Keeping up with the latest trends used to be as easy as turning on the TV or reading your daily newspaper. The world moves at a very fast pace – today, trends change as quickly as Google changes their Algorithm.
So how do you keep up with the latest keywords that people are searching for?
I have identified several sources that are great for any search marketing professional to watch on a daily or weekly basis, depending on your need for the latest trend data.
Search Engine Trend Spotting
Google’s Hot Trends is an ever-morphing tool that has a lot of real-time data that can be taken advantage of. One cool feature here is that you can look backwards and see popular search terms a few days ago, weeks ago, or a few months ago. If you’re looking for popular keyword variations to pounce on, this is the tool for finding them!
Yahoo! Buzz has taken the web by storm. I love this tool almost as much as I love Google’s tool. The colorful blog that accompanies it is a nice change to just looking at keywords all day. Yahoo does a good job of making sense of the searches, not just putting out data.
Trend Tagging
Technorati’s popular tags has a pretty good overview of the tech industry’s hottest topics.
Flickr Hot Tags has a good overview of the more graphical side of search. Keep an eye on these searches if you’re in the photo search marketing space.
Del.icio.us Popular Tags has a good assortment of the latest keywords for the web development community. There’s usually some more “long-tail” search terms buried deep in this tool.
Shop Till You Drop
Amazon’s Best Seller list is a great tool for looking at popular products to push if you’re an affiliate marketer.
Amazon also has a “most popular tags” feature that shows you popular general categories that could be targeted.
Ebay’s “Pulse” is similar to Amazon’s list and it’s pretty small compared to Amazon’s list.
What’s your favorite Trend Spotting Tool?
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