What is Google Trends good for, and how can it strengthen your content marketing strategy?
Google Trends gives anyone from individuals to business leaders the power to know what the internet at large is searching at any given moment. You can enter in a search term and see how frequently that topic or phrase was searched over a given amount of time, effectively helping you understand the popularity or relevance of a topic. You can even filter the data in real time, so you have the ability to understand the popularity of a search term over the last three years or just for that morning.
Understanding what’s currently trending on the internet can help you create ultra-relevant copy and capitalize on a culture’s quest for information about a certain topic.
Let the power of Google Trends fuel your content marketing strategy
Here are several ways you can use the Google Trends tool to help increase the effectiveness of your content marketing.
Improved SEO
You can use trending searches to help increase the visibility of your brand. If the news recently showcased a story on privacy breaches, you might be able to quickly turn around a blog or email series that outlines how to protect your privacy online. That way, during searches (which Google Trends tells you know are happening), your blog, and therefore your brand, are more likely to appear in the search results. This can help drive more traffic to your site and help customers see you as a resource and relevant source of information.
Improved topic selection
Relatedly, Google keyword search trends can give you great ideas for fresh, new content. Google Trends can connect you to the questions of your customers and help you develop new ways to give them answers and perspective, ultimately highlighting your brand or business.
Keyword Comparison
Also related to SEO, Google keyword trends can help you choose just the right words for your title, headlines, and more. Trending topics can help you narrow down not just a topic, but also find out which keywords within your title are more likely to be searched by consumers. Should you use “lawyer” or “attorney” when writing an article about the benefits of family law? Google Trends can help you find out which word has been searched more over time, helping you predict what might be more helpful in composing your article to help it appear in more searches.
Repurposing Past Content
It’s entirely possible that you’ve already created content that matches current Google searches. Now is that time to re-share this content. Send it out in emails or post it across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social channels. If analyzing Google Trends is going to be part of your marketing strategy, you should be ready to search the archives of past content to see if you can match old content to new trends.
Use Geographical Information
In addition to being able to see searches from all of Google all over the earth, Google Trends has the ability to filter searches to certain areas. What are people in NYC searching, and how is it different from people in San Francisco or Dubai? This can be very useful for small businesses trying to increase their visibility in a local market and help them connect to their community.
Google Trends is a very useful tool that can help businesses plan their content calendar and even make smart, last minute adjustments to their content to create relevant, timely, audience-reaching articles, blogs, and whitepapers. In an increasingly data driven business world, Google Trends can also help you optimize your content to use the most-likely to be searched keywords and help you define and narrow down your topic choices to appeal to more users.
