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Ever since Google released its Trends tool in 2006, it has become an invaluable part of any content marketer’s toolkit. Here are just a few of the ways that you can use Google Trends with your content marketing.
See what’s trending right now
When Google Trends was first released, it was primarily designed to show the popularity of search terms over a specific period of time (such as a month or a full year). But there are a growing number of ways to see what’s trending “right now.” On the first page of Google Trends, you can get a quick snapshot look at the big stories and search queries that are most popular. This can be very useful in putting together relevant social media content that people are actually going to want to share with their friends.
Get ideas for search engine optimization
You can also use Google Trends to see “related topics” and “related queries” for any search term that you enter. By understanding what people are searching for, you can often get some important insights about how to make your website more SEO-friendly. For example, you might decide to start using different tags for future blog posts in order to help Google find your content more easily.
Find new content and story ideas
If you’re running out of ideas about what to post next online, Google Trends can act as a sort of inspiration board. At the very least, it can help to break you out of a rut. Many business people spend their whole days completely surrounded by what they do and their company does. They tend to develop a sort of tunnel vision, where they assume that everyone else is using the same jargon and talking about the same things. But chances are, they aren’t.
For example, say that you run a restaurant catering business and spend all day thinking about food, recipes and ingredients. Why not get inspired by Google Trends for your next blog post? For example, people are still talking about the Super Bowl and the Grammys – so why not come up with an original food (or cocktail!) recipe idea for the fans and then post it to your blog and social media platforms?
Spot new trends before they go mainstream
Since Google Trends shows you a graphical representation of search terms over time, it’s relatively easy to spot recent spikes in certain search terms. For example, maybe you’ve never, ever considered investing in a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. But right there on Google Trends, you can see that people are obsessed with “Crypto.” That might help you see that embracing crypto for your business might be a clever marketing promotion. For example, Kentucky Fried Chicken took advantage of the Bitcoin craze to offer a limited time “Bitcoin Bucket” – it was literally a bucket of fried chicken that you could only buy with Bitcoin. The price of the Bitcoin bucket varied in real-time with the actual trading price of Bitcoin. Ideas like that can endear you to the young millennial crowd.
Of course, Google Trends is not a magical oracle. It can’t predict what will be popular in the future – but it can certainly give you some very rich, textured insights into what has recently been popular, possibly giving you an edge over the competition.
