Cyber Monday Shopping Traffic – SEO for Google Blog Search

Yesterday I wrote about how a business could prepare for big events like Black Monday sales by creating content on your site that targets keywords people might be looking for. The post generated some ok traffic to my site from some interesting sources that I thought would be good to mention to you.

Yesterday I got a lot of traffic from both Google Trends and Google Blog Search. While most people use the Web search part of Google, Yahoo, etc. to search online and it’s a good idea to optimize your site for these search engines, more and more people are using other services like Google Blog Search that might provide targeted traffic and could be easier to optimize for.

Let’s look at what happened:

At 6:00am PST I posted my article on Black Monday. I used the term “Black Monday” because I thought most people would be posting about “Cyber Monday” and I stood a better chance of competing with “Black”. Within a short time of posting I started getting traffic from Google Blog Search (GBS). The way GBS works is by picking up RSS feeds and allowing users to search them.  The formula for how results are shown is based partly on how relevant the words in your search are to a given feed headline and on how recent your post was.  The more recent your post the more likely it is to show up at the top of the list.

While blog search engines like Google’s and Technorati are still not as mainstream as Web search (they tend to skew younger and more tech-oriented) they can still provide good traffic.  Bloggers are probably strong users of blog search so if you are looking to generate links from blogs for your pages it could be a good idea to target blog search.  One way to do this is to provide regular updates on a story throughout the day.  So if I had posted five articles on “Cyber Monday” throughout the day there’s a good chance that at any given time my recent post would have appeared in the top blog search results.  I guess this is sort of like spamming.  In theory you could just keep posting with similar keywords and stay up at the top.

Google Trends shows stories related to what keywords Google thinks are most popular with it’s users at a given time.  So if you’ve got a story on Black Monday it could show up in Google Trends as mine did – see image below – when the story was hot.  Once again I am not sure what kind of user is actively searching Google Trends but my guess is that it’s either a blogger, a marketer or a reporter, two of which you probably would be interested in.