What do the search engines say about John Howard vs Peter Costello?

If you have been wondering what people are thinking regarding this big who haa with John Howard and Peter Costello. Lets take a peep as to what the search engines say. I always feel its easy to guage peoples reactions to things based on search volumes and types of keywords being searched for.

John Versus Peter in Google.com.au

Source Google Trends 14th July 2006 (link)

This graph shows the volume of search traffic by city in Australia.

It can be seen from this that Johnny boy is very popular in Wollongong?!? Well that reason is simple he just visited the great city (link)!

Now if we look at Canberra we can see that John Howard is winning this category although Peter Costello has his strongest search volume coming from this city. This hot contest between the two men is definitely controlling the agenda and its showing in the search engines.

What do people think about Peter Costello?

Above is the current search keywords that people are searching for relevant to the keyword “Peter Costello”.

927 searches for “Peter Costello Australian values” is quite a lot considering there would be 3 times this in Google. It seems Peters views on telling migrants to assimilate to Australian ways has sparked some interest with the people (link) are going to be used for good not Voodoo!

Put Peter's Picture on you wall

21 searches for “Peter Costello Picture” are people looking for a great happy snap. I hope these photos (link) are going to be used for good not Voodoo!

If I were a keen politician I would create pages and start targeting the interests of what people are searching for. Keeping in tune with what traffic and people are searching for is the basis for good search engine optimisation. There is little point optimising for a keyword if no one is searching for it, unless you know a change is on the horizon and its key to get in before everyone else does.

Fred Schebesta is a Director of Freestyle Media and heads up the Search engine optimization department. Freestyle Media are an online marketing agency specializing in search engine marketing and online marketing production. You can contact via email or call (02) 9818 7300 about the article. Or you can request a quotation on your search engine marketing directly from Freestyle Media.