I recently had the opportunity to present at the SEJsummit London – a jointly run event between SEJ and SearchMetrics. The event focuses on practical takeaways for in-house and agency marketers.
As part of my presentation, I used an example of a Seasonal Keyword Heat Map. Several people at the event and through Twitter asked questions on this, so I thought I’d follow up with a post describing this technique.
Below you can see a seasonal keyword heat map for the term “holidays + destination”. The red boxes indicate low search volume while green ones indicate high search volume. In this example, we can see that people are generally searching for holidays in Italy or Croatia in January while they look for holidays in Cyprus or Tunisia in August. Spain is a winner in terms of average monthly search interest.
The value of this exercise is fairly obvious. It can inform your content calendar or on-page optimisation – and engage clients with this activity. I’ve used it to gain insight on user demand for products and even, as search interest on some keywords can be driven by mass media budgets, identify patterns in competitor spending that can be hijacked.
This is an incredibly easy data exercise to carry out. You only need 15 minutes, Google Keyword Planner data and a copy of Microsoft Excel.
The first task is to use the Google Keyword Planner tool, to get the search volume for a selected group of keywords.
Once you have these results, then download this data to Excel CVS – making sure you check the box “Segment statistics by month”.
Once you open this document in Excel all that is left to do is to apply, on a row-by-row basis, some conditional formatting for the colouring.
I hope that was useful. Let me know in the comments how you used these charts and any unusual results they highlighted.
The post How to Make Seasonal Keyword Heatmaps appeared first on Nick Wilsdon.
