Great traffic on photography blogs does not happen by accident..or does it? Clearly, to be successful photo bloggers, visitors are important. What I am about to show you will forever change the way you manage your blog, so don’t publish another post until you read this.

It is no secret that Google is not just an important player in today’s online world, it is the most important factor in determining your online success. Google’s US search market dominance hits an all-time high this year with 67% of searches performed, with Yahoo Search (20%), MSN (5.25%), and Ask.com (4%), far behind.

But what does Google’s success have to do with photography blogs? Patience, I getting there. Google’s dominance in the search engine market has enabled them to compile more data than you could possibly imagine. But lucky for us, Google is the sharing type. Most users of Google have probably never noticed all the valuable applications they simply give away. From maps to office applications, widgets to data trends…yes, internet search data trends. By navigating your way around that minimalistic browser, you will find Google trends to map your way to blogging success.

Before I go too far, let me lay down the breadcrumbs to locate Google Trends…Google>more>even more>Labs>Google Trends. It’s amazing that most of the links you will find on these pages were once small companies which were bought out for millions, and are now just a blip in the world of Google!

Ok. Now that we’re warmed up it’s time to get down to business. Before you start any business or in our case write a post, you should start by defining your target audience. The target audience will be the customers or viewers you plan to pitch your product/post to. Make sense? Good. As we lay out our plans to define an audience, we start by thinking in broad terms. For our example, we will pursue field of photography. And since you are reading this article on my site, we can refine our product to “photography blogs”.

Now, you will need to pull up the Google Trends page which recently discussed. What is Google Trends? “With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.”

From the description about Google Trends, I have emphasized, in bold letters, the key reason to use this tool is to increase the exposure and traffic of your photography blog….”in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.” Just a few paragraphs ago, we talked refining our product, or in our example blog post to “photography blogs”. With the use of this tool, we can determine what parts of the world the most searches for our topic occur, and then redefine our topic even more. After we enter our phrase into the tool and enter, here is the data we are presented with.

We can see quickly see that “photography blogs” is an increasingly popular keyword phrase. This is a good start, but there is much more we have also learned. In addition, Google makes it easy for us to drill down to the locale of users searching for our phrase. In the case, we can quickly see that
web searchers from India are the number one searchers for “photography blogs”. This is valuable information as we try to define our product/customer relationship equation. In using this data, it is clear that we can greatly increase our potential viewing audience by incorporating Indian related content, in addition to our photography blog subject matter. Although you don’t have to focus on the largest searching audience of your blog post topic, it would be wise to select one of the top audiences or change your subject matter to suit the audience you are after.

As we continue to sort through the search data on our keyword phrase “photography blogs”, we see that Google also gives us the “city” where the top searches of our phrase are performed. In this example, we see that ” New York City”, “San Francisco”, and “Washington, D.C.” are tops on the list. Again, we will greatly increase our viewing audience combining our general topic “photography blogs”, with content related to one or more of the top cities.

Using Google Trends will allow you to simultaneously compare up to 5 keywords/keyword phrases on one graph. Besides viewing where your search is coming from, I like to use Google Trends to determine if there is a seasonal nature to what I am writing about as well.

Google Trends really is a wonderful tool that can boost your traffic and drive results for free. Yes, the most under-appreciated blogging tool is free for the taking…if you know where to find it. So give it a test drive and let me know what you think!

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