Google Trends – An Overlooked Free Tool for Keyword Research

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Google Trends is an amazing and free tool that you can use to keep up with the latest trends and find keywords for your content.

As they say, it’s first in best dressed, and what better place to find trending items than the world’s biggest and most popular search engine?

Search Engine Optimization is the skill of producing content that answers the query that a user types into a search engine – usually Google. Search Engine Optimization is something that works over a long period of time, but you can give your business a significant advantage if you stay on top of trends and use them to find keywords before anyone else does.

If you can take that red hot keyword and pair it with some unique and high-quality content, you will give your search rankings a big boost.

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What Is Google Trends?

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Google scrapes all search data from its search engine and presents it as a form of a dashboard to show trending topics, trending news stories, and some random oddities.

The dashboard itself is quite innocuous and may seem like it does not offer much, especially if you have a niche business. The platform defaults to the US, but you can set it to look for trends on a global or national level for any country. You can also drill down further to states and regions, cities, and towns.

Key in a word that is relevant to your business, and the magic starts. If you searched for tea, for example, Google Trends will show you the data metrics for your country as well as serve you with the latest related topics and the latest related queries for that word.

This is where it is easy to go down the rabbit hole, but you should stop and take a step back because you can also compare keywords and measure the data.

You could compare tea and coffee, or tea and coffee and chai, for example. The possibilities are endless.

The data from Google Trends can be sorted by the last seven days or a fixed date range going back to 2004.

What Can You Get Out of Google Trends?

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It is very much dependent on the nature of your business, but there is something in here for every business owner. If you sold televisions, for example, you could look up televisions and see what brands are hot and what are not. The related queries could show you what size of televisions people are looking for.

If you are in very big business, you could track the popularity of actors, athletes, or influencers to see if they would be worthwhile to engage in an advert campaign.

You could also look at past trends for seasonality, such as Christmas, Summer, Spring, Mother’s Day, and many others. Knowing what peak demand is going to be like at any given time can help you plan and be ready to meet that demand.

Another useful thing you can do is look at the interactive search maps and drill down into which places are more likely to search for a term than others. You could use that data to target a Pay Per Click advert campaign.

It is important to realize that Google Trends gives you relative data. It will not give you empirical numbers but a visual and ratio for any search. As mentioned earlier, you can use that relative data from within a keyword tool to get even more meaningful data.

It is also worth noting that in the explore section, you can browse for web searches, shopping searches, news searches, and YouTube searches.

Do Not Waste Time on Keywords You Cannot Rank For

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Google Trends always releases a Year in Search report. When you open it, you will immediately notice that there are spikes in there.

While it would be great to rank at the top of the list, you may want to look at these spikes and see if there is anything meaningful in these searches or whether they are just one-offs… the World Cup or the Olympics and, of course, Covid, are excellent examples of this.

Using this same principle, Google Trends is also a great tool to see where things literally stop being trendy anymore. If you have a shop selling gold sneakers and you see that the trend for searches has dropped dramatically overnight, then it might be a good idea to cancel the next order with your supplier.

And that is the beauty of Google Trends. It allows you to stay ahead of the curve and one step ahead of the competition.

Find Relevant Topics

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Google Trends is great for finding trending topics, and it’s a total bonus if they relate directly to your business. But you can also use Google Trends to be more relevant to your clients. Let’s take 2020, for example. Australia suffered the worst bushfires in its history, and billions of animals died.

It was a trending topic around the world for many months. So how is this relevant to you if you are a plumber?

Well, you could set up a promotion on your website or Google My Business Page, announcing that you will donate money to the site from your fee on a job if people book you in.

It really is all about creativity and thinking outside the box.

There is also an option to sign up for notifications once a week or once a month, and you can tailor what you receive by keywords.

If you sign up, you will receive all trending topics direct to your inbox. You can do this by clicking on the hamburger in the top left corner of the page and navigating to subscriptions.

From that same dropdown, you can also look up what is trending right now in real-time or over a past week or month.

You can also look at some of the predictive models to see whether a keyword is going to explode, but you should exercise caution here. Google has never revealed just how this predictive modeling works and whether it is actually accurate.

Use Google Trends Relatively

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Let’s say you want to produce a bit of video content for your business. You can check which videos are trending.

You can use the explore for trending topics “YouTube Search” to tailor your keywords, titles, and descriptions to what people are searching for on YouTube. This is very handy to boost your video Search Engine Optimization.

You can also use this tool for inspiration. Watch a few of the trending videos that are relative to what you want to produce. Examine them in-depth and see whether they all use a new innovative approach. Check to see if they have overlays.

Basically, use Google Trends to see which videos are trendy and do something similar but different.

Conclusion

If you are looking for empirical data, Google Trends is not the perfect tool or platform. But it does give some really well-presented organic data which you can use.

Google Trends’ best feature is that it is not a sea of numbers. It is a tool that is easy to use and shows you what the world is searching for.
Using Google Trends will certainly help you boost your Search Engine Optimization, improve your keywords use, and convert online visitors into sales.