I thought I would share some trends information about Michael Jackson and the searches surrounding his death. I’m not going to go into an in-depth analysis (for numerous reasons, including competitive concerns) but thought I’d at least share some highlights.

First off, when you are doing SEO for a large media organization, it’s important to win on SEO as it is breaking:

Secondly, it’s important to know which term to go after. In this case, ‘Michael Jackson dead’ has twice the search volume as ‘Michael Jackson death’

Thirdly, it’s important to get wins where you can and leverage that Google News is different. Thus allowing wins on much more difficult terms such as ‘Michael Jackson’ in Google News and Google News results in Google Web. Of course, I would’ve loved to have the top result in Google Web for ‘Michael Jackson’ but is that really realistic considering the competition and history of link structure of other sites? But YES, I still wanted it. It was 10x the volume of search queries for ‘Michael Jackson dead’.

Lastly, it’s important to remember the longer tail terms that are occurring at the moment and will occur in the coming days, weeks, and months as well. You don’t want to focus too heavily on just the head terms. Besides, nailing the longer tail terms allows you to setup a proper and more realistic link structure (which keeps Googlebot happy too).

Oh and yes I know that Google Trends isn’t the only source for information but I didn’t want to take forever writing this post . . . start to finish it was 15 minutes.