Google Trends can provide your website with a competitive advantage through strategic marketing.
From enhancing SEO to market analysis, this free tool provides a ton of value.
In this article we’ll dive into the benefits, use cases, and best practices of using Google Trends in your overall marketing strategy.
Table of contents
What Is Google Trends?
Google Trends is a free tool that uses real-time data to analyze the popularity and demand for Google search terms.
Google Trends provides an unfiltered but anonymized sample of search requests made to Google. Because the data is anonymized, no personal identifying information is attached; instead, the data are grouped, categorized, and associated with the search query topic—not the individual searcher. Since the data are topic-based by geography, you can drill down to city-level geography within the topic.
Google Trends provides two types of sample data:
(1) Real-time data covering the past seven days.
(2) Non-realtime data (historical data) covering searches from 2004 to 72 hours before your query.
Why Does Google Trends Only Use Sample Data?
While Google processes billions of searches per day, for processing efficiency, Google only uses sample data in Google Trends. Using the complete set of data would take too long to process. To get real-time results quickly, Google uses a sample data set representative of the entire data set.
Why Should I Use Google Trends?
Whether you’re an established eCommerce business or just starting, you must market your business consistently. Effective marketing begins with solid research. Google Trends can help in the following areas:
- Improve Content Strategy
- Improve SEO Rankings
- Conduct Competitive Analyses
- Find Shareable Content
- Discover Content That Attracts Inbound Linking
- Encourage Email Signups with Relevant Content
- Market research
- Product research
- Geography-based trends
What Can You Learn from Google Trends?
To keep your content marketing relevant, you need fresh content with exciting perspectives. Google Trends can help you identify trending and seasonal topics, so you plan your content marketing effectively.
1. Use Google Trends to Find Trending Topics
To find trending topics, scroll down to the middle of the page to “Recently trending.” There, you will find the week’s most recent trending topics. See if there are relevant trends you can tie to existing content or develop ideas for new content.
2. Use Google Trends to Find Seasonal Topics
Google Trends can help identify seasonal terms to help plan your content and advertising campaigns. Does your eCommerce business spike during specific holidays like Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, and Christmas? Or, if you sell safety equipment, Hurricane season might prove profitable.
Let’s look at how seasonality works in Google Trends. Here we searched for “gifts for mom” keyword trends for the past five years. As you can see from the graph below, there are two times a year when searches spike for the keyword phrase “gifts for mom”: May (Mother’s Day) and December (holiday season).
Armed with this search-demand information, we can see that creating content and ads for December might yield better results since there’s more demand. Aside from demand, you can also use seasonality to plan your content calendar, promotions, and paid search campaigns.
This is just one example of how to use Google Trends to identify seasonal topics for your eCommerce business.
3. Use Google Trends to Improve and Optimize SEO
With Google Trends, you can research trending keywords and topics to help optimize your SEO strategy. Here’s how:
Research and refine keywords
Start or supplement your current keyword research with Google Trends. Unlike other search tools, Google Trends uses real-time data. This can be super helpful for keyword research. If you have an existing list of keywords to research, enter them in Google Trends to gain additional insight. While Google Trends does not measure keyword volume or difficulty, you will see how keywords perform over time.
Discover related topics
To gain additional insight, use related topics and related queries or refine by category. You can also compare queries to gauge popularity. As you can see, searchers use the word “best” and year in their queries, so if you’re creating a blog post, for instance, be sure to add the word “best” and the current year to the blog post’s title.
Create topic clusters.
An effective content marketing strategy uses topic clusters, grouping content around one central idea, often called “pillars.” Related topics and related queries can help you create topic clusters.
Topic clustering is an effective SEO strategy to help (1) organize your content and (2) improve internal linking. Topic clustering helps customers and Google find content and can be used to improve SEO rankings.
4. Use Google Trends to Improve and Optimize Local SEO
One powerful feature of Google Trends is to view keyword trends by geography (worldwide, country, subregion, and city). Geography-based keyword trends allow you to understand your local market better and make necessary adjustments.
Use the drop-down menu to drill down to the subregion of choice (subregion, metro, or city) from the Interest by subregion section of the page. In this example, clicking any of the five cities listed allows you to drill down further if data is available.
How to Monitor Your Competitors with Google Trends
Let’s say you work for Toyota and want to check out your biggest competitor. To do this, we compare “Toyota” versus “Honda” for the past five years.
As you can see from the graph below, the competition has been steady and neck and neck. We can also see that the lines have trended almost the same way, including the significant dip in March/April of 2019.
If you notice sharp spikes or dips in traffic, you can try to map events that might explain the changes. For instance, look at model release dates and see if they coincide with changes in search trends. Can any external events demonstrate a spike or dip in search trends?
Use the seasonality and geography to understand better how your competition is doing during specific holidays or in specific cities. This kind of research will give you the competitive advantage over your competition.
Conclusion
Google Trends can enhance your eCommerce business’s content marketing and SEO efforts. The simplicity and flexibility of the tool allow you to discover additional insights as you research keywords and topics.
Need help with your content marketing or search engine optimization (SEO) strategy? Contact us today for a free, no-obligation consultation. We can help you achieve your content marketing and search engine optimization goals.
Gentian, CSO and co-founder of Shero Commerce, guides the company and client digital strategies. He's an expert in technical SEO, Inbound Marketing, and eCommerce strategy.
