Charting trends

I often tell people you need at least a year’s worth of data about search referrals and Web traffic for any given topic before you can really begin to understand how to optimize for queries relative to that topic.

But that’s not always the case. When you deal with industries that are continually producing new topics, new events, after a few years you can get a leg up on the competition if you understand the trends that are peculiar to that industry.

My trending analysis focuses for the most part on my personal avocations: science fiction and fantasy, entertainment, movies, and television shows. Although I have worked with many Web sites and businesses through the years, the sectors I know best are the entertainment sectors I have a personal investment in.

Star Trek, Star Wars, and Harry Potter are probably the best known franchises. Each has generated billions of dollars in book, theater ticket, and merchandise sales. Star Wars typically monetizes in the billions of dollars per movie. If George Lucas wants more money, he may be hard at work on those fabled last three movies.

The Lord of the Rings spawned several thousand business operations and projects around the world. Some of those enterprises are still going today but most shut down.

Among television shows, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys kicked off a string of hits for Renaissance Pictures (Rob Tapert and Sam “Spider-man” Raimi) that spanned a decade. The Jim Henson Company’s Farscape ensured that Ben Browder and Claudia Black would be able to join the cast of Stargate SG-1, which is currently the longest running science fiction television series on television.

To a Webmaster, recognizing a viable television show or movie franchise can mean the difference between 1 million annual visitors and creating a Web site your loving family will applaud and tell you is great. I’ve tried to support a few shows and movies that didn’t work out. Occasionally, something surprises me.

Your search engine optimization should include trend analysis. If you have been collecting WordTracker reports for at least 2 years, you have the ability to do some trend analysis. Your particular vertical may not be flooded with fan sites for the latest sexy herbicide, but every industry has events and high profile personalities.

You can spot the start of a trend by thinking about how people who have a passion for your sector may react to a new product, a new service, a new business startup, a new marketing campaign. Think in terms of new. By the time everyone is aware of the new thing, you’ve missed your opportunity to ride the trend wave.

Getting into search engine results at the beginning of a trend is much easier than in the middle of the trend. Of course, you can wait until the trend has expended itself. Usually, it’s pretty easy to seize position in the search results because no one cares any more.

To spot a trend you have to look for small signs of interest. Subscribing to Google and Yahoo! Alerts is the poor man’s investment in online research. The search engines tend to regurgitate unrelated content in their Web alerts as they recrawl the same sites over and over again. Even if you see a lot of “new” content in the first week after you set up an alert, the odds are pretty good that stuff has been out there for years.

You want to know about emerging products and services before other people have had a chance to review them. Create useful, meaningful content that is indexable. Make your site the resource center people turn to when new products and services are introduced.

You want to share some harmless gossip. If you hear something neat and sharing it won’t get you into trouble, then tell people stuff they probably have not heard before. They’ll remember you and come back with more information when they find it. If you encourage people to share information with you, the sudden surge in emails for any topic will be a sure sign that something is up.

Every trend I have managed to optimize for early on has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in email. If you cut yoruself off from the community at large, you’re operating in a vacuum — in a very dark vacuum. Knowing nothing about what piques people’s interest until your competitors get the clue virtually ensures you do no optimization before they do.

The value of optimizing for trends is that you teach yourself to create content before everyone else is talking about creating that content. You won’t always pick the right horse. Sometimes that great content you create just sits there and gets a trickle of traffic. Hey, it happens even in the entertainment field. But if you don’t try, you’ll never help build a query into a competitive vertical. Other people will do it for you.

The difference between being lucky enough to have the right content to surf a trend wave and knowing when to create that content is measured in success: when you spot more trends than your competitors, you’re doing it right. If you keep asking yourself how your competitors always seem to dominate search results for new queries, you’re doing it wrong.

I’ll come back to trend analysis in the future. There is a lot to be said about this topic.