Master visual trend spotting and break Google’s stranglehold on keywords
Are you on top of the best long-tailed keywords for promoting your small business?
It’s an important topic we often cover here and it’s what we’re going to use as a starting point for a related discussion.
Let’s quickly look at what you’re trying to accomplish when you compile a list of what should be the best-performing long-tailed keywords for you to use on your website in and your digital marketing efforts.
You want to find the long-tail keywords that best match your products or services and match what people need. In other words, you want to find where those three areas overlap. That would be your digital marketing sweet spot.
There are various ways to explore long-tail keywords. If you need to review those, follow the link in the opening paragraph of this article and you’ll get a rundown of the main sites and tools available to you. But these sites will deliver words, words, and more words. Don’t get me wrong, words are fine, however, we know that the Internet is becoming increasing visual, so let’s look at another strategy.
Instead of using words to discover more words, let’s use words to discover images and see what we can learn from the images!
The first screenshot below shows you initial search results on Pinterest for the hashtags #shirts #white #womens. The second is an Instagram search for #whiteshirtstyle. A similar search using white shirt hashtags on Facebook, by the way, delivered mostly black shirts (I’m not kidding)…so I’ve left if off here, but you might find a Facebook search useful for your products or services.
Let’s revisit the graph for just a moment. See the circle labeled “Consumer demand”? Let’s tweak that just a little and call it “Consumer trends.” If you can find the place where the product or service you offer overlaps with a trend, and can then discover the best keywords to use, you are opening the door to a major sales opportunity.
So here’s the strategy:
- Do hashtag searches on visual social media platforms that align to what you sell or what you could
- Examine your search results carefully, looking for how many people “like” different posts, how many times an item on Pinterest is repinned, etc.
- Take note of any other hashtags associated with those popular items.
- Use all of these hashtags to build the long-tail keywords you use on your website.
- Post images of your offerings on these visual social media platforms using what you judge to be the best long-tail keywords.
- If necessary and feasible, merchandise to take advantage of the trends you discover.
Another way of thinking of this is that you are using sites like Instagram and Pinterest as a kind of visual version of “Google Trends.” Next, you’re taking the trend information you glean and translating the visuals back into words and also replicating the popular visuals in ways that promote your brand and small business.
We know that a picture is worth a thousand words, so maybe using images like this could be worth a thousand additional sales!