Google owns roughly 90% of desktop searches and 95% of mobile searches.
As such, the search giant has a massive trove of search data–some of which is shares for free via an awesome little tool called Google Trends.
In this post, we discuss how you can use Google Trends search data to make strategic marketing decisions that can significantly increase your own website traffic.
Let’s dig in!
Table of Contents
What Is Google Trends? & How Does It Work?
Google Trends, started in 2012, is one of the most powerful tools as it bears the knowledge of frequently changing search trends.
It can help you discover all you need to know about a news search term: the number of times it was looked up when it happened, global regions where the search originated, and so much more.
It also takes the site’s search volume and the time period into consideration when fetching the results for you.
The tool is designed to dig deep into granular data in real-time.
It can carry out comparative keyword research and lets you discover event-triggered fluctuations in the keyword search keyword volume.
The information and insights provided by the tool are incredibly accurate since Google has made pathways into the everyday lives of millions of people who use its search capabilities globally.
All in all, Google trends shows offer valuable data in the form of segmented keyword research with search volume, search engine user, geographical locations, and more.
However, many people mistakenly believe that Google Trends is nothing more than scientific polls used to gather data.
But in reality, this tool is a lot more powerful, comprehensive, and thorough at extracting data that exclusively reflects the search interest in the market. It tells you about the most searched words and spikes in particular topics according to the keywords you provide for the tool.
However, the data from the tool always represents one side of the story. Using the data, marketers need to Google trends research through various angles to draw the best conclusion.
What Makes Google Trend Popular For Driving Traffic?
While every consumer journey is unique, there is something to be said for the collective experiences that lead to search trends when many people search for the same thing simultaneously. When used repeatedly online, the words, questions, and topics can quickly tell anyone if their product or service is in demand.
To get the customers to your website, you need to lure them in with what they need. And that’s why you need all the insights you can get to figure out how to entice your target audiences.
Marketers also rely on Google Analytics to find this data, but not many know the importance of having Google Trends in the marketer’s toolkit. Where analytics provide periodic data only, Google trends shows offer real-time live updates. It helps marketers and businesses explore data across decades and dig deeper in the search engine history to see historical Google trends and understand how people consume the search results.
Google Trends is popular because it offers datasets that can build various search engine marketing and link building strategies for driving traffic – whether it’s PPC, SEO, or social media marketing. Once you know the most trending search queries, you can pave the best path to reach your consumers.
Google Trends Data – What’s Included?
Google trends data is an unbiased set of anonymized, categorized, and aggregated real time search data that enables marketers to measure audiences’ interest in any topic across search results. They can further refine it according to the location from city level and up to global level.
Use the free data explorer on Google Trends to look up any topic, keywords, or phrases and learn about their search volume. This way, you can discover what other relevant search terms are garnering attention online.
The trends data can be of two types. These are:
Real-Time Data
Search engine data from the last seven days.
Non-Real Time Data
Datasets can age back to any year in the past to as early as the last 36 hours.
Now that you have discovered the basics of Google Trends, Trends Data, and how it differs from other Google tools, let’s dig deeper.
Using Google Trend Searches For Driving Traffic To Your Platforms
Google Trends is the key to enhancing your digital presence and speeding up traffic acquisition for your website. If you are not using the mighty tool, you are far behind your competitors and missing out on many vital insights that can instantly boost the traffic on your website.
If you look forward to knowing the latest Google trends on the web, Google Trends is the best tool to get you all the insights. It will help you access the most trending topics, keywords, and phrases for strengthening your marketing campaigns. Here’s how you can achieve all this:
What Do You Need To Do?
First of all, you need to open Google Trends and lookup for data. Sort it by type, category, region, or a specific time period. Try different things to draw out some conclusions, and then put them all together to find the best results. Utilize the trending topics, predictions, and related queries to optimize your content and website to draw more traffic and boost sales.
For example, use the tool to find the search volume of a specific phrase over time to identify its peak season. This will help you plan the content distribution according to the peak seasons.
Curate Content Based On Trending Topics
Do you have content on your website that doesn’t get frequent visits, no matter how good it is? If yes, then it might be on a topic that people don’t find interesting. Marketers need to explore trending topics and use what they discover to inform their SEO and content marketing strategies.
Once you know the trend, create blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and more. Next, optimize them with the most trending keyword phrases to rank them on the SERPs. Using this strategy will instantly bring more visitors to your website – this is considered one of the best strategies to drive traffic.
Also, you can find the region where relevant searches are popular and target those audiences in your regional or local SEO and content strategies. Just remember to always look up for real-time data to find the most recent insights.
Update Existing Content To Refresh The Context
People often prefer to create fresh content for each purpose. But if you want to optimize your content with relevant keywords and phrases, you can also opt to shuffle up your keywords with the trending ones.
This means you can use the old content and tweak it to refresh the context and keywords according to the trends. For example, if you see warm clothes trending and already have a relevant blog post, you can add the trending phrases for warm clothes in the existing vlog post to increase its visibility on the SERPs. The key is to make the content relevant to the trend and optimize it for better reach and more traffic.
Plan Content Based On Seasonal Trends
Sometimes identify seasonal trends have no background, but at other times it’s the seasons that give them a kickstart. Looking up numerous keywords, you will find out there are certain seasons for specific keywords trending.
Using Google trends, get predictions to analyze the tentative movements in the coming season. However, you would only need to use them as one data type and not base your entire content on it.
Let’s say you have winter season approaching, and you have warm clothes to sell through an ecommerce store. You would need to analyze the predictive phrases 3-4 months before the winter season. To make all your content come into play, you need to give it some time to rank.
So, for example, if you want to rule the search come Christmas time, you’ll have to ensure that the bulk of your targeted content is written, optimized, and live by September. This will give it enough time to rank online.
Once the season starts, your already optimized content will already be on the SERPs compared to your competitor’s fresh content.
Invest in Region-Specific Marketing Campaigns
Whether you are using Google Trends for SEO, PPC, or standard advertisement, it is essential to know the region where your products or services are mostly demanded.
Running an ad campaign or optimizing your content that reached the entire globe is only a waste of time, effort, and money. Imagine advertising your warm clothes in Equatorial regions that never get any winters.
Look up searched phrases trending in different regions to figure out if the people there would appreciate your offerings.
Use data from Google Trends to target specific regions or sub-regions instead of entire countries. Create useful and relevant content and optimize it for a location, aiming at people who reside in those areas.
Also, always compare search related queries from different regions for local SEO, so you can optimize content for each area differently by knowing the trending interests.
Modify Your Keyword Strategy For SEO and PPC
If you are planning your SEO content for SERP rankings, use Google Trends to modify your keyword strategy. By discovering the recently trending phrases, you can easily generate organic traffic in no time.
Look up trending keywords with high search volume to sort out the best and most relevant ones for your brand or organization.
You can use the non-real-time data from Google Trends to see the specific keywords performed throughout the year and in the past. Also, you will be able to analyze if the keywords are worth investing in or not.
Explore More Keywords Related To Your Brand Or Offerings
It’s never advised to keep all your content optimized with limited keywords. It is always beneficial to include relevant keywords in your optimization strategy to drive traffic one way or another.
Look at related queries to understand where your audience’s interests lie and optimize your content accordingly. You can curate separate pieces of content for related queries to target your audience; this will instantly boost the ranking and traffic of your platforms.
Advertise More For Trending Products Or Services
If you are running PPC or any other paid advertisements, you can use the data from Google Trend to boost sales and increase traffic on your platforms.
The key is to look up trending products and promote them in the region where they are in demand. You can enter the products or niche into the Google Trends search and choose products with rising demand.
Promoting your products without knowing if people need them or not is a waste of money. Therefore, you must see the need to sell your offerings to make your campaigns effective.
For example, as the winters approach, the demand for warm clothes instantly increases, making it the best time to advertise warm clothes from your online or ecommerce store.
Also, you may often find high-demand products that won’t stay in trend for longer as the movement will fade over time. One thing to understand here is to promote according to the audience’s needs but not the irrational trends. For instance, fidget spinners became a booming product for some time and then disappeared as the trend faded away.
Considering the mechanism, you need to consider the rational needs and trends and ignore the trends that might not stay the same over time.
Keep Track Of Your Competitors’ Performance
Knowing your competitors is one thing but learning from them is another. If you want to be successful in the industry, you need to keep an eye on your competitors.
With Google Trends, you can look up keywords used by your competitors, learn how they performed through the year and in the past. Once you know everything, you can analyze what you can include in your strategy. Mindfully spying on your competitors can help you drive more traffic and boost sales in no time.
Refine Your YouTube Video Strategy Considering The Trending Topics
Video is a preferred content format for many consumers, as people prefer videos over textual content.
But making a video trend needs a highly trending topic. Have you ever imagined why brands and influencers leverage the ongoing hot topics and spread awareness or insights on the specific issues?
Well, it’s the trending topic that makes their video content trend.
As the topic Google trends on the SERPs of Google, Twitter, YouTube, youtube search or other social media platforms, their video content also spikes!
Therefore, if you want your video content or YouTube channel to rank or become a significant trend, you need to target the hot topic in your industry. You can quickly discover the topics through Google Trends. However, it is up to you to prioritize the trending topics from all over the web search or specifically from YouTube search. The tools allow you to find trends from YouTube analytics, so you can create better-performing videos for increasing the traffic for your YouTube channel.
Conclusion
Keeping up with the global search trends for marketing aspects may seem daunting, as the industry keeps evolving and the trends keep changing.
But what remains the same is the audience that you are catering to through your products and services. Thus, it would be best if you kept up with your audience according to each market trend – no matter how quickly it changes or how long it remains in effect. This will help you target your audience frequently and gain maximum results through your marketing practices.
Whether your goals are to render SEO, social media, content, video, email marketing, lead generation, or any other marketing technology, the latest trends are a great way to ensure your marketing strategy remains relevant. This is how you’ll reach your audience, drive more traffic, increase conversions, and boost sales.
Using Google Trends, you can make mindful business decisions for marketing and better handle your customers, keeping their needs on top of your priorities.
Tim holds expertise in building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams.
When he's not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach...preferably in Hawaii.
Over the years he's written for publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.
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