Attracting readers to your content isn’t always easy, but choosing keywords with Google Trends can help you promote your website effectively.
The best way to attract visitors to your website is to create content that is interesting to your target audience, and then use every tool at your disposal to make sure they see it.
A keyword tool like Google Trends can help you base your content strategy on your target market’s evolving interests and needs. It will take you beyond data snapshots and show you patterns of search intent and user behaviour.
Seeing these trends lets you make swift and smart decisions about how to meet your target audiences with relevant content that feels customized to their needs. Google Trends helps you choose relevant keywords that will increase in value over time, attracting larger audiences to your content.
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends is a free online tool that provides access to a sample of search requests users have typed into the search engine. It gives you valuable insights into which keywords you can use in your content to boost search engine optimization (SEO).
This keyword tool allows you to research and review data that shows how popular specific searches are on Google and YouTube. You can even examine different date ranges to see how a keyword has performed recently and over the long term.
To find relevant keywords for your content, simply use the research features in Google Trends to see how many people have shown interest in your keyword and, most importantly, if interest is climbing or dropping off.
A keyword that is suddenly trending upwards could give your website traffic a boost if you jump on it quickly and work it into your content plan. You can build your content strategy around desirable keywords to help ensure there will be an audience for your content when it is published. With some planning, every piece of content you create not only has an audience but also attracts increasing interest over time.
Google Trends lets you analyze keyword data in multiple ways that include:
- hot searches that show real-time search data covering the last seven days;
- search volumes in any period from as recently as 36 hours ago to as far back as 2004;
- top charts with lists of popular searches;
- related topics based on your main keyword; and
- niche topics by region.
Be sure to watch for rising searches flagged as breakout terms, which signal the search volume has increased by over 5000 per cent. These keywords can be at the beginning of a big spike in interest and are great to jump on.
How does Google Trends differ from other keyword tools?
Trends tell us what’s gaining popularity and what’s falling off the radar. Google Trends goes beyond simple numbers to help you make better choices based on what your target audiences may want to be reading soon, not just what’s been popular lately.
For example, when using Google Trends for keyword research, you might compare the results with those you get from Google Keyword Planner or another keyword tool. They will differ because Google Trends will show you the relative popularity of search terms at any given time instead of search volumes. You’ll gain insights that can help you create the right content at the right time to capture your target audience, as well as optimize posts in advance of seasonal spikes in interest.
Consider what would happen if you typed in a long list of keywords into a traditional keyword search tool to see which would be most useful in your content. If they all had a similar search volume, you could end up using them all or simply guessing which are best.
Now, imagine if you typed those same keywords into Google Trends and saw that most have been steadily trending downward, but a dozen or so have been rapidly climbing over recent weeks or months. You could dig deeper to see how each has performed historically to help anticipate future performance. And you’d know to use the keywords that are attracting increasing interest and ignore the ones that are fading.
When you consider how much it costs to plan, create, edit and distribute high-quality content, the ability to identify which keywords will likely be used by the most searchers and are growing in popularity gives you a powerful advantage.
How Google Trends can improve SEO
SEO is a solid method for getting your website to show up more often to more searchers, ideally on the first page of results. There are all kinds of factors that play into which sites rank highest with Google, and improving your results is a worthwhile undertaking.
The more you can bolster your content with keywords that are frequently used in searches and relevant to your business, the more chance traffic to your website will increase. This is how pursuing excellent keyword insights can give you a big competitive advantage.
Now that you understand how Google Trends differs from other keyword research tools, you may be asking yourself, “How do I use Google Trends for SEO? Where do I start?”
You can harness the power of Google Trends insights to boost your SEO by:
- Improving your keyword research for future content.
- Adding stronger keywords to existing content.
- Comparing keywords to make more informed choices.
- Checking terms from your past keyword strategies to watch for downward trends.
- Analyzing the numbers to see if search volumes are better for terms similar to your current keywords .
- Expanding your keyword strategy to include terms that are synonymous with your main keyword with latent semantic indexing, or contextual search.
- Viewing search volume results from Google, YouTube, Google Shopping and Image Search to get a broad range of information.
Using Google Trends to create better content
Google Trends isn’t just valuable for optimizing your website. It will quickly become an essential part of your content strategy as you learn how to use it to compare search volumes and gain deep insights into searches on both Google and YouTube.
This will help you:
- Develop new content ideas around trending topics to stay ahead of competitors.
- Establish authority in your niche by sparking discussions on popular topics.
- Plan content around seasonal trends.
- Be more proactive with your content calendar.
- Watch for shopping trends to see which products are in high demand in different niches.
Other ways to use Google Trends
As well as improving your SEO and content strategy, Google Trends calls help you:
- Monitor your company’s brand reputation over time.
- Compare your brand’s performance to that of competitors.
- Gauge interest in new products before launching them.
- Explore new product categories to sell.
Basic SEO has been around for years, and keywords aren’t a new concept for most marketers. This means you and your competitors are likely employing similar SEO and keyword strategies while pursuing the same audiences. With valuable data and focused analysis, you can make a measurable difference in how search engines assess and rank your content, boosting your position in the search results.
Google Trends can give you layers of insights to boost your SEO, refine your content strategy and strengthen your brand reputation. Once you explore all the features available, you’ll find many ways to incorporate this free tool into your SEO and content planning.
Curious about how to use Google Trends to draw higher-quality visitors to your website? Download The Search Engine Marketing Handbook to learn more.
