Everything you do in the digital marketing space needs to be married to an overarching strategy. Building a website, writing blogs, posting on social media – those things are all great, but the effort isn’t worth anything if you can’t get them to work together. That’s where Google Trends can help out.
One of the big parts of your marketing strategy is keyword research. Remember, we’re dealing with companies like Google. Their computers can only be so smart, so we need to use keywords to help them understand what our businesses are offering. If you can figure out the words and phrases people use when they’re searching the internet, you can use those keywords to build a digital presence that attracts the attention you’re hoping to get.
There are a few great (free!) tools that you can use to do keyword research and bolster your strategies, and Google Trends is one of them.
What is Google Trends?
It’s no secret that digital marketers love data, and Google Trends is packed with interesting info that can be turned into insights about your business and customers.
At its core, Google Trends takes data from Google searches and lets you compare the frequency of keyword searches over time. Results can be filtered to show certain periods of time, different countries, topic categories, and what platform they happened on (e.g. image search vs Youtube). Used properly, this info gives a better picture of what your customers are searching for and helps build stronger digital strategies.
Use Google Trends for checking popularity
Google Trends is really good at spotting seasonal trends and passing fads. For example, if you run an eCommerce store and there’s a new product you want to sell, you could use Google Trends to see how popular that product is. If we look at the Australian trends for the search term “women’s jackets” it’s easy to see that it reaches its popularity in the lead up to winter:
Just because the trend is seasonal doesn’t mean you can’t sell heaps of jackets. After all, there’s some demand throughout the whole year. But, you could definitely use this graph to help set your advertising strategy. Save your Google Ads money in Spring and Summer when demand is low, and ramp up your spend as Autumn approaches and more people start searching for their winter threads.
Use Google Trends for keyword research
Whether you’re planning a website, blog content or a social post, it all needs to target your keywords to be an effective marketing tool. Google Trends is a great place to expand your keyword research and find related queries and topics.
Use Google Trends to see how your competitors are performing
One of the best features of Google Trends is the ability to compare the popularity of up to five different search terms. That means you can use the Trends results to see how you’re doing versus your competition. For instance – we can see how the search traffic looks for Ultra Tune vs JAX Tyre & Auto, one of their main competitors:
Keeping an eye on your competitors is always a good idea. Knowing who’s around and how well they’re performing is a good starting point when you want to get more competitive. Is your biggest competitor doing really well? Try to figure out what keywords they’re targeting and try to steal some of that traffic for yourself!
Use Google Trends to Plan Your Content Schedule
Google likes to prioritise great content. Anything that’s relevant, helpful, and high quality is something that Google will love, but it also assigns a freshness score to the content on your website. Fresh content is anything new that meets those quality guidelines, and it loses its freshness over time.
If you want an SEO boost, all you need to do is create new content or update your existing website a little. As soon as you update your content and tell Google about it, you get a freshness boost that can mean your results show up on Google way more often.
Before you go off to update every page on your website, take a second to look at Google Trends and see how your keywords perform over time. Some industries have obvious trends where certain times of the month or year are more popular. Timing your content updates to coincide with those popularity peaks is a simple way to get an even bigger boost from fresh content. For example, you can see here that “air conditioning repair” is more popular during the summer months:
If you were an electrician offering air-con repair services, you could use this trend to figure out when you should be updating your website or releasing new blog content to give your SEO the biggest boost.
Build stronger marketing strategies and ad campaigns with Gordon Digital!
It’s easy to get sucked down the digital marketing rabbit hole, where you try to do a bit of everything but end up spinning your wheels instead. Tying together all the things you’re doing is the hard part. You need a strategy (and it HAS to be a good one) or your time and effort won’t amount to much.
At Gordon Digital we live and breathe digital strategies. Whether you want to work with us for SEO, Google Ads, or social media stuff, we tailor strategies to the individual client. Come and have a chat with us if you’d like to get started on crafting a digital marketing strategy that’ll help you kick your goals!
