Google Trends is an under-rated marketing tool that has been historically sidelined by most marketers. The tool provides search data that helps businesses, marketing professionals, and researchers to learn about the search behavior of their audiences. Google Trends also provides data about trends based on seasons, regions, or verticals.
The tool also helps the users compare the trend of two different search terms or topics. It is available in multiple languages and is one of the most authentic sources of search data. No one can doubt its authenticity because it is owned and maintained by Google itself.
SEO for startups is one of the toughest tasks. Since the website is quite new, it is difficult to establish authority and gain traction. But, if you create content that has the potential to go viral, your search engine rankings will easily ramp up. Google Trends helps such startups in identifying the viral topics in their niche.
The tool helps businesses come up with more targeted and successful digital content ideas that will help them rank and perform better in search results. Google Trends can also act as an idea-generating machine for businesses that want to venture into outsourced content creation.
In this guide, we will educate you on how to use Google Trends for advanced marketing insights.
What is Google Trends and how does it work?
Google Trends is basically a website owned and maintained by Google – that analyzes the search data and gives its visitors an opportunity to explore insights about searches worldwide. The tool gives you access to data from all of Google’s search engines, including Google Search and Youtube.
Google Trend’s interface is quite intuitive. You visit the site, put in the key terms or topics that you want to learn about, and the tool provides you with the search data related to these terms/topics. Google Trends assign a number to each search term, ranging from 1 to 100. As the number gets closer to 100, it is considered trending and vice versa.
This is how the tool works for the users, but if you want to learn how does it work in the backend, you need to know where does Google Trends data come from?
Where Does Google Trends Data Come From?
Data is what Google Trends provide to its users. As they say, ‘Data is the new oil’. The data that Google Trends uses come from multiple sources. For your reference, here are the sources of Google Trends’ Data as we know them:
- Web Search
- Image Search
- News Search
- Google Shopping
- YouTube Search
As you can see above, these are all the search engines that Google owns. So, there is very little risk of inaccuracy in the tool’s data. It comes from the most popular search engine on earth. If your sole objective is to analyze the user’s search behavior and come up with your digital marketing strategies accordingly, it is needless to say that Google Trends data is the most authentic in the market.
Having access to data is cool, but if you don’t know how to use that to your benefit, it is utterly useless. So, let’s talk about the ways you can use Google Trends for in-depth marketing analytics.
6 Ways Google Trends Can Be Used for In-depth Marketing Analytics
Here are the 6 ways you can use Google Trends to analyze your marketing data in-depth:
Understanding your audience
Wanna know a secret? Your business can not survive if you don’t understand your audience well. It’s all about learning about your audience and improving your business model or practices to cater to their needs. There’s only one rule of success in business, and that is, providing more value to the customer than your competitors.
Competitor Comparison
Another way you can use this tool is to use it for competitive analysis. You can research your competition. Compare the interest of the users in your brand with your competitors and you’ll get to know how your competitors are performing in terms of brand recognition and awareness. These metrics are extremely useful if you want to get ahead of your competition. Getting access to these advanced marketing insights will enable you to come up with effective strategies to become number one in your niche.
Industry Keyword Research
As you know, Google Trends is mainly about keywords. It gives you data about keywords that most people are searching for in your specific region or language. With the help of this tool, you can get insights into the keywords that people are searching for in your industry. For example, if you’re into the manufacturing process of* car accessories, you can search for trending topics related to car accessories and you’ll get the list of keywords that are being searched. That can help you a lot in your keyword research.
Seasonal/ regional Trends
Since the tool shows a graph of trends, for certain terms and topics, you can clearly see if it’s a seasonal interest or a permanent one. This way, you can identify seasonal trends and target them accordingly. Also, use these trends to make your brand name and your logo design famous.
Apart from this, you can also filter the results based on different regions. You can see what’s trending in the US, and what’s trending in Ukraine. Obviously, the trends and search terms will be much different. If your business only operates in the US, you must only focus on the trends in that specific region. Even though international trends are important, but targeting local trends and creating your campaigns around them is more profitable.
Blog Popularity Comparison
Along with measuring the popularity of search terms and queries, you can also measure and compare the popularity of big blogs. By doing this, you can identify which industry’s blogs are performing well as compared to others. You can then craft your campaigns accordingly for better performance and returns.
Related, Top and Rising Trends
Last but not least, the related, top and rising trends. After all, trends are all about topics that are relevant, are searched the most, and rising in popularity. Google Trends tool provides you with the data required to do such analysis on the search behavior of people. You can see what are the topics that are relevant and are rising in a specific region. It can help you target your customers with more relatable campaigns – increasing your profitability in the end.
Pros And Cons Of Using Google Trends
Let’s talk about the pros and cons of using Google Trends for your marketing. Here’s the list of advantages/pros that you can enjoy using Google Trends:
Advantage #1: Availability of backlinking articles and websites
Creating content around relevant and trending topics gives you an extra edge over others. If your business has produced and published content around a topic before everyone else in the market, you will definitely be judged as high-authority by Google Search. It will result in more automatic backlinks for your content – helping you reach the highest position on search results organically.
Advantage #2: Containing information about the hottest trends
There are certain trends related to your industry that you can easily miss on. If you’re into a marketing team of any business, it is highly likely that most of your time would be spent creating strategies, campaigns, or content for your audience. It is quite easy to miss new emerging trends because of your workload and other stuff. But, using Google Trends will help you stay ahead of your competition by identifying the latest trends as they arise.
Advantage #3: Identifying the keywords relevant across your region
Google Trends will not only help you learn about the latest trends but also about the trends that are relevant to your region. It will help you keep your focus on your audience, and craft marketing strategies accordingly. Being relevant and relatable to your target audience is essential to the success of any marketing campaign. Google Trends will help you do that quite easily.
Advantage #4: Observe your performance
The tool helps you observe and keep track of trends that are relevant to you. You’re not just limited to just a snapshot of what’s trending, but you can also see how a certain topic or key term is performing. This way, you can easily identify the volatility of any topic, and then create your strategies. Sometimes what happens is that you see a trend like Whatsapp marketing that is rising very quickly and diverts your efforts at creating your marketing strategies accordingly, but that trend drops out way before your campaigns/strategies are out.
Drawback #1: Minimum traffic requirement
As we have said above that you can measure and compare the popularity of any blog, that is true, but here’s the catch – You can only measure/compare blogs that are popular enough to be featured on Google Trends. It has a minimum traffic requirement, and that’s the biggest drawback of Google Trends. If this requirement was not there, we would never need any SEO tool to do competitor or site analysis.
Drawback #2: Provides Incorrect Information Sometimes
Since the data that backs up the tool is updated in real-time, it is possible for Google Trends to provide incorrect information about some trends/key terms. It happens when the trend is new and is just picking up momentum. You have to be cautious while analyzing the data about a new topic.
Incorrect analysis of a trend, and then making a decision regarding such a trend can be fatal to your business. Therefore, this is considered to be one of the two biggest drawbacks of using Google Trends.
Drawback #3: Confusing Results
The third and last drawback of using Google Trends for advanced marketing insights is that it can sometimes produce confusing results. The data is updated in real-time, and there are billions of users that send data to Google’s servers each day. Producing confusing results based on that data is not impossible for them.
Wrapping Up
Google Trends is an awesome tool to collect marketing insights about your brand. You can learn a lot about the search behavior of the audience you’re trying to target. But, due to some drawbacks that we’ve listed above, you can make wrong decisions. Therefore, if you’re using the tool, you should use it with your own creativity and rationality as well.
