If you are an SEO professional and do keyword research, you might have used Google Trends, but have you ever used the full potential of this fantastic tool?
Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a popular option for keyword research, but Google Trends is a fantastic one. This tool enables you to learn a lot from your keywords. The best part about Google Trends is, it will provide you data not just for today, but for a longer period. Here, in this content, we have discussed how you can benefit from the Google Trends tool for keyword research.
Google Trend can
- Show you trends for keywords
- Display seasonal spikes and local differences at a glance, whenever you search for a keyword
- Enable you to get superb content ideas
How To Start:
To access this tool, you don’t need to have a Google account. You can simply go to the Google Trends website and put your keywords. You can even put multiple keywords separating them by commas.
We have shared below the ways by following which you can take full advantage of it.
1. Recognize seasonal trends and then build and promote content at the right time:
If you are an efficient SEO professional, you would know that the search volume of some keywords gets affected by seasonality.
For example, if you have a business of umbrella, you would get the maximum searches for this keyword during the rainy seasons. It becomes high when the rainy season begins in the country. So, if your business is seasonal, I mean season dependent, like an umbrella, you can use this tool to quickly estimate its peaks and bottoms by searching the queries in Google Trend.
To get a quick estimate, you can use the data in two ways –
- Develop relevant content to coincide with the peak:
To sell your umbrellas, you can find out the peak season through the tool and develop relevant content and publish them online before the peak season arrives. People usually start searching for the product before they need to use it. You can write content like “A complete guide to stay dry in this wet season”. This would make an impression on your customers. - Optimize existing relevant pages before the peak season has arrived:
If you have an eCommerce page selling umbrellas, you might already have content for wet season preparation. But you should optimize your content again with the relevant topic before the peak season arrives so that your site appears on the top in searches during the peak season.
2. Check for data-skewing popularity spikes to avoid keyword unicorns:
If you are looking for a good topic for your next content piece, check the topic in Google Trends. Google Trends shows the topics that are on the rise. So, don’t waste your time by creating a content piece with a falling topic. It will show you only the topics that are trendy at present. This tool does not deal with what happened yesterday.
3. Emphasize the trending topics:
By using Trending Searches, you can search the topics that jump in extreme popularity in the last 24 hours in any specific location.
- Why do this?
Say, you own a blog that tells about celebrities. Now, you have to update your blog with the breaking news to make it hot on the search engines. To do so, you can check in Trending Searches to find the relevant topics that are trending right now. Since Google Trends highlights the trending topic of the day, you can find it easily. Depending on that, you can create your blog and make it appear on top.
4. Google Trends tool helps you in planning your content calendar:
For your celebrity blog page, if you find “Oscars” is trending, you can go in details and use Google trend data to plan your content calendar. If you look at the term “Oscars” on the Trending Search over a 5-year period, you would find the peak season occurs at the same time every year, and that is in the beginning of March. The graph on Google Trends would tell you this. If your blog deals with celeb gossips, you can mark your content calendar so that you can create content about this topic in March each year.
5. Find new keyword ideas by using related queries:
When you search your term, Google Trend enables you to learn about the terms that people also search with the term you search. From these “related queries,” you can find new keyword ideas that would help you beat your competitors.
With the help of the related queries, you would better understand the search journey of your potential customers and get to know their needs and requirements.
This is not the end. You can use the suggested queries by Google Trends as the seed keywords and put them on Keyword Explorer to get even more keyword ideas. You can use filters for Keyword Difficulty and Search Volume to find some real gems.
For example, if you search for “sneakers”, you would get the following related queries –
- Sneakers Nike
- Adidas
- Sneakers shoe
- Nike
Now, if you use them as the seed keywords on Keyword Explorer, you would find as following –
- Nike Sneakers for men
- Nike sneakers for women
- Women Nike sneakers
- Nike wedge sneakers
- Nike white sneakers and many more
Now all you need to do is to filter them to find the ones you are looking for.
6. Get to know which cities and subregions have maximum demand for your products or services:
Another advantage of using Google Trend is, it enables you to see where your search query is the most popular. That means you get the answer to a vital question: where do your products or services have maximum demand?
How can you get this data?
Well, you can
- Target these regions with PPC advertising
- Develop content targeting people of those areas
You can also compare how the interest of a search query differs from location to location.
7. Analyze what people are searching on YouTube & refine your video SEO strategy:
Since Google and YouTube are two different search engines (even though Google owns YouTube), the popularity of a particular search query on these two is different.
For example, if you search “HTML tutorial” on both the search engines, you would find a completely different result. The trend of this term is falling gradually on Google, while it is becoming a trend on YouTube. The graph on Google Trends tells everything. Yes, you can get to know about the popular search terms of YouTube through Google Trends. To do that, just hit the “YouTube search” on the dropdown button on Google Trends. However, if you want to promote an HTML tutorial, you should try it on YouTube instead of Google.
8. Augment your Google Analytics:
Have you ever noticed a big shift in your website analytics data and confused about what is happening?
If you don’t have enough historical data to understand if your site is experiencing a change in visits or if something unusual is happening, then you can check analytics and Google Search Console data to get to know about the organic traffic to your landing page for a keyword. Also, you can check in the Search Console for organic queries related to your term. Now all you need to do is to compare this to your Google Trends for the same searches. Thus you will get an in-depth understanding of your website in comparison to larger search trends.
9. Find spelling preferences:
Google Trends also helps you to choose the spelling that is preferred.
For example, donut and doughnut have the same search volume in SEMrush. But when you use Google Trends, you get the exact search volume for both the terms. So, depending on your region, you can choose the term that is preferred more.
Did You know:
Searchers change their queries and adapt new searches faster than you think. So, include checking Google Trends regularly in your SEO strategy. This would help you to stay updated with the trend and develop your content accordingly.
This is true that Google Trends was not specifically designed for SEO professionals and content marketers. However, its features make it an extremely useful tool for keyword research as well as for content promotion. So, if you are still stuck to Google Keyword Planner, just give it a try. I promise you would not repent.
Do you know any tool that can be this much advantageous for keyword research? Share with us in the comment section.