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Labor Day is behind us, which can only mean that Christmas and New Years is just around the corner.  Whether you are ready or not, these holidays along with others are big search engine traffic generators.  For search engine marketers, this means that planning is essential to be as successful and effective as possible.

What I find truly find perplexing is that although everyone regards “Christmas” as the grand poobah of all holidays, Halloween tends to go under the radar by some.  From experience as a parent, I can tell you that kids are just as ecstatic over Halloween as they are for Christmas.  Plus, if you think it’s all about the candy…it isn’t.  Kids love the whole idea of Halloween starting from throwing up the decorations, watching their favorite movies, to choosing what they want to be for the big night.  Retail outlets are littered with entire Halloween sections that are nearly impossible to navigate through.  To reinforce a suspicion, I ran some common holiday keyword terms in Google Trends for fun to see where Halloween ranked among holidays.  To my assumed inclination, Halloween was second in line only to Christmas.  In addition, Halloween traffic has slightly increased while Christmas traffic as flattened and declined.

For search engine marketing, this means that SEO and PPC campaigns could be developed or revised from the year previously.  In addition, keyword research can be done to determine what this years hot products may be such as depicted below.  Just check out the top 10 KEI keywords from Wordtracker:

Well, it looks like Gene Simmons and Slipknot are big winners…at least for this year.  (Side note- I didn’t even know what Slipknot was until I Googled it) Ok, I know what you are thinking.  What about the tricks or treats?  Using Google Insights for search, amazingly candy wasn’t in the top ten.  Not saying that this tool is perfect, but you could argue that candy was hidden in the treats.

Regardless, the main point from the above analysis says that if Halloween isn’t in your search engine marketing arsenal, perhaps I have made an argument that it should be.  Now if could only figure out what I want to be this year…

As you likely probably heard, Google added search engine volume to the external keyword research tool. This was a nice break for us search engine marketers, as we have been left in the dark for accurate numbers since the disappearance of Yahoo!’s Overture keyword tool. But just when we thought things couldn’t get any better, Google released yet another keyword research Tool entitled “Google Insights for Search.”

What’s great about this new keyword tool is that you can see a macro view of industries, seasonality, and regionality over a period of up to 4 years. I like to look at it as Google Trends on steroids.

In any regards, this new tool for me fills in the last piece of the pie. Not only do we know how much search volume there is for each keyword, But we also can find out what kinds of keywords people are using for each niche category, the cities they reside in, and the peak times they search for it.

A quick look at the category “electronics” in Minnesota, reveals the top keywords Minnesotans have used in the past 30 days. Of particular note, the peaks you see in the below graph are actually not weekends. As it probably comes to no surprise, this would be great to know for several reasons. First, you should keep your paid advertising campaigns running hot during these periods. Secondly, using this new keyword insight, hot popular products such as the “ipod touch” depicted will naturally rise to the top of the list which in turn could be used for in-store specials and discounts.

Other notable features worth mentioning here include downloadable reports, search traffic numbers (if you have a Google Account), and 3 ways to start your search session. If haven’t had time to check it out yet, i would recommend taking a couple of minutes and stopping by. I think you will find its well worth the time.