERPs rankings now require anchor text back links from trust-ranked sites to get any decent rankings. So the creation of this content really wont return dramatic results.
In the case of BLOGs - you can get some traffic if it is Digg'ed....but usually, just casually putting together some mediocre piece in a hurry, won't really do that much good. For every subject, there is something already on the Web. Usually there are passionate people who created it BEFORE there was an anticipated hype.
If you manage by a miracle to create a fast piece and have one of the top Digg'ers Digg it - you many get traffic, but not quality traffic and not long term traffic.
I posted a video on one of my sites that showed a safari tour guide getting mauled by a tiger. I referenced him as a dumb Steve Irwin.
Well a few months later when Steve got killed my site was pulling all sorts of keywords regarding his death.
That's an excellent example, despite the morbid angle.
Surely that's just pure luck (for imnotadoctor - not Mr Irwin), rather than being a result of predicting what's going to happen?
Now if it turned out that imnotadoctor had a pet sting-ray which he released recently, then it might not just be chance....