Imagine you’ve bought a CD player and want to show it to your friends. If it was the early 80’s, your friends would have been a huge fan of you for carrying such a cool gadget. But, now they will laugh at you for being too old fashioned.
In the online world, this is exactly how your audiences react when you spit out an old content or something that’s out of trend. People will not read your story, or even care about it if it’s not juicy anymore. In fact, they will end up categorizing your website as an outdated one.
Luckily, there are some powerful free tools for marketers that can solve this problem. Such one tool is Google Trends that helps you come up with fresh content and get more keywords to enhance your organic traffic.
Continue reading if you are interested to learn how you can use Google Trends for SEO.
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends is an official tool from Google that measures the relative popularity of your query. It will show you which topic is currently popular among people around the world at a given time.
Google Trends uses a number of search data and analyzes them to measure the users’ interest in different topics. Then it conveniently presents the results in a graph.
To make sure you get the most accurate and relevant data about the trend, this online search tool doesn’t consider repeat searches from the same person over a short period of time.
Apart from that, you will learn about a query’s search popularity over certain time frames. Since it’s a relative measurement, the popularity will change when the total number of searches changes.
Ways to Use Google Trends for Better SEO
Although Google Trends is an outstanding online search tool, it’s one of the most underutilized. However, there are dozens of ways to use this tool to boost your SEO and increase your sales, regardless of the business you’re running.
The following are some of the ways that will help you to unleash the full potential of Google Trends for SEO.
Start Big & Narrow Down Later
If it’s your first time in Google Trends, you will see a search option in the dashboard, which is now quite simpler than before.
Some people like to narrow it down when they start searching for a particular keyword. However, considering more than 10 billion monthly searches alone in the US, it’s highly recommended that you start with a big-time-keyword.
Once you type your keyword and press enter, the tool lets you narrow down your search by a fixed time zone, using worldwide, search type, and many more.
It’s important to filter by a category, otherwise, you might end up with something irrelevant to your query. Also, don’t forget to use multiple time selections to understand the difference between short-term trends and long-term trends.
Go for Seasonal Trends
When you’re creating content, it’s important to search for seasonal trends and optimize your content accordingly since these are some of the most consistent and genuine topics you can cover.
But how do you get such topics?
If you run a blog on holiday shopping, for instance, you know how people get crazy on “Black Friday.” Once you plug the keyword “Black Friday” on Google Trends, you will see its search popularity peaked during the week of November 24-30, 2019.
These insights will help you to decide exactly when you need to publish your content regarding Black Friday. If you don’t have fresh content, no problem. Just edit and optimize your old one and publish it at the right time.
Don’t Ignore Context
This online search tool works in quite a relativistic manner, meaning that it will compare to the previous heights of the query you entered, instead of the overall popularity of all trends.
For example, when you search for a particular keyword, you may find its popularity is quite low if you see the results in default settings, such as the last 12 months.
However, if you see the results for the same keywords for a bigger time-frame you will see the overall trend is quite stable. You can also add context to your search query by using the compare tool, web searches, or filtering it by category or country.
Use Specific Search Options
Since you’re using Google Trends to boost your SEO, it’s crucial to go beyond the basics and get some advanced insights.
The tool offers five options, each of them will show you results based on various segments of your potential markets. The options include:
- Web Search (Default)
- YouTube Search
- News Search
- Image Search
- Google Shopping
While sorting popular queries, you will see more options that are highly beneficial for SEO. These options will help you create new content that will eventually embrace new trends.
Make Sure The Popularity Spikes Don’t Falsify The Keyword’s Search Volume
Most people choose a keyword based on its monthly search volume. However, this can be quite problematic as it calculates the average time users spend to search for a keyword per month. However, popularity spikes can seriously affect a keyword’s monthly search volume.
For example, if you search for a particular keyword and see it’s monthly search volume is let’s say 1200.
Now search in Google Trends for the same keyword and you may find after analyzing a few years of data that for a certain period the search volume got higher or lower due to a particular event.
Before you select a keyword and start writing an article on it, see if its search popularity in Google Trends is steady or increasing. If not, choosing that keyword may not be the right decision.
Determine The Root Cause of The Drop in Organic Search
You may find the organic traffic of a particular blog post drops that was quite popular a few days ago. While this is certainly not your content’s fault, it might be the keyword that has lost its popularity.
But how can you find it? Google Trends can help you with that.
Just plug your top keywords into the tool and check their popularity trend over time. You will get a clear idea about whether you should update your content or just remove it.
If you see the popularity of your keyword is increasing or steady, you need to update your content with the latest information.
But if you see it decreasing, it means your target audiences are losing interest in that particular keyword. In that case, there’s nothing much you can do to increase the traffic for that post. Just search for new keywords and start creating content on that.
Target by The Locations
When using Google Trends to search a particular keyword, don’t always judge its popularity from the general view. For a better result, you can add locations to find out for which region you can create your content.
For example, if you search for the keyword beachwear across the US, you will see the popularity of this keyword is far higher in South Carolina compared to Newyork.
This information is critical if you want to set your target customers and create content for them. Targeting by locations will help you create content for the right region and boost your SEO.
Try Both Location & Season to Get The Best Out of It
Depending on the niche of your business, you may not always create the same content for audiences from a particular location. Things aren’t popular in a place right now might be essential to others.
For example, if you want to create content on Umbrella in Australia, you will see the query umbrella is most popular here in December and January, while in the USA the peak falls in May.
From the search, you can understand these are the months when the rainy reason starts in these countries. So, when creating content, you just need to target the right audiences at the right time.
Find Relevant Long-Tail-Keywords
When you enter your keyword in the Google Trends, it doesn’t only show you the popularity of that certain keyword but also shows the top trending related queries, as well as the most popular related queries.
These are called long-tail-keywords, which you can use to further develop and improve the quality of your content. You can also use some SEO software such as SEMrush and Ahrefs to check their search volume and keyword difficulty.
Using this process, you will be able to cover more popular and trending topics and boost your organic traffic.
Use The Data for Video Optimization
If you want to create a video or already have video content for a certain keyword, you can use Google Trends to find out if it’s going to get traffic on YouTube.
Just after entering your keyword, simply change Web Search to YouTube Search, check out the related topics and related queries.
From the data, you will be able to know if the keyword you’re using for your content can rank on YouTube. You will be able to edit your title and description based on that data.
Final Thoughts
Over the years, Google Trends has changed a lot, but its principle remains the same, that is updating its audience with the latest trends.
While most SEO specialists use this tool occasionally to find out how the popularity of a particular keyword changes over time, most of them fail to discover its full potential.
Luckily, there are some companies like OneLittleWeb that make sure your content is up to date with the latest information, thus securing some quality backlinks from websites with high traffic and authority.
In case you have any doubt, try our DA50+ backlink with a $275 discount and see it yourself.
Sujan Sarkar is one of the co-founders of OneLittleWeb. He leads the agency with over a decade of experience.
In 2018, he founded OneLittleWeb, driven by a vision to fill a void in the industry, providing top-quality SEO and backlink services.
His impressive track record includes crafting over 25,000 backlinks for more than 1100 clients, generating over 1 billion in traffic. This has earned him a significant presence in the SEO realm.
He successfully leads a dedicated team of 65+ SEO professionals, focused on helping SaaS and Enterprises scale their organic traffic.
Sujan firmly believes that the best backlinks are not paid for but earned through high-quality content and strategic relationships.
Every day, he works tirelessly to position your business at the forefront of your customers’ minds, striving to elevate your brand’s visibility and authority.
His daily inspiration centers around securing client features on top-tier publications like Forbes, MSN, BBC, Yahoo, and many more. He leverages the right SEO strategies to achieve this mission.