Since this blog started a couple of months ago I wrote two posts where I went on two little rants regarding Apple’s and Starbucks’ recent joint marketing gimmicks (here and later here). Of course these are highly subjective.

What has been interesting to watch is the type of long tail traffic that ends up coming to my blog as a result of those two posts getting indexed in Google. I use Google Analytics which tells me what was it that users searched for on Google as they came to this blog.

This is a great example of the long tail search in action, here are some keywords people searched for before they found and clicked on my posts. Can you tell my favorite is #8?

1. starbucks soundtracks
2. starbucks recommendations
3. apple starbucks radiostations
4. ari starbucks blog
5. is starbucks good coffee
6. itunes from starbucks are they only good to down load that day?
7. recommendations for starbucks
8. starbucks “song of the day” “songs suck”
9. starbucks double short latte
10. starbucks good
11. starbucks streaming
12. what recommendations would you make to starbucks
13. why starbucks is good  

Is Starbucks Watching?

Another interesting thing is when I see there’s been one or two instances of searching for “starbucks recommendations” or “what recommendations would you make to starbucks” in a day, it is sometimes followed by 5-8 people actually viewing that page within the day. Looking over the stats and other possible entry points, the only conclusion I can make is that once the person has found the link he or she has passed it on to a few colleagues to check out as well. Now ordinarily those two posts aren’t the best of the ones I have, so an average person wouldn’t pass them on. So in a paranoid (and cool) way one possible explanation is that some marketing heads at Starbucks are actually searching blogs and trends to see what’s the latest chatter about Starbucks in the blogosphere. There are actually companies who get paid nice sums of money to track this for corporate clients.

So if that is true in some part, it just makes ranting so much more fun when you know it can potentially land on some decision maker’s desk in the twisted way the web works these days. What this also means is that now this post will attract even more Starbucks searching people since it’s stuffed with keywords. That is, unless Google de-indexes this post altogether thinking I am trying to spam and stuff the post to get traffic for profit. Oh Google, I have so much to say on this my friend, but it’s just not going to fit into one post. I’ll leave it for another day.