New points on top rankings with through Google keywords

Some notes on the new ideas I've been having on the business of search engine optimization.

I've been messing around with videos, as I've told you earlier. And here is my latest, an overview of all my books I've been writing/editing/publishing lately.



Now, that wasn't too bad, was it? (Ok, then leave a comment...)

These videos continue to improve as I go, which is usual as you practice and study anything.

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Now, what I've discovered lately is the international aspect of keywords. (No, Duh?) But we in the U.S. are all too tied up in our own ethno-centricities (or eccentricities) and often forget that our sales can be better in niches "overseas" than here. Looking up my server logs showed that one site was more popular in Europe, another in Africa.

So I saw discrepancies when looking up "personal development, self improvement, self-help" on Google Trends. When I ran those up on Google Keyword External, the rankings didn't add up. While the world has a higher and longer use for "personal development", we in the US prefer self-help or self improvement - and the rest of the world doesn't. So I looked around on the page and found that my results were English-US only. When I searched for English in all pages, I came back with much different choices - and much wider ones.

While Google Keyword Tool gave "life coaching" as top position, this was as it ranks by advertising competition by default. Clicking on average searches gave me new top terms - which are closer to what people are actually looking for, as opposed to what people are making money at. "Book, business, dating, health, love" were top terms. Plugging these into Google Trends again gave me a new comparison for these terms, since how people search for them isn't necessarily what advertisers are looking at.

Just out of that, you could see that a "book about business health" should get a lot of hits. No, it's such a niche that Google trends doesn't even have it. But business book is number one in India and Singapore. "Love book" takes over in the U.S. and other leading countries. And "business book" is the only thing that shows up (out of "business book, health book, love book, fitness book, dating book" - the top 5 out of 8 terms from that first above search) in news search.

So press releases on just about anything with "business book _____" would give a substantial ranking.

And you can see that books about the other top items are also high in demand.

The point here is that this gives you additional tools. I started out looking for the broad field of personal development and found that there are five popular items which would be created and marketed as niches within that field. But the buyers would vary according to the product. "Love books" would sell better in the U.S. and "business books" would do better in India, Singapore, etc. A little more searching would show how to sell your "fitness books, health books, and dating books" to whom and on what continent - all from online research.

Just ensure you don't rely on your own fixed ideas when you are marketing. Niches are all over the place - remember, there are as many or more buyers on the Long Tail than there are at the Short Head.