An interesting post from Steve Safran’s Lost Remote, where he recommends buying Google keywords for, say, your station’s weather forecasts.

As an example, a quick search for Sheffield weather doesn’t return anything from Hallam FM, the local radio station for the area; and the BBC’s the top result. Well - nearly the top result. The top result is actually… the weather forecast. Rather negating the point.

However, I would also recommend you buy Google keywords, for one reason: Google’s never fresh enough.

One example - do a search for Derby result, to discover who won today. The best match is the top result, but that’s a page that (at the time of writing) Google had last looked at on May 22nd. (Epsom racecourse cleverly published a page ahead of time; clicking on that result reveals the winner).

Later this month, Muse are playing in the new Wembley stadium. People will search for Muse Wembley pictures after the event - and, I’ll bet, not find much. You see, Google’s main search results are produced, for many sites, monthly or fortnightly.

This is where Google keywords come in. If you were to buy ‘Muse Wembley pictures’ for just a day or so, you’ll catch that traffic: doing Google’s job before its crawlers come along and take a snapshot of that page. And a secret: certainly in the tests I’ve done, Google’s search engine appears to be influenced to look at your AdWords target page fairly quickly after you start advertising; so you can stop the ads fairly quickly, once you appear in the organic search results.

So - if something important happens, whack it into Google Adwords, and watch the traffic come in (even after you’ve stopped paying for it). That’s my tip of the day.

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Disclosure: a site I run earns revenue from Google AdWords.

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