11 Powerful Ways to Use Google Trends for SEO

---

How Google has become synonymous with the internet is how Google Trends has become with optimized content marketing. The two have become inseparable ever since Google Trends changed into a digital analytics measuring tool.
Like how its founder puts it, Google Trends is an anonymized, categorized, and aggregated box of data.
It is every SEO marketer's best friend. Its output is very straightforward. It merely shows what internet users all over the globe are googling.
Of course, this data is highly intricate—data about trending keywords, topics, related keywords, daily searches, real-time searches, and more.
With just a click, you can see what users are searching for from 2004 till 36 hours ago.
Crazy, isn't it?
Yes, we agree!
Now, scroll down to look at how you can use this treasure trove of data to improve your websites search ranking, boost your social media presence, and more.

1. Optimize Content Using Trending Keyword Search

Including relevant keywords in any written content online is the only reliable way to boost your search engine rankings. And Google Trends gives this information to you on a golden platter. You can search for a topic or a specific keyword and see which location and under what genre it is trending. And this way, you can discover the intent behind each query.
For example, if you key in the words 'Meghan Markle', you will find that there has been a sharp increase from March 7 to 13, the time when her interview with Oprah went viral. It also shows how places like Vermont, the District of Columbia, and Connecticut are more interested in this topic.
The unique quality of keywords is that they will continue to trend even if the buzz around its related topic quiets down. After collecting all relevant keywords, trim them down and use them as per the article or blog post's theme and requirement.
Thorough keyword research will immensely improve navigation, site rankings, organic traffic, and more.

2. Capitalize Related Keyword Search Option

This option is like the unexpected bonus money you never saw coming. Related keyword search is one of the most valuable and exciting features of Google Trends.
Other than the original or seed keyword you typed, this throws up an additional list of related and relevant trending keywords you can capitalize on.
By altering the time range, categories, and location toggles, you can find out precisely when, where, and by how much a particular topic or keyword is performing online.
Oprah interview, Oprah Meghan interview, and Oprah are breakout queries with more than 5000 % growth rate in the above example.
If you own a business in the USA that focuses on entertainment, women's issues, or celebrities, now is the time to churn out articles on these related queries. You need not break your head for story ideas, and an entire list is prepared for you, thanks to Google Trends.
Create stories on topics listed in this section peppered with trending keywords, and you will have a winner in your hands.

3. Strengthen Local SEO Strategy

This is a great tool to target local audiences. Its unique algorithm gives you 'Interest by subregion' along with 'Interest over time.'
With this info, you can vary the context of content depending on your audiences' preference. This is valuable to improve your brand image, Google My Business Ratings, navigate more organic traffic to your website and overpower the local competition.
For example, for the past one week, the football world cup has seen upward trends worldwide. However, in the USA, some states were interested more in American football.
North Dakota showed Interest of 85% in American football while California showed 71 percent in European football. If you own a local sports business, these figures will be handy to target specific sets of audiences.

4. Identify Seasonal Trends

Some things and some events are bound to repeat every year no matter what. Even sudden calamities like Covid19 can't erase these. This includes seasonal changes in weather conditions, festivals, important dates, holidays, and more.

With Google Trends' help, you can capitalize on such occasions by churning out SE-optimized content.

As keyword and search data are mapped on graphs, one can easily see the spike in trends mentioned above. You can target the right promotion window with relevant content, which will increase traffic. This is one way to nail digital and social media marketing.

For example, the keyword thermal clothing saw upward trends during November, December, and January for the past five years. On the other hand, 'umbrella' was trending during August in the USA and Hong Kong due to the rainy season's onset.

5. Find Fads Among Original Trends

When SEO professionals and content writers see a sizeable blue spike on Google Trend's bar graph, they get utterly excited. Of course, this is quite understandable. But this could be a temporary trend or a fad that will lose the trending status in a few days.
Following this false trail will ultimately be a waste of time and energy of your efforts.
To avoid such situations, always check the reliability of the trend by increasing the time range.
Looking at data from the past two or three years will help you establish the true nature. Another way is to check out the Real-time Search Trends tab. This will show if popularity is growing or fading for a particular topic. Also, look for fluctuations in the short-term range.
If there are too many irregularities, you are likely looking at a fad. Get this right before investing personnel and resources to develop a trend.

6. Improve Retail Sales with Google Trends

Though most look at Google Trends as a tool to refine written content, it can effectively boost sales for retail eCommerce companies.
The Google Shopping tab shows how a keyword performed with connection to shopping or online sales. This throws up words that have triggered shopping experiences. Including those words in articles or Google Ads is a reliable way to up your revenue.
Another option is to make use of the Google Trends compare tab. This is extremely useful to outshine competitors in your niche area of trade. It is an excellent tool for marketers to check their growth in terms of search demand.
For example, suppose you compare McDonald's, KFC, and Burger King with one another. In that case, Google Trends shows you the growing popularity for McDonald's and popular vote share for each fast food joint in every state in the USA too.

7. Boost Your Visual Strategy

Fortunately for us, the world's biggest search engine owns the most popular video-sharing platform too! By changing the toggle to YouTube Search, one can find the topic, keywords, and stories trending on YouTube. This is immensely useful to improve the quality of your video and audio content.
Depending on the topic and popularity, you can make a quick video instead of a blog post as visual content always tends to have a more significant impact. You can use the same principle for images as well. Change the topic to Image Search on the dropdown menu to see the trending images on Google.
These two components, video and image, can supplement your written content to a large extent. Google Trends will help you create all three types of relevant content to have maximum impact. A trending video or infographic can lead the user back to your website, hence boosting organic traffic.

8. Ideate Using Trending Stories

Google Trends is the motherboard of all story ideas. A list of relevant, trending topics is already consolidated for you. Use this to come up with fresh content ideas. But not all trending topics of the day will match your business type. In such cases, a slight detour is required.
Instead of the Daily Trends section, search for a keyword and explore the Related Queries and Related Topics sections.
For example, with Grammy Awards as the keyword, one can see that most related topics are about women artists, and voila, there is a brand new story idea right there.

9. Utilize Trend Predictions

One of this software's main characteristics is that it can predict surges and downfalls in consumer demand. Most use it to see how preordained yearly events like Oscar awards, or Olympics, will fare. This serves as a heads up to plan and release content accordingly.
It is a reliable method to help you with keyword search as well. Since 2004, Google Trends has been upgraded with many valuable additions like forecasting and trend data. These can be used to align your calendar with predictions, beat the competition, and, most importantly, produce SE-optimized content.
Also, the advantage of Google Trends is that it works well with other applications of Google. This mainly includes Google Keyword Planner and Google Ads. When all the three applications are utilized together, optimized, timely and relevant content can be produced with ease.

10. Stay Abreast of Competition

Knowing how to utilize Google Trends optimally means getting an edge in your overall digital marketing strategy. It provides enough data to carry out yearly, seasonal, monthly, and even hourly user patterns analysis.
This will be immensely useful in keeping competition at bay. Apart from giving you projections, it will also help to detect new competition in the market. And Google Compare is a dynamic feature that will help you keep an eye out on market rivals.

11. Retrospect and Improve Overall Content Strategy

Google Trends provides the best opportunity for you to rewind, reflect and retrospect on your previous year's performance. There is a separate subheading called Year in Search, under which events, topics, and news stories that trended throughout that year are listed. And this info is collected specifically for each country.
You can cross-check whether a sufficient number of relevant, SE-optimized content was put out at the right time during that specific year. You can keep track of your hits and misses and finally work on problematic areas in your company.
Under each year, there is an exhaustive list of subheadings with specific topics.
For example, in 2019, farm style and colonial house styles were trending under home styles searches, while Shepherd's pie and Chicken Parmigiana were the most searched recipes. This kind of information makes it easy to create year-end articles too.

How to Use Google Trends to Create SEO Friendly Content?

---

Google enjoys more than 90 percent share in the search engine market worldwide.
Around 75 percent of all searches are done on desktop and 80 percent through mobile via Google. It is undoubtedly the king of all search engines out there.
Hence it is only logical and practical for companies to sculpt their content marketing strategy based on Google.
Read on to discover how one of Google's most valuable tools, Google Trends, can be used to create SEO-rich content.

1. Examine Search Patterns

The search pattern is potent information as this reflects what the user is thinking. Analyzing what users are searching for in your business niche is an excellent way to create engaging content.
Along with this, one must search for trending keywords that you need to incorporate into the article or blog post to generate organic traffic to your website.
This way, you can also avoid making content on stale topics and irrelevant keywords. Including technical SEO keywords will help users to find your content faster and engage them for longer. Don't forget to make use of information under Related Queries and Related Topics in Google Trends.

2. Locate Trending Topics in Your Niche

Google Trends' ability to rank keywords or topics based on location is one of the crowd's favorite features. This is a reliable tool to boost your brand image, website visibility and up your digital advertising game too.
For example, the word smartwatch was most searched by people living in Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia.
If you own a retail store that trades in electronic goods, you can develop targeted blog content focusing on these three states. This is an effective way to increase your blog rankings on the Search Engine Results Page.

3. Generate Reactive Content

One can capitalize on breaking news and trending topics by locating them on Google Trends. Real-time and daily search trends are two such options to achieve this.
For example, producing content about St Patrick's Day or Elliot Page right now will generate reactive content. Customer engagement is crucial to ensure higher retention. And Google Trends can help you gain this by pinpointing trending keywords, topics based on the location that too in real-time.
Creating reactive content does good for your brand awareness and visibility, generates more sales by acquiring new leads, and as a result, increases overall revenue.

4. Avoid Falling Trends

As Google Trends heavily relies on graphs for data interpretation, it is effortless to point out fads or falling trends. This way, one can avoid wasting time, energy, and resources on weak keywords that do not lead to any results.
Though the topic Black Lives Matter generated a lot of interest and search volume online, as a keyword, it lost its popularity after May 2020 and has been on a downward trend since then.
The topic itself is of grave importance, but people have stopped looking for it online. This means producing any content on it will not generate much impact.

5. Create an Engaging Content Calendar

Creating and planning a content calendar is crucial for any kind of content to have maximum effect. And here is how Google Trends can help.
It can correctly tell you when a particular topic has the most interest around it. It allows you to push stories at the right time when users are active online. You can use the same principle to plan a year.
By simply changing the time range to the past day, you can see how a particular topic performs online.
For example, on March 17, the term vaccine had the highest peak at 4:26 pm after a sharp decline. So, if you have any content based on vaccination drives or other pandemic stories with vaccines as the keyword, you can release it around 4 pm for maximum engagement.

Google Trends & SEO FAQs

---

1. What Is Google Trends, and How Do I Use It?

Google Trends is one of Google’s applications that allows the user to find keywords and topics online. This is a handy tool for SEO and digital marketers, content writers, and bloggers. From 2004 till 36 hours ago, one can find how a particular topic or word has fared online.
Before creating an article/blog, video, or infographic, one can get information on any search word based on time, region, language, and genre. You can incorporate trending keywords or write about trending topics and publish them at the right time with Google Trends' help.

2. What Does ‘Breakout’ Mean in Google Trends?

Specific keywords are searched so intensively that their popularity increases beyond 5000 percent. In such cases, Google Trends calls it a breakout.
They term it instead of giving a percentage because it is so high that it cannot be calculated. Recently, terms like Meghan Markle, Oprah interview was breakout terms.
Experts say that these are soon to fizzle out trends that don’t have much life once the event gets over. So, it is advised not to depend on such terms for too long.

Related : List of eCommerce SEO Trends to Look out for

3. How are Google Trends Calculated?

Based on the popularity for a said topic or keyword Google Trends ranks each of them from 0 to 100. This score is primarily based on search volume, i.e., how many times people have Googled a particular word. It also depends on time and location.
Boxing day may get a score of 96 in the USA during December every year, but it might get only a 13 in Indonesia due to relevance. Hence the popularity of each word is subject to many factors and is prone to fluctuate.
Do you help in finding trending keywords for your website? Drop your details here to speak with our experts.