At its very core Google Trends is a market analytics tool, but has been used for all sorts of things – from identifying the biggest conspiracy theory per state, and figuring out whether Kanye West or Taylor Swift is more popular at any particular moment, but how ‘hack it’ can we use it to get SERIOUS marketing info?
The answer is Taylor Swift by a long-shot at the moment by the way. Congrats Taylor.
1. Look for some of the most popular search terms and news articles to create content and relevant keywords for our clients
You can actually search by vertical – for instance, manufacturing, and then download top terms and rising terms for that vertical to look for anything that’s pushing up and start creating content for it just as people are starting to search those terms more:
2. Taking advantage of these upward trends is huge. Ride the trending topics.
Knowing downward trends allows you to avoid certain topics and keywords, as they are not as relevant
For instance – people stopped talking about ‘online marketing’ and instead they were referring to ‘digital marketing,’ when talking about the exact same thing.
If you want to unlock the traffic data of a keyword, compare that keyword with a keyword you already rank for and are familiar with the traffic levels. For instance, if you rank for ‘cold calling’, but want to understand how that might relate to ‘inbound marketing’ put them in together and get an anecdotal comparison of the two search terms keyword volumes.
3. Look at HOW people are searching differently now compared to the last couple of years and what broad categories of searches are moving
I strongly suggest just poking around in Google Trends for an hour of very nerdy analytical fun. Start with your favorite pop heroes if you want, move to key terms you use in your company and might think ideal customers would use and then follow the rabbit down from there.
- Play around with things you think might have similar volume so the sense of scale isn’t so far off it’s indecipherable.
- See what terms were used sparingly before, but are having a come up.
- Look for terms you used to use, but keywords that might be falling out of fashion… should I say – that the writing is on the wall for…. nay, look for keywords who’s time has come 😉
4. Then, determine what times of the week should you be blogging certain categories of content.
For example, two of the top trending keyword trends are “How To” & “Near Me” searches. When you scale down to the 90-day view you can see what days of the weeks those searches are popular.
“How to” blog post traffic seems to trend upward on Sundays and Mondays. Searches related to “Near Me” trend on Fridays and Saturdays.
Of course, use some discretion on whether these people would be using those for your industry at those times of the week – but you can see how categorically sorting by days of the week will help you understand your audience and market more effectively if you’re creative.
5. Look at “How to” content per your industry
Because you can search ‘How to’ or any other TYPE of content per a particular vertical you could very quickly asses if this is a burgeoning type of content for the people you’re trying to serve.
For instance, perhaps there’s a downward trend for manufacturing ‘how to’ but for automative it’s up – this could inform your company to do more tutorial stuff if you’re in the auto industry.
6. Use “Rising Queries” function to find big upcoming content plays
Many terms are on the come up but had never had significant search volume before the last couple of years or even months. The “Rising Queries” filter can give you a big leg up on the competition since so many people are reactionary with their keyword research and only look at what their competitors are ranking for.
I strongly suggest using this and other opportunities like ‘Answer the Public‘ or Quora, or Reddit to do creative research and blog about stuff that people actually want to know about, not just rely on your competitors (who you might not even respect) to blog about it first.
In Short – Don’t Sleep on Google Trends
The whole point here – is that you might not be utilizing Google Trends as much as it certainly could be for your content strategy. If you haven’t taken a look at the tool in a while, get back in there and see what it has to offer.
Google Trends can be powerful for content strategy – and these are just six ways to get the most out of it in short order.