Would you like to know which products are popular this holiday season?
Would it help you in deciding which products to make and which Keywords to use in marketing them?
If the answer is Yes, then keep reading.
Trending Topics & Rising Searches indicate what’s Popular NowOne way of finding out what people are interested in right now is by watching Trending Topics on sites like Twitter, Yahoo, Google and others that display that type of information on their sites.
On Twitter you can even specify Trending Topics by country or by certain cities.
You might not get immediate results. However, by watching trending topics, you will be the first to know which topics, related to your products, are on the rise.
Not sure why “Uncle Jesse” (aka John Stamos) from Full House is a trending topic now, but if I had any products connected to the show or “Uncle Jesse” in particular, I’d mention that in my tweets today ...
You can also subscribe to specific searches and use hashtags like#Handmade, #Crafts, #Scrapbooking, #Woodworking #Jewelry, #Vintage etc., whatever is more relevant to your product line, and follow a few Influencers on Twitter to gain an insight into what’s popular and why.
Also,
Google provides two great tools for researching Trending Topics: Google Trends is a basic tool that shows how often a Keyword is searched in relation to the total search volume throughout the world.
Google Insights is a more sophisticated tool, meant for marketing professionals and anyone else, who is serious about studying users’ search behaviour. It provides additional flexibility and functionality, compared to Google Trends.
You can analyze results there from Google News, Product Search, and Image Search.
Here are the results of the Rising Product Searches on Google Worldwide in the past 30 days, produced by Google Insights.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#date=today%201-m&gprop=froogle&cmpt=geo 
“Breakout”, according to Google, means that the search term has experienced a change in growth greater than 5000%.
Doesn’t this inspire you to drop everything and start making Candles or Signs for Halloween?
If I could make candles, I’d make a bunch of them immediately, tag them all with “Halloween Candles” and write a good story about why my candles are great for Halloween. Ha ha...
Search Volumes over time help with ForecastingGoogle Trends can be used to see the historical search data for keywords entered, broken down by location and language. You will see a horizontal timeline, which goes back to 2004.
Let’s say you have 3 distinct product lines - “Christmas Decorations”, “Christmas Cards” and “Christmas Jewelry”. You go on Google Trends and do a search for all 3 Key Phrases, separated by comma: christmas decorations, christmas cards, christmas jewelry
The result below showed no surprise in the rise of the search volume for your Key Phrases in the last quarter of the year, most likely due to Christmas shopping. However, it also showed that “Christmas Cards”, even though highly popular in searches, have been on the steady decline since 2005. “Christmas Decorations” are not declining, but not as popular as “Christmas Cards”... and “Christmas Jewelry” seems to be not popular with the online users at all.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=christmas+decorations%2C+christmas+cards%2C+christmas+jewelry&ctab=0&geo=us&geor=all&date=all&sort=0 
Looking at this graph, can you guess what will happen this time next year?
You’d actually have to play with the Keywords that are relevant to your products to make this tool useful, but I think you get the idea, right?
Picking the Right Keywords to Market your ProductsNow knowing that “Christmas Cards” are more popular in Searches than your other products, you decided to put all your efforts into making Christmas Cards this year. Smart move!
The next question is which Keywords should you use to market your cards?
You can use the same tool Google Insights to play with keyword ideas for “Christmas Cards” and use them to tweak your Product Titles and your Adwords Campaigns.
Here is what you will see on Google Insight for Top Searches and Rising Searches in the past 90 days worldwide (no point to search for 12 months, as you already know that people look for “Christmas Cards” in the last quarter of the year):
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=christmas%20cards&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q 
If you have any products that could relate to Charity or have Photos on them, you could pick “Christmas Cards Charity” and “Photo Christmas Cards” for optimise your product pages.
Most of the online traffic (some say over 94%) comes from the
Long Tail Keywords, those that consist of three or four Key Phrases with very specific terms related to your products. Long Tail Keywords are also less competitive, that’s why you should always pick them over shorter and more generic Key Phrases.
You could also go to
Google Adwords Tool and do another search on “Christmas Cards” or specifically on “Photo Christmas Cards”. Simply take each relevant phrase and do a quick research on it.
Google Adwords tells me that for the term “Photo Christmas Cards” Estimated Global Searches are about 49,500
https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=5720851795&__u=3933752095&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS#search.none I've also learned here about additional Keyword Ideas, like “personalized photo christmas cards” with Estimated Global Searches at 4,400 and “holiday photo christmas cards” with Estimated Global Searches at 2,400, which I also like.
I’d suggest you also perform an actual search on Google for the term you are thinking of using to optimise your product pages. If you enter “Photo Christmas Cards” on Google, you will get about 83,000 results – those are other sites competing with you for the same term.
http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enCA383CA384&q=Photo+Christmas+Cards#sclient=psy&hl=en&rlz=1T4GGLL_enCA383CA384&q=%22Photo+Christmas+Cards%22&aq=f&aqi=g1g-c3g-o1&aql=&oq=%22Photo+Christmas+Cards%22&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=c2f918b5f88c0036 But don’t get discouraged!
Click on the top 5 links and check their Google Ranking (you’d need to install
Google Toolbar for that -
http://www.google.com/toolbar/ie/index.html) If they are PR 1 or 2 or 0 – you can take them! Well, at least you have a chance to appear on the first page, if you optimise your page properly.
Keyword Optimization is needed for SEO, even though in the past year, this has become a bit less of a factor for search engines. But most importantly, it’s needed for capturing attention of the potential Buyers.
When people search for something very specific, they’ve probably made up their mind about what they are going to buy, right? Otherwise their searches would be more generic in nature.
Even if your page is listed at the bottom of the page, but you have the exact Keywords, that users used in their search query, incorporated in your product Titles – you have a better chance of grabbing user’s attention. People are more likely to click on your links and check out your products, when they see exactly what they are looking for.
You can read more about Keyword Research in my other post -
https://icraftgifts.com/forum/1066/choosing-right-keywords-is-not-a-guessing-game/ and more on page optimization here
https://icraftgifts.com/forum/1202/how-does-perfectly-optimized-page-looks-like/ What's Popular on Amazon Another great way of gaining an insight of what’s popular this holiday season is by checking out Amazon's Bestsellers - a list of the most popular items on Amazon.com (Updated hourly) http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/ref=pd_ts_jw_ldr
You can drill down further by clicking on the product categories, like Jewelry, listed on the left-hand side.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/jewelry/ref=pd_mw_jw_mte You can also select the “Most Gifted” and the “Most Wished For” items within specific categories.
Let me know if you found this post useful and Good Luck with your Holiday Keyword Research!
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