'Public relations' keyphrase gets nearly five times the traffic of 'social media marketing'

It's not always easy to come up with exactly the right content at the right time. Social media marketing can be a fickle mistress. One day your servers are straining because there's so much traffic, the next, nothing. From your point of view, you followed the same rules, applied the same techniques only t oget wildly vaying results. It can be slightly exasperating...

Here's a little trick to helping you discover what content to produce at any given time. This assumes that you are still writing within the remit and context of what your website needs in order to maximize conversions from any traffic you generate.

In other words, you can't write a post about the disaster in Japan if your website is selling muffins in Bakersfield (unless somehow the two are integrally linked - like the proceeds are going to relief efforts).

What you can use are the following:

1)Google trends
2)Google keyword tool

There are also a number of other sites that offer trending information that can be useful in guiding you to creating content that is both relevant to your site and in the minds of everyone online. Twitter is probably the best one to look at. For now, let's stick to the two Google sites.

Google trends

Trends is really useful because it tells you what topics are hot and what searches are hot. In other words, what are people talking about and what information are they looking for. Not only that, but you can search for topics and search terms to see how popular they are currently. This can be a great help, if you come to realize that what you were planning on writing about is really not of any interest to anyone else.

Google keyword tool

This is my personal favorite. In order for Google's Adwords clients to be able to figure out which keywords are best for their ad campaigns, Google provides a keyword search tool that tells you exactly how much competition there is for a given keyword - and how much traffic is searching for those keywords and keyphrases.

The image in the blog post shows the Trends graph for the phrase "social media marketing". Clearly its become a big thing in the last few years - and is still on the rise. The interesting thing about the traffic that involves that phrase is that it is predominantly in India and Singapore. Not surprising given the massive web based industry out there - but all the same, traffic in the US comes a distant third for this particular topic.

Doing the same search in the keyword tool, also tells an interesting story:

• social media marketing - receives 165 000 searches per month
• social marketing - receives 300 000 searches
• social media - receives 1 500 000 searches
• social network - 2 750 000 searches
• public relations - 823 000

What's interesting here is that the abbreviated phrase social marketing takes far more traffic than social media marketing. This should instantly indicate that you can benefit more by using the SEO phrase social marketing in your content - even if that doesn't change the subject matter of your content. 'Social media' takes more than either, but is a more general term so the SEO focus of your content is diluted if you go with this phrase.

However, "public relations", which is a related topic gets far more than both potential keyphrases so you might want to consider shifting the thrust of your next online "public relations" campaign. Just to throw something new into the mix.