What do consumers search for?

If you are spending money on SEO and PPC in order to drive traffic, it is vital to understand how consumers search and what kind of terms they generally use when looking for relevant content or businesses. Whilst you can track which terms do best at converting for you, it is also important to understand the wider market, especially in fast moving markets where popular terms might change frequently.

A new article over at Searchenginewatch offers some suggestions on how to keep your knowledge fresh. For example, Google Trends will allow you to access Google's own database of billions of searches and query the data by time, location or languages. You can compare specific terms, as well as looking at what is hot right now. Yahoo! Buzz Log will show you top searches by Yahoo! users with their rank, buzz score and movements over time, and Bing Trends reports on its blog about search trends over the previous year.

Moving away from general search, Twitter Search allows you to figure out what people are posting about on Twitter by keyword, hashtag or username and even looks at emoticons to figure out attitudes. YouTube keyword tool will show keyword suggestions with monthly search volume, whilst YouTube Trends suggests popular videos based on keywords and video views.

Gathering insight into how people search and how this is changing is vital insight for developing new PPC and SEO strategies, and the above services will help you do that, free.