The Future of Search & “Off-web Factors”
Using Google Trends, you can compare the search traffic for your industry’s main phrases. Google Trends also displays data on how often specific topics appear in the news. It can even tell you which geographic regions have searched for phrase the most often.
This data can tell you a lot about your industry and the way people search within it. It can also offer some insight into the direction of future search technology.
For an example, let’s look at the search phrase “nfl football”:
Of course the most obvious thing to note about this chart is the increase in search traffic for the phrase during the football season. You will also see that searches peak at the start of the season, then taper off through the season, and again peak during the playoffs.
From Google Trends you can also see the top cities for the search phrase are (at the time of this article):
1. Cincinnati, OH, USA 2. Pittsburgh, PA, USA 3. Columbus, OH, USA 4. Philadelphia, PA, USA 5. St Louis, MO, USA 6. Orlando, FL, USA 7. Tampa, FL, USA 8. Denver, CO, USA 9. San Diego, CA, USA 10. Rochester, NY, USA
These cities may not come as a surprise to many, but to some it may very interesting data. You will note that these cities are big sports areas and most have their own NFL teams located nearby.
If we take this info and think outside of the box a little bit, and try to look past the obvious, we can begin to make some informed assumptions about the search phrase “NFL football” and the people that search for it.
The main assumption that can be made is this:
People living in Pittsburgh that search the phrase “NFL football” in the months of August and September, are likely looking for different results than a person in Omaha Nebraska searching the same phrase during the month of March.
I realize that this may be a painfully obvious assumption, and that using “NFL football” as the example may be even more obvious; but what I am talking about here is more than just search terms and time of the year. I am talking about the future direction of search technology.
Imagine how the time of the year and location of a search could affect the desired content for a person searching the terms “flowers”, “gifts”, “mom”, “vacation”, “tickets”, “beaches”, etc.
The search engines have it in their goals to provide users with the most relevant results for each search performed. To do this, they are moving further and further from on-page and off-page factors (i.e.: links, content, and popularity) and are beginning to evaluate shifts towards what I call “off-web” factors (i.e.: time of year, location of search, and world events - and soon enough the age, sex, education level and socioeconomic status of the person doing to the searching). Simply put, this means that serps for a keyword phrase will yield different sets of data during different times of the year for different types of people.
For example, during the NFL playoffs searches for the term “football” conducted by men in their 30’s may return results that pertain to current standings, news, and highlights, and the same search in March conducted by a female in her 60’s may return different results all together. Perhaps results pertaining to gift ideas and memorabilia, current news about specific players, and fan clubs.
What does this mean for SEO?
It means that successful search engine marketers of the near future will not only need to concentrate on their niche and the main phrases within it, but also their target users. You will need to target the most likely information that a person will be seeking in your industry during various times of the year, and in various areas of the world. Knowing your target audience will become one of the most important aspects of successful online marketing.
