- What is Google Trends?
- How to utilise Google Trends for marketing activity
- Using Google Trends to create valuable content
- Identifying long-tail keywords to target specific audiences
To stay relevant, it’s up to marketers to explore what the world is searching for. One way to achieve this is by using Google Trends – a helpful tool that marketers can use to identify current and existing search trends relevant to your industry.
Market research is essential for businesses; this free tool developed by Google allows marketers to analyse search term popularity and semantically related keywords to determine seasonal trends and better plan for marketing campaigns.
Whether you’re looking for a free tool to support your marketing activity or don’t have the time and resources to invest in market research methods, Google Trends could help you unlock hidden insights to superpower your SEO and marketing strategies.
What Is Google Trends?
Google Trends is a free tool developed by Google that helps marketers identify trending topics across a variety of industries.
Although Google Trends was designed with journalists in mind, the tool is leveraged by marketers worldwide, who use the software to:
- Find popular industry topics
- Analyse seasonality
- Conduct competitor research
- Predict consumer behaviour
Google Trends show you what topics are trending in search relative to your industry and how you could use that information to generate interest. For example, “Rihanna” is trending at the time of writing, more than likely due to rumours announcing that she’s pregnant with rapper A$AP Rocky’s child.
If this is relevant to your business, you could use that information to curate some valuable content. Alternatively, if you have a specific topic you would like to write about but aren’t sure if it’s trending, you can type the query into the Google Trends search bar and analyse data on the search term.
For example, we searched for “SEO” and narrowed our filters to the UK in the last 12 months. According to Google Trends, SEO searches scored 53/100, with 100 indicating extremely high interest and 0 symbolising no interest.
The tool also revealed that searches for “SEO” hit peak levels between December 2020 and January 2021, perhaps due to digital marketers updating their SEO for the new year following seasonality.
The Benefits of Google Trends For Marketing
Irrespective of whether you’re directly involved in content or not, all marketers should take advantage of Google Trends to collect purposeful data that can inform marketing and SEO strategies.
Although evergreen content creation is essential, it’s also important to capitalise on trends and publish content on popular topics to help position your brand at the forefront of your industry.
Whether the goal is to increase conversions or build your customer base, here are a few reasons to use Google Trends.
Leverage Hot Topics
If you’re not monitoring trends, chances are you could be publishing content of little interest to your audience.
Many marketers overlook the importance of trends in favour of keywords and technical SEO, all of which becomes less effective when you’re publishing content about topics that people don’t want to read.
One of the easiest and quickest ways to learn what topics are interesting to people is to use Google Trends, which will score the popularity of search queries and provide you with related terms based on search volume to help inform your keyword research.
Remember to analyse trends that are relevant to your industry, as not all trending topics will be a good choice for your business.
Monitor Market Performance
Marketers can also use Google Trends to monitor and measure brand performances by unveiling insight into activity shown towards your brand or service.
In the Search Volume Index section, you can analyse how often your brand’s keyword is searched for and identify popularity peaks and periods of low interest.
Suppose searches for your brand’s keywords increase during seasonal holidays. Then you could use this data to inform your marketing strategy. For example, suppose brand-related searches hit peak levels during November in the run-up to Black Friday. In that case, you could set aside more resources for ad spending during that month to increase conversion opportunities.
Identify Seasonal Trends
Besides collecting trending information in various countries, marketers and web admins can use Google Trends to identify seasonal trends.
Suppose you work in the e-commerce, travel and tourism industries. In that case, chances are your business has been affected by seasonality, and as such, identifying when to stock up in time for the holiday rush can be a challenge.
However, let’s say you’re a fashion retailer; you could use Google Trends to determine at what point in the year related search queries trend the most. We know that the Black Friday and Christmas period are some of the busiest times of the year for e-commerce retailers.
You could use Google Trends to identify at what point of the year interest in clothing searches peaks to help you determine when to start pushing your marketing campaigns.
Similarly, Google Trends will inform you of when interest slumps, which will serve as an indication about when to reduce your inventory to avoid overstocking.
5 Ways to Use Google Trends for Marketing
So, we’ve covered the benefits of using Google Trends for marketing. Now let’s take a look at how you can use Google Trends to enhance your marketing activity.
Using Google Trends to Create Valuable Content
Content marketing is one of the most important drivers when it comes to ranking factors and, as such, has become a priority for most marketers in 2022.
However, finding new and exciting topics to write about that your readers will love can be challenging. Google Trends is a sure-fire marketing tool to find valuable topics as it tells you precisely what is trending on the internet.
Furthermore, the website provides you with search queries and phrases around related trending topics that people are interested in, allowing you to find associations between different trends.
If you’re writing about something time-sensitive, producing relevant content for your audience is crucial as this will increase the chances of users landing on your site.
Boost Social Media Engagement
As Google Trends allows you to find trending keywords based on location and demographics, you could use the results to inform your social media marketing strategy and build creative copy.
One way you can use Google Trends to boost social media engagement is by extracting popular keywords from the platform and weaving them into social media posts as hashtags. Including a few optimised hashtags on a social post is a better strategy than throwing in every hashtag that comes to mind.
You could also use Google Trends to plan campaigns and remain relevant. If your audience is already searching for and talking about the topics you publish on social media, chances are your posts’ engagement levels will spike.
Use Google Trends as Part of Your SEO Arsenal
The most obvious reason to utilise Google Trends is for organic search.
You can leverage the tool to identify keywords relevant to your core search term and then insert those phrases into SEO platforms such as SEM Rush to determine their value.
As you can analyse a year’s worth of data, you can also use the tool to predict future trends in user behaviour and create content before anyone else does!
Identify Long-tail Keywords
Marketers are beginning to harness the power of long-tail keywords to target a more specific audience and separate themselves from the competition.
Although Google is placing less importance on keywords, sourcing the right ones are instrumental to your marketing success, especially paid ad campaigns. From a financial standpoint, the sooner you find keywords, the faster you can begin to capitalise on your paid ads.
What are long-tail keywords?
Long-tail keywords are more specific phrases that your users might be searching for and tend to have less search volume than your primary keywords.
As Google Trends reveals user intent, you can use the service to source these long-tail keywords and discover related phrases that you might want to consider adding to your website or using in your blog posts.
You could learn what long-tail keywords are trending in your industry by going to the “Explore Topics” box in Google Trends and entering your primary keyword. Google Trends will then display a graph showing interest over time and related search terms.
Competitor Research
You can use Google Trends to identify search terms and topics your competitors are utilising. How?
The tool allows you to view what kind of search terms people are entering when using your competitors core keyword and displays trending results from over the past year. With this data, marketers can compare what was popular for competitors in the past with what is trending today.
Using Google Trends for competitor research allows marketers to analyse seasonality and determine whether competitors offer similar year-to-year offers and anticipate sale periods.
