Forecasting Search Demand

Everything is going green. Green cars. Green hotels. Well, those are the subjects I’m focused on at work since I work with travel and hospitality clients. If you do a search on Google for “Green Hotels”, not one major hotel chain shows up at the moment. Wanna know why? It’s because the keyword tools say there is currently no volume for the “green” keywords yet. So nobody creates the content for green keywords. Yet if you pick up Travel + Leisure, and did an analysis, you would find that the keyword volume within the magazine itself is very high for the words “green”, “eco-friendly” etc. This has an impact on the consumer and I believe it helps to shape their future search behavior.

The same thing is occurring in the car rental field in regards to keywords such as “Green Car Rental”. Not one major car rental agency is currently showing up on the first page of Google search results. Yet major newspapers are all over the topic with USA Today running an article on their front page a couple of weeks ago on the consumer demand for fuel efficient car rentals.

While many search marketers might scoff at optimizing for keywords with no current volumes, the press and media coverage of green themes in travel and hospitality will ensure that these keywords become valuable. Team those generic terms with geographical terms like “green hotel san francisco” and you’ve got yourself a potential revenue generating optimization strategy. I’m absolutely sure of it.

Every day major corporations miss out opportunities they created themselves for search demand. On July 18th, 2007 Whole Foods scored big with a Designer Bags publicity stunt in Atlanta, GA. I know because I heard about it on the radio in Dallas, TX and then later in the day in Tulsa, OK. I went online to find out more. After many searches, I didn’t find anything. Later they followed this up with an operational decision to ban plastic bags altogether. That’s all you are going to find out about on wholefoods.com if you try to find about the designer bags. At least they had a related topic to cash in on. Most companies don’t. Instead, they come up with golden ideas and then forget to optimize content in advance by forecasting the search demand.

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