In today’s ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. Google Trends is one such tool that can be your secret weapon for SEO and content marketing success. This versatile tool can help you understand what the world is searching for, identify emerging trends, and create content that resonates with your target audience.
Understanding Google Trends & its Metrics
Google Trends is an excellent, free, user-friendly tool offered by Google. It provides valuable insights into the relative search interest for specific keywords and topics over time. With Google Trends, you can explore trending search queries, compare the popularity of multiple keywords, and gain a deeper understanding of the search behavior of your target audience.
Before diving into using Google Trends for SEO and content marketing, it’s crucial to understand the various metrics the tool provides:
Search Interest:
Google Trends uses a scale of 0 to 100 to represent the relative search interest for a given keyword or topic. A score of 100 indicates the peak popularity of a term, while a lower score represents lower search interest.
Geographic Data:
You can filter results by region, country, or city to understand where a keyword is most popular. This is particularly helpful if you’re targeting a specific location.
Time Frame:
Google Trends allows you to specify a time range, from the past hour to several years, to analyze how search interest has evolved.
Related Queries and Topics:
Google Trends provides competitor insights into related search queries and topics, helping you discover other relevant keywords to target in your content.
Finding Trending items on Google Trends
When it comes to finding trending items on Google Trends, you can adopt one of two available ways.
- The first way is via Google’s Trending Now webpage.
- The second way is via Google’s Tool named Google Trends Explore.
Let us delve into these two methods one by one.
1- Trending Now webpage displays the list of the top twenty current search trends of the day, or, you -might say, top trending keywords. It also makes you available a Real-Time Search Trends button. One can also choose any specific country and then the desired category. The general categories to choose from are Top stories, sports, science, technology, health, entertainment, and business.
2- Google’s Explore Trend tool allows you to find the trending keyword by specifying the period along with it. There are several options available to select, which include the past hour, the past four hours, the past day, or the past seven days. One more important thing to mention here is that you need to specify keywords yourself in the second method, and you will get to know whether it’s trending or not.
How to use Google Trends for SEO and Content Marketing?
This fantastic and effective tool has made it easy to identify keywords or phrases that have been popular for a specific period and within a particular area or location. This kind of essential information assists you in creating successful content and effective SEO campaigns.
Let us have a look at a few different ways one can utilize Google Trends to discover new keywords or even phrases.
Google Trends Search Operations are useful
There are four Google trends search operators one can use to alter the displayed data; let us have a look at the table to get a clear understanding of it.
| Minus Sign – Using the minus sign with two different keywords like KW1 – KW2 It means that the search results will be all related to KW one. It will not have something related to KW2. It will be excluded from the search. | Plus Sign + Using the plus sign with two different keywords like KW1 + KW2It means that either the results for KW1 will be displayed or for the KW2. Both KW will not be included in the search results. |
| Quotation Marks Using the Quotation mark with two different keywords like: “KW1 KW2” means that the exact match result of the written keyword will be shown. The order of the KW inside the quotation mark also matters and affects the results. | No Search Operators Last but not least, using no search operation with the keywords at all, like this: KW1 KW2 It means that the search may be related to both the given keywords in any order and in any way. |
Related Topics & Queries
Moving further, Google Trends has two significant and impressive features. Both of them can provide effective ideas for content creation.
The first one is – related topics, and the second one is – related queries.
| Related Topics | Related Queries |
| Related Topics – These are the related search queries; it means that these share the same concept. It will never show up whenever someone is comparing multiple keywords or phrases. It will show up when the user chooses to investigate only one keyword at a time. | Related Queries – These are not much different from Related Topics, as the description of both is almost the same. It gives you two options to choose from. The first one is Top Queries, and the second one is Rising Queries. Top queries relate to the most popular searches, and the Rising queries relate to the ones that are becoming popular with each passing day. Rising queries allow you to stay ahead of the competition easily. |
Consider time-based trends to discover insights
When it comes to researching the keywords, there are generally two ways to look at them. You may either search for the ones that are stretched across for a long time or the ones with here for shorter periods.
For instance, one can choose to set Google Trend to display the traffic for a specific keyword stretching back to 2010. It will let you know the trends from the past year and your audience’s interest, too. There are a few things one should keep in mind regarding this:
| Long-term trends moving downwards | Long-term trends moving upwards |
| Spikes may be in regular or irregular patterns over a certain trend. If there are regular intervals, it may indicate the search query’s seasonal pattern. | If a specific trend is going downwards steadily, it means that the audience is losing interest in it so you don’t need to focus much on content creation. |
| Spikes in searches indicating irregularity | Spikes may be in regular or irregular patterns over a certain trend. If there are regular intervals, it may indicate search query’s seasonal pattern. |
Keyword research based on category
If you want to create amazingly effective content for long-term benefits, you can choose to sort keywords based on the categories – Google Trends can assist you regarding this. The category tab is essential to refine your research for the keywords to the correct context.
It will let you know the more accurate and relevant results of specific categories based on the moment.
For example, if your keyword is Skincare, it is sensible to choose the “beauty and fitness” category. If your keyword is Motorcycle, you will select the “Auto and Vehicles” category. It will just display the refined data based on those specific categories. There could be more than one suitable category against one keyword, so you can choose the ones that you think are more related and appropriate.
Simply, it means that the Google Trends Category option allows you to get proper information related to your specific keywords or phrases within the correct context.
Keyword research based on locations
One can also get keyword data based on particular locations with Google Trends.
When we talk about Google’s ranking strategies, the content is ranked based on to whom it’s more relevant. Therefore, if you choose to incorporate locations in your context, it can assist you a lot.
It is one of the most effective ways to reach out to a particular audience who might be interested in your specific products or services, which in turn is really advantageous for your business. You can easily create content targeting the people from that particular location for selling or promotional purposes.
For instance, if you are an insurance service provider, it would be wise to target the audience from the US instead of Pakistan or India, where buying insurance trend is particularly low.
If you are selling some products or services that are purely for hot areas, it would be wise to make promotional content for only those countries that have sweltering weather instead of selling it to the colder regions, where you will get no audience to buy.
Target search intent with search types
Search type is another fantastic option that Google Trends allows you to make use of it. It makes it possible to refine your keyword data based on the type of the search.
It results in getting more accurate, more relevant, and more meaningful data by removing all the unnecessary noise that your search may contain. Let us have a look at a few options by which Google Trends data can be refined. It includes:
- Google image search
- Google Shopping
- News search
- Web search
- YouTube search
For instance, if you choose the YouTube search, you will get to know that the keyword How is the most famous keyword on this platform. The majority of people are searching keywords or phrases starting with this so that you can create content around this keyword. When we talk about Google News Search, we come to know that What is the most popular keyword here.
Keep experimenting with this search-type option, and you will get actionable and accurate facts undoubtedly.
Wrapping up – Google Trends for SEO and Content Marketing
Google Trends is a powerful, versatile, and user-friendly tool for SEO and content marketing. It helps you identify trends, understand user behavior, and create content that resonates with your target audience. By using this tool effectively, you can stay ahead of the competition, enhance your online visibility, and drive more organic traffic to your website. So, make Google Trends a staple in your digital marketing Services & toolkit, and watch your SEO and content marketing efforts reach new heights.
