Our job as marketers is to deliver what’s popular at the current moment. When something big hits, how do we interpret the data? One great way to keep your finger on the current pulse of your industry is Google Trends.
Google Trends highlights current and existing trends in search marketing. You can then use this data and apply it to any of your marketing strategies.
In this post, you will learn how to use Google Trends and the steps you can take to get the most out of your efforts.
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends is a superb tool. It helps marketers find trending topics in their industry. While it was designed for journalists, the journalism and marketing worlds have a lot in common.
Journalists and marketers are vying for attention. Regardless of what they’re trying to accomplish, they want to get the attention of as many people as possible using relevant and interesting information.
Enter Google Trends. This tool shows you what topics are currently trending and how to use the tool to reel in the attention of your desired audience.
For example, in December 2022, Argentina was the number one trending search on Google. This is likely due to Argentina’s victory over Croatia in the World Cup.
This is Google’s way of telling us this is a popular topic, so it might be a good idea to create content around it. Naturally, many other factors dictate what content to create, but Google Trends helps us identify what is currently popular.
Do you already have a topic you want to cover but aren’t sure if it’s trending? Don’t worry! You can search for it via the search bar at the top of the page.
For example, I searched “Detroit Red Wings” to see if my favorite hockey team was trending.
As you can see, Google Trends provides a chart ranging from 0 to 100, with 100 being very popular and 0 having almost no interest.
Over the past year, the Wings spiked as a highly searched keyword on Google. This is likely due to the start of the 2022 season. On the contrary, the two low periods followed the end of the regular season and then during the summer months when the National Hockey League was on break.
Why Should You Use Google Trends?
Even if you’re not part of the content creation process, you should know how to use Google Trends. Marketers who use Google Trends do so because they realize the value of capitalizing on trends.
We’re typically focused on developing evergreen content, but we should also aim to maximize our efforts by finding the right time and place to produce a particular piece of content. Here’s how to use Google Trends:
Find Interesting Topics
It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger, content marketer, or SEO professional; you need to find exciting topics your audience wants to read about. In the SEO world, we’re so focused on keywords and technical SEO that we often forget that people typically want to read about cool stuff.
A great way to discover what interests people the most is Google Trends. The tool will show you how much interest surrounds a specific search phrase. This helps you determine whether it’s worth creating content on the topic.
Remember, not all popular trends are worth writing about. That said, look for popular trends related to your industry.
Inspire Creativity
Google Trends is not only great for written content, but it also rocks with visual content too. If you’re trying to figure out what to do with your social media or how to improve a featured image on your blog post, Google Trends can help you identify what your audience wants to see.
By creating an exciting image, you generate attention for your content and show your audience that you understand them and know what they want. This has numerous SEO benefits too.
Leverage Seasonal Trends
Your business might be seasonal if you’re in the travel, eCommerce, or tourism industries. It can be difficult to know when to stock up on certain items.
For instance, let’s say you sell snowshoeing equipment via your e-commerce store. YOu could use Google Trends to see when snowshoeing trends the most. Here’s what Google Trends has to offer:
As you can see, the interest in snowshoeing spikes during the winter and bottoms out the rest of the year. Please note that this search applies to the United States, which is in the Northern hemisphere. The results would likely be the opposite in the Southern hemisphere.
This tells an eCommerce store owner that it’s time to invest in their marketing efforts late in the fall and early in winter since that is when their inventory is trending. They would also want to increase their inventory to avoid backorders.
5 Ways to Use Google Trends
Now that you know how to use Google Trends for SEO let’s explore the actionable steps you can take to make a difference in your marketing campaigns.
Generate Blog Post Ideas
Google Trends is an awesome way to find new topics to cover. If you’re a writer, you know the struggle associated with producing content that your audience will enjoy and rank well on Google. Google Trends is a great way to find strong topics because it tells you exactly what’s trending.
The real kicker is that it provides you with narrow topics and queries about trending phrases. Building off our snowshoeing example, let’s scroll down to the bottom of the page. The tile on the left provides related topics, and the tile on the right offers related queries.
These two resources provide the necessary information to expand on a theme and cover related topics.
It’s essential to select blog post topics based on trends if you cover time-sensitive content. If it’s not evergreen content, it must be 100% relevant to your audience when you hit publish.
Collect Ideas for Social Media Campaigns
In addition to organic search marketing, Google Trends is also helpful for social media. Building a large following and developing exciting content is a tough job. However, Google Trends can make your job easier.
You can use the related queries tile to find trending topics, build creatives, and draft copy around that. For instance, the first two topics are for snowshoeing equipment and the third through fourth entries are popular snowshoeing destinations. If you operate a snowshoeing eCommerce website, you would likely want to create a social media campaign about the first two topics or the second three destinations. You could also write content about the destinations to draw attention to your brand.
Improve Your SEO
This may seem obvious, but Google Trends is an excellent tool for improving your organic search ranking. It can also help with keyword research. Everyone doesn’t use Google Trends, so you can use it to identify relevant keywords and then use various SEO tools to decide if a keyword is worth your time.
One of the beautiful features of Google Trends is that it provides a full year of data. This allows you to map out future content since you know if a topic is evergreen enough to invest the time and effort.
If we search the same snowshoeing keyword and review the past five years of data, it is clear that the trend will continue for years.
Each year the volume rises and falls during the same months. This data can fuel your marketing strategy and help you prepare for the upcoming months.
Find Long-Tail Keywords for Paid Campaigns
Identifying the right keywords for your paid campaigns is critical to your success. It’s also crucial financially because the faster you find the right keywords, the sooner you can start getting the most out of your paid ads.
If we narrow our snowshoeing search down to 90 days, it tells us more about what’s trending right now.
While not shown above, the thirteenth related topic is an excellent long-tail keyword – “cross-country skiing.” This tells us that winter enthusiasts are looking for additional activities during the chilly months.
This is a tell-tale sign that you should consider also selling cross-country skiing equipment. It would help if you created a paid campaign around cross-country skiing equipment with an image of a happy couple working their way across the tundra. This would appeal to your target audience, and we know the term is trending, so there should be more than enough paid search volume.
Find Trending Topics for Webinars
When crafting a webinar, you want to reach the right people at the right time. Google Trends can help you do that.
You’ll want to use currently trending topics in social media and PPC advertising to get the attention of your audience. You also need to know what winter lovers are actively searching for on the internet.
FAQs
Is Google Trends Free?
Yes – Google Trends is 100% free.
Can You Use Google Trends for SEO?
Google Trends is a phenomenal tool that supports SEO via niche content planning. Enter a keyword that piques your interest and gain valuable insights into how many people are talking about that topic and other closely related topics. Doing so allows you to curate a highly personalized SEO strategy.
Closing Thoughts
Identifying trends is an important task for all marketers. No matter your industry, your target audience is actively searching for things on Google and you need to figure out what those things are. Google Trends is a great way to get started.
