All You Need to Know About Google Trends to Grow Your Business

September
5, 2021

5 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

SEO positioning is a crucial aspect of effective digital marketing. Therefore, it’s not surprising that new and improved online SEO tools constantly appear to help us identify search trends and valuable web positioning campaigns. One of the most useful tools in this field is Google Trends.

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a free application used to find out the latest trends on the web, based on user searches.

This allows you to have a more detailed analysis of searches since you can pinpoint the specific period when your strategic keywords had the most searches. This can be utilized in different ways, like when detecting possible keyword seasonality that could affect your business strategy.

One factor that we must pay attention to is the way in which Google Trends shows the level of searches. The value it shows for each keyword is not an actual value, but an estimate. Its value scale goes from 0 to 100 and is established proportionally, with 100 being the highest value and 0 the lowest. 

For example, we may have a keyword that Google Trends marks with a 0; this doesn’t mean that it has no searches, but that its searches are very few.

The true benefit about this tool is not solely obtaining the volume of searches, but rather that it complements this info with graphs to better see whether something is a growing trend, or, on the contrary, a passing fad.

Related: 7 Ways to Use Google Trends for SEO

What Google Trends offers you

To make the most out of this tool performance-wise, it’s important to know how it works and what it can offer you.

The components of Google Trends can be summarized in these 8 elements:

1. Search volume: These are the relative values ​​that indicate the number of searches for each keyword or topic.

2. Search trend: Google Trends allows us to see whether a keyword is moving up or down in searches.

3. Related searches: These are words that can complement a keyword to form long-tail keywords and are related to the same search. For example, the keyword “anniversary” and the word “gift” together form a long-tail keyword “anniversary gift”.

4. Search filters: This is very useful when we want to see searches for a specific geographic area or a specific date. These filters are especially beneficial when businesses are looking to further improve and segment their strategy.

5. Forecast: The tool tries to estimate the trend that a particular keyword will have in the future. Although this is not an exact science, the forecast can serve as a guide. 

6. Comparison of terms: With this option, it’s possible to compare the searches that a keyword has in different geographical areas as well as track its evolution over time.

7. Export: Google Trends allows us to save all the obtained data in an Excel sheet and conveniently access it on our own PCs.

8. Trends: This is the closest thing to the trending topic list on Twitter. Google Trends shows the most searched topics that are trending and lists them by relevance. You can also see the trends of particular social networks such as YouTube.

Related: How to Identify the Best Long-Tail Keywords

How to use Google Trends

Now that we have established the possibilities of Google Trends, it’s time to see how we can use all the information extracted from this tool and put it into practice.

1. Search segmentation: If we want to carry out a local SEO strategy, the geographical segmentation of a search can be of great help. This is especially useful for brick-and-mortar businesses.

2. Seasonal searches: As usual, some searches only occur on specific dates of the year. It’s vital to detect them to know when to exploit them.

3. Content plan: When making content marketing strategies, we will need a proper plan. Knowing the search trends and the terms that relate to our business can help us make a plan with better results.

4. Competitor analysis: You will be able to pinpoint the keywords that your competitors within the same industry are trying to rank for to make an informed decision about whether to join the trend or try to differentiate yourself.

5. Find the right keywords: Google Trends allows you to find the most suitable keywords for your content concerning your market sector.

6. Search for different terms: The application allows you to compare the different search levels for various terms to see which one is best in each situation. That way, you can define the perfect keywords for each of your pages.

7. User behavior: It’s possible to notice which users can become potential customers or which customer profiles fit your target audience. For example, if you sell “eco-friendly fitness wear” and that search is trending in big cities, but it has almost no interest level in smaller towns, you already have a clue to define your buyer persona.

8. Effect of offline actions on searches: Google Trends makes it possible to measure the impact of offline campaigns on digital marketing and vice versa. For example, you can track how your online marketing campaigns affect your physical establishment or how the changes you make offline affect company sales via online channels.

Related: Buyer Personas: What They Are, Why They Matter and How to Best Build One

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that Google Trends is a compelling application that can take your digital marketing strategy to a whole new level. Not only is this a wise choice to include in your tool arsenal when it comes to bettering your marketing and SEO positioning, but it’s also completely free.