Google Trends for blogging success
If you’ve never heard of Google Trends, it’s a website designed to analyse the popularity of search terms in Google with graphics used to compare the terms over time in different languages and regions. In our office, we love it for determining blog post language and topics for clients as it’s a great way to ensure people are reaching your site for the sole purpose of your business product or service.
How does it work?
One of the reasons we love Google Trends is for it’s simplicity - it’s super easy to use!
Firstly, you want to make sure you’ve selected the correct region (for us it’s Australia), a time frame and sometimes it might pay to also specify a category and web search, but we haven’t in the below example.
Hypothetically, let’s say you own a mortgage broking business. Below you’ll see 4 search terms with ‘home loan’ clearly taking the cake as the most searched term. This simple graphic clearly indicates:
what items people are commonly searching for,
the time of the year when a topic is most popular,
if there is any overall upward trend in a particular product type (and if something is becoming less popular i.e. don’t order that stock of Tamagotchis).
This is a really basic example, but shows how useful such a simple tool can be to maximise website potential and reach your target audience.
What are the perks?
It’s quick and really easy to use. Simply type in your search words next to each other and the graph appears almost instantly.
It’s visual, making it easy to comprehend. The graph is a simple and effective way that clearly indicates trends in colour coded form.
It’s free!
You can choose up to 5 search terms to compare.
There is a region comparison. For example, you can see in which states more people are searching for particular terms.
Google Trends can help with…
SEO (Search engine optimisation) and content marketing - use Google trends to see what your target audience are searching for. Writing about trending topics will drive more traffic to your site.
User experience - make the things that are more requested, more prominent on your website.
Paid search - Google trends can provide information on seasonal campaigns and also help with budgeting (Cost per click of search terms are usually higher during peaks). It can also show you what terms you may not want in a campaign, which will help improve ad efficiency.
Inspire creativity - use Google trends to find out what’s capturing the public imagination. Referencing trending topics in your campaigns may encourage higher engagement and viral impressions.
With all this in mind remember that it’s nice to be niche with website language, but in a competitive online world, sometimes simple is best!