Barack Obama and SEO?

Posted by Jennifer Kettlewell in SEO on Jan 19th, 2009 | Leave Your Comment

Historic Moments
Breaking News
Famous People & Moments…

The inauguration of Barack Obama is on everyones’ fingers. Typing aways searches about the coverage of the ceremony, or the first 100 days, finding out all the details about the historic event of Barack Obama’s step into the White House.

So what does Barack Obama have to do with SEO? Nothing really. It is the trend of searching for Barack Obama’s name that has to do with SEO and SEM.

The picture below is from Google Trends and it shows that there have been a few spikes in searches for the term, “Barack Obama”. It also shows that searches are on the rise. No real surprise, since the inauguration is happening tomorrow.

Now, here is the funny part. The person may be “Barack Obama”, but the person has a persona that has become known as “Obama”, and if you look at Google Trends for “Obama”, there are some pretty interesting results.

First of all, notice that there are more peaks, more search volume, and in general more activity.

The real tricky part…understanding these results. The one for Obama as the search term will also include Michele Obama, and other extraneous information if someone is just searching for Barack.

This phenomenon is not uncommon in determining what keywords to be used in order to make sure your website is being found.

Let’s take the example of a web site dedicated to the inauguration of Barack Obama.

As we can tell from the previous two trends, we have a base trend, and that is the searches for the term “Obama”. However, as mentioned, it contains extraneous terms that do not pertain to the web site we are working with.

We can further narrow down our target by taking the base keyword and adding a qualifying keyword. In this case making the search target “Barack Obama”.

One step further and create a term that would considered a long tail keyword. “Barack Obama Inauguration.” This really exemplifies what a long tail keyword is. There won’t be as many people searching for that particular phrase of words, but the ones that do will be very targeted and very interested in one thing.

So, what do you do with this knowledge?

When you are writing articles, or creating pages for your web site. Do a little research on Google Trends and find out what people are really searching for.
Find out if there are particular times of the year that those terms are more popular.
Determine if there is a qualifying word(s) you should add to your keywords that will narrow the field of searchers, but give you more qualified visitors that are really looking for what you have to offer.

It is all about understanding your customer and their search habits. Understanding what they search for and when they search will help you target that market as effectively as possible.