How to Use Google Trends to Spike Your Traffic

In a previous post, Google Trends: The Borg Speaks, I talked about the strange and sometimes disturbing movements of Google Trends.

In that post I had some fun using Google Trends as a radar of our bizarre cultural zeitgeist. But that is far from its only use. For one thing, bloggers have found a clever, perhaps less than scrupulous way to use Google Trends to gain a large bump in their site traffic, and thus their advertising income.

Now, I’m not necessarily advising this technique, but in the spirit of full disclosure of the black arts, I’ll tell you how to do it.

For this to work well, your site needs to already be a) reasonably popular in terms of traffic, b) already listed by Google, and c) indexed quickly by Google Blog Search after each post – quickly meaning a matter of minutes. If c) isn’t happening, make sure your blogging software is set to ping “http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2″ after each post. The faster your post is indexed, the better this will work.

Step One: Find It

Google Trends is updated frequently throughout the day. As it updates, wait for a newly popular subject to bubble up. Look for one without much competition in the search results – something new or uncommon. That’s not too difficult in a society which creates new “celebrities” on a pace of about twice a day. Sometimes a neologism will pop up, usually after being spoken by someone on a popular TV show. Grab it.

Step Two: Write It

Write a quick, keyword-heavy post on this hot subject. The content can be cribbed from Wikipedia, imdb, or AP News – it just needs to be relevant to the subject. The first couple of lines should be inviting to a searcher (i.e. “Everything you want to know about _____”, “Hot nude pics of _____”, etc.). Use the popular term by itself as the post title, for maximum keyword density.

Step Three: Ping It

The final step is to ping Google as quickly as possible and get indexed. If it works, searchers will see this post in the top few results for one of the most popular searches of the day. That can mean thousands of clicks. If you have advertising which pays by the impression, you just made some money. Even if you have pay-per-click ads, you’re likely to get quite a few extra clicks from people simply looking for somewhere else to go after they’re done with your page.

Now, that’s how to do it unethically. But do you really want to post solely for the sake of gaining traffic? If you were a store owner, do you just want to get people inside your store with a window display, or would you rather work on having satisfied repeat customers?

Then again, how unethical is it really? Isn’t this really just another form of what the Huffington Post does – re-packaging other people’s work and putting it in front of more noses? Don’t get me started; let’s save that for another post.

So there are open questions and gray areas. If your post is relevant to your site and to the subject, and you manage to add some value, then clearly you’ve served a purpose, even if you’ve marketed your goods in an manipulative way. And isn’t all marketing inherently manipulative? Doesn’t a consumerist, advertising-based society favor manipulative tactics over quality, innovation, humanity and all that other bullshit people still seem to care about despite decades of soul-crushing propaganda? 

I think the only way to answer these questions is with an experiment. Tune in tomorrow for a Google Garbage™ Special!