How Google Trends Can Help You With Keyword Research

Keyword research is incomplete without Google Trends. It is a great tool that allows people to check out how much interest a given keyword is generating overtime. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize the full potential of this fantastic tool by Google and miss out on one of the most useful keyword research tools out there.

In this blog, you will get to know what Google Trends is all about, how you can benefit from it, and its use as a search engine optimization (SEO) tool.

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a keyword research tool. It helps you search popular terms, also known as keywords, that are trending on Google. It will show you the trending terms for Google web search, images search, shopping search, news search, and even YouTube search, which will help you with YouTube keyword research.

Now, what are keywords? Keywords are specific terms that people type into Google search, or any other search engine, to find products or services they need. Thus, keywords are an essential part of how people look up things online and how you can achieve SEO success by targeting keywords related to your business.

What is Google Trends Used For?

It is a well-known fact that Google is the most popular search engine in the world. As per the Statcounter of May 2020, Google holds about 92.06 percent of search engine market share worldwide. 

Hence, if you are looking to reach out to people on Google, you should be aware of the things that are trending on Google and how frequently they are searching for a specific keyword.

Google Trends helps you with its search trends feature, so you can identify the keywords that you’d need to add to your website’s content. Adding trending keywords to your content will increase traffic to your website and boost its rank on the Google search engine results page (SERP).

What is a Popular Trend?

Whenever you search for something on Google, you get a list of websites that relate to the topic you are searching for. These search predictions are nothing more than search terms related to whatever you are searching for online and what other users have already searched.

Trending searches and trending blog topics on Google can be anything from an event, a person, an organization, a product or service, to a specific animal that is gaining interest online. For example, The Academy Awards, the annual awards ceremony for the film industry in the U.S., is a trending topic in February.

What Does the Value 100 Mean on Google Trends?

Google Trends is the perfect tool to find out which trending words are searched online and how much popularity these trending Google topics have gained over time. To show the popularity of a particular trending topic, Google scores it out of 100.

If a trending topic has a 100 out of 100, this means that the topic is on its peak popularity right now. This also means that the same topic is more popular than any other searchable term that has a lower score than 100.

What is Google Trends in SEO?

Over the years, Google Trends has become a quintessential part of SEO operations. However, to understand its importance in SEO, you’d need to understand the current nature of what goes into optimizing a website to best rank it on Google.

As mentioned earlier, keywords are an essential part of curating content for a website. Some keywords have a steady demand, as people are searching for them throughout the year.

With Google Trends, you can get to know about search terms that are gaining popularity. For example, COVID-19 and Coronavirus are two search terms that are very popular right now in all over the world. This forecasting feature is very helpful if you want to plan your website’s content and factor in all the upcoming changes in the market.

Furthermore, the Google search trends change all the time and people can search for a specific term to find out how much search volume it has generated over time.

For marketers and digital marketing companies, this information is vital, as it allows them to ramp up their marketing efforts when their targeted search terms are trending. That being said, it is also important to note that during these popularity phases, the cost per click on Google Ads is also likely to increase. This means that Google Trends helps marketers in their budgeting.

Here are some of the ways an SEO professional can utilize Google Trends:

• Paid search: Data collected from Google Trends can be used to form seasonal campaigns and may also prove useful in budgeting. Apart from this, SEO professionals can also use Google Trends to set aside negative keywords by finding irrelevant trending terms. This will help to make sure that the trending search doesn’t affect the campaign’s costs.
• Content marketing: Google Trends can be used to learn about the most trending topics on Google searched by an identified target audience. By creating content about these Google trending topics, you can effectively increase the total amount of online traffic.
• AD creative: By browsing Google Trends, you can see what topics are currently popular amongst the general public. By referencing these trending topics in your online advertising campaigns, you can increase your ads’ engagement.

How do I use Google Trends for Keyword Research?

By now you must have a general idea about what Google Trends is. To fully understand how to use Google Trends for optimization purposes, you can refer to the following pointers:

Identify Seasonal Trends: It is a fact that the popularity of specific keywords is purely seasonal. For example, the popularity of the keyword “cardigan” would be higher in winter than in summer. So, if your business is seasonal, then with Google Trends you can get data about the popularity of keywords, which correspond to the products and services you are offering online. 

With Google keyword trends, you can use this seasonal data in two ways:

• Create content that coincides with the keywords’ peak popularity
• Optimize your existing web pages and content to take advantage of spikes in popularity of a search term

Deflect Keyword Unicorns: If you are trying to find a topic for your website’s content, you should check Google Trends before writing a single word. Many content curators start by doing a keyword search on generic keyword explorers to determine which words are searched for the most. 

But this approach has certain drawbacks, as some topics go viral for a short period and get a lot of clicks, but fail to sustain that growth over time and eventually die off. 

With Google Trends you can get to know about these discrepancies, and also find out how much interest a certain topic is generating over time and whether it is sustained or not.

Identify Popular Topics: Using the trending searches feature on Google Trends, you can find out about keywords that are experiencing exponential spikes in popularity right now. But, as mentioned earlier, a search term may not sustain its online popularity overtime. Moreover, the peaks in popularity may just be a sign that you are already too late to catch on to the online interest for a given topic.

However, Google Trends compares keywords and finds out how much popularity a topic got in previous years. This will give you an idea about when you should work on a subject for your website to get the most visibility.  

Conclusion

In a nutshell, with Google Trends you can know about the most searched topics on Google and what search terms are gaining popularity. You can also find out whether a search term, which has a lot of views, is still piquing people’s interest or not.

So, if you are:

• A business owner looking to maximize your profits from online marketing campaigns
• An SEO professional who is looking for ways to increase a website’s traffic
• An individual who is just curious about what other people are looking for online

Then, Google Trends is the tool you need.