4 Easy Ways to Use Google Trends in Your Search Marketing Strategy
Last week Google merged their Trends and Insights for Search products into one behemoth of a search traffic tool. Now unified under the banner of Google Trends, we thought we’d take a look at a few of the ways you can use Google’s new Trends tool to gain insight into search traffic and boost your own!
1. Newsjacking
Struggling to find your next topic to write about? Taking a look at ‘Hot Searches’ in Google Trends’ sidebar is a great way to see what people are searching for and how you could create content that gives searchers what they’re searching for.
By jumping on emerging or popular stories in Google Trends and putting your own worthy spin on the news, you’ll be capitalising on existing interest and generating bucketloads of organic search traffic back to your site.
When looking to Google Trends for searches to newsjack, make sure you’re also exploring related searches, which may have similar amounts of traffic with a much lower level of competition.
2. Seasonality
Take your main keywords and plug them all in at once into Google Trends and set the time filter from ‘2004-present’. See any patterns?
Above is an example of how seasonality can affect search traffic. If I was a US hardware store selling sprinklers, hoses and pool salt, I’d be boosting my search spend substantially over the peak periods seen below for summer. While we often look at how users search for your products through keyword research, understanding when your customers are searching for your products is equally essential to building a search campaign.
There’s also a ‘Forecast’ tool that explores Google’s predictions on search traffic for the chosen key phrases that can be incredibly valuable for searches that haven’t been incredibly popular in previous years. It’s like having your own little Google crystal ball.
3. Regional Interest
Under the ‘Interest Over Time’ graph is a map that shows regional interest for your chosen key phrases. Much like we explore when customers are searching for your products with interest over time, where they are searching from can be just as valuable for many businesses.
Search terms surrounding SEO for example are concentrated heavily across India, Vietnam and a slew of other countries in South East Asia.With this information we might want to start native-language blog posts, build products we could launch online that are targeted to these countries and explore other ways that we could add value to these regions already searching for our field of expertise.
Explore where your products, services, brand or industry are popular, and if they’re within your reach, explore ways in which you could cater to searchers in this region and capitalise on the existing search traffic in the region.
4. Local Trends
While regional trends on a larger scale is important to understanding where new opportunities may lie, getting down and dirty with the data on a local level is where you’ll be able to target these potential searchers much more accurately. Clicking on a country inside the regional interest map will narrow down the interest by country, state and even cities where the data exists.
So how can you use this data? With local-focused mobile AdWords campaigns. Targeting users based on their location and where search traffic is highest for the term is a great way to keep your AdWords budget down with highly-targeted, mobile clicks. We’ve used similar tactics before and seen huge results for clients with limited AdWords budget operating on a local level. Give it a try!
Got your own Google Trends tricks? Share them with us in the comments below!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
