What are people searching for? It is whatever is impacting their life at that moment. It could be a plumber to replace the hot water heater, the menu at the local restaurant or how to set-up their new WordPress blog.

Many keyword phrases have a distinct seasonality within the year such as Christmas lights or graduation gifts. Other phrases are seeing growth year after year and others are shrinking in use. Google has a free tool that allows you to research these trends… it is called Google Trends

Google Trends: View popularity of topics over time. Based on Google search data, graphs of search volume are available. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Graphs show the relative popularity of each search term over a specified period of time – (data since 2004).

Picking the right keywords is part art and part science. You need to understand the psychology of how and why people search. People search the web to find information, answers and a solution to a problem. Sometimes it is best to get the help of keyword research services to set the right foundation for your search engine optimization.