Photo taken by Dier Madrid, Flickr Creative Commons
Wow, it’s been a while. It feels like I’ve been hibernating for the past two weeks, mostly satying in and working on keyword research. The holidays are now over and winter is settling in for real.
Two weeks ago I posted about the importance of content, and how it was at the basis of any good SEO practice or any web project for that matter. I’m gonna keep going in that direction today and talk about editorial calendars. Having great, desirable content is one thing, but planning your content is another. To make the most out of high search volumes, it is important to plan content in order to make it coincide with events, holidays and such things. For instance, there will be high searches on Thanksgiving-related keywords as we get get closer to Thanksgiving. In order to benefit from this search volume, you need to plan your content accordingly. That’s what the editorial calendar is about.
There are some great tools available to determine high volume searches. A lot of you must be familiar with Google Trends and Google Insights. Google Trends lists the top searches on the web everyday, which is great for weekly planning. It also allows specific keyword searches. Here’s are the results for a search on Valentine’s day:
Search trends on Valentines day keyword
As you can see, search volumes on Valentine’s day starts building up in January till it peaks on February 14th. Then it drops back to nearly nothing. Also, results can be broken down according to geographic location, which can be useful if you’re targeting a specific market. An editorial calendar would help planning content to make the most of these searches, and bring more visitors to your pages.
Google Insight does a similar job to Google Trends, though there are more ways to break down searches. It also provides a list of rising searches that includes the main keyword. Here’s what you get on a search for Valentine’s day:
Top related searches on Valentines Day
Top rising searches on Valentines day keyword
These tools are essential to plan your content in order to make the most of what people are looking for at specific time periods.
Another nice trend tool is Twitter. It would be hard to plan ahead of time your content using Twitter Trends, but for day to day or even weekly planning, it does an amazing job. Twitter is very much a real-time application. On Twist, you can monitor what people are looking for in real-time, see what’s hot at the moment. These trends can crash as quickly as they pick-up, but some pattern are discernible. Knowing what’s going on on Twitter can give you a heads-up on competition.
What tools are you guys and gals using to plan your editorial calendar? Come and share your comments!