6 Helpful Ways to Use Google Trends
November 19, 2020 By Ashley Orndorff, aka Marketing Geek
Google Trends can be a helpful tool for your business and your marketing efforts. Here’s what you need to know and a few helpful ways to use Google Trends:
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends is a useful site from Google that allows you to explore search trends more deeply. You can use queries or topics to see what kind of search interest they have in Google ocver time and you can dig deeper into specific regions, languages, related topics or terms, and more.
In addition to exploring things you already have in mind, you can take a look through the sections about what is currently trending and what has recently been trending. Also, there are the “Year in Search” reports where you can see what was trending on Google in a certain year.
6 Helpful Ways to Use Google Trends
Here are a few helpful ways to use Google Trends to help support your marketing efforts and grow your business:
1. Find New Content Ideas
Blogging is a great way to add new content to your website, increase the ways people can find you online, increase brand awareness and leads, and more. But, if the topics are irrelevant to your potential customers or the content is poorly written, it doesn’t do much for you and, in some cases, can hurt your visibility in search.
Finding the right ideas for existing and future content is one of the reasons why keyword research is important. Coming up with content ideas, and making sure they’re the right ones for your business, can be difficult. When you find yourself stuck in keyword research or blanking during brainstorming, Google Trends can help you use data to generate content ideas.
A simple Google search can also help to kickstart your creativity. But, Google Trends will help you dig deeper into specific topics to help you determine topics that your target audience cares about. You can also switch from Web Search to Image Search, News Search, Google Shopping, or YouTube Search to see how things change and what new topics pop up.
2. Track Brand Awareness and Popularity
Google Analytics or another analytics tool will help you track traffic to your site over time. But, Google Trends is a quick way to see how the search interest branded terms, products, or services have grown over time.
Not only can you get an idea of how popular your own branded searches are, but you can also look at competitors’ branded terms as well. Additionally, you can compare brands to see how they perform against each other. This can help you stay informed on where your main competitors are in comparison to you and it can also help you identify new competitors in your space.
3. Diagnose Seasonal Traffic Drops
Some industries have more severe seasonal traffic drops than others. If you have several years of analytics data available for your website, you likely have an idea of seasonal traffic trends for your site and your industry.
Being able to cross-reference and validate those drops with Google Trends can be helpful in diagnosing whether a drop in traffic is a normal seasonal trend or an indication that something else is going on. It’s particularly useful for newer websites that may not have several years of their own traffic data to reference or when something unprecedented shakes up your industry.
4. Figure Out the Best Way to Repurpose Content
One of the best ways to keep your old content working for you is to keep it updated and also to repurpose it into other formats. One great blog post can easily become several social media posts, a slide deck, a video or video series, etc.
If you have videos, you can also repurpose video content into several other formats to make the most of the content you create. Because Google Trends is all about search interest, you can use it to narrow down interest in related topics and also figure out the best ways to repurpose the content you have.
The content formats that resonate the best with your target audience may vary depending on the topic, the specific perspective you have, the platform they’re consuming it on, and more. Google Trends paired with some other research can help you focus your efforts on what matters to your target audience.
5. Improve Your Social Media Posts
Since you can use Google Trends to determine queries that are currently popular, have recently been popular, and preferred terms within topics, you can use it to improve your social media posts. Although Google Trends focuses on popular Google searches and things can vary by social platform, you can still use it to get a pulse on what people are paying attention to.
Even if you don’t want to jump on current trends, you can figure out when it makes the most sense to start posting things on seasonal topics, holidays, etc. You can start with Google Trends and go from there, especially for YouTube because you can change the filter from Web Search to YouTube Search in it. But, you can also start with some topic research on social media platforms and then dig deeper into them on Google Trends to help you with ideas for posts on those platforms.
6. Identify New Markets or Opportunities
Looking at what people have searched for and what they’re currently searching for can help identify new opportunities for your business and, potentially, new markets as well. You may be able to catch upcoming trending searches that offer your business the opportunity to innovate and meet those needs. At the same time, you may be able to identify current gaps in your industry that your business can fill.
These are just a few ways to use Google Trends to help improve your marketing efforts and benefit your business. Several of these methods could also help improve your brainstorming sessions in general. But, if your website isn’t designed and built to offer a great user experience and support your business, your efforts can fall flat. Contact us for a meeting of the MINDs to talk about how we can help get your website back on track and performing for your business!
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