Much of the profit potential from the web comes from nascent industries that effectively replace older (and often less efficient) alternatives. When industries are new the keywords are less competitive than when the industries are already established. If you pick the right words early you can have a big advantage as people migrate toward using them, but if you focus your brand and content on the wrong keywords then you will be working against natural market forces.

Having seen and experienced the growth of the field of SEO I thought it would make sense to highlight examples of how the field (and associated language) have changed over time.

Please note that Google Trends data is broad match, and is weighted across the entire period, such that terms that were popular early show more weight on graphs where they have more time being popular than newer related phrases.

Google's Domination Over PPC

In 2008 AdWords became a more popular query than PPC. This is largely because of 3 factors

• Google's domination over the fields of search and search monetization
• AdWords becoming more complex to where people have more questions about it
• Many common PPC tool and management services becoming irrelevant due to Google and other search engines baking lots of functionalities directly into their ad platforms, and complimenting them with a suite of free tools like Google Analytics.

If the Google ad syndication deal with Yahoo! goes through Microsoft will need to aggressively buy marketshare from somewhere or there is a risk that the acronym PPC could end up being replaced by AdWords!