What is Google Trends?
Google Trends is primarily intended for tracking and analyzing the popularity of search queries and topics over time. It’s a valuable resource for marketers, researchers, journalists, and businesses to gain insights into consumer interests and behaviour.
Google Trends gathers its data from the billions of searches performed on Google’s search engine. It provides insights into search trends by analyzing the relative search volume of specific keywords and topics over time. The tool aggregates and anonymizes search data, making it possible to understand the popularity and interest in different search terms, topics, and queries.
By understanding how search volume changes, where interest is concentrated geographically, and what related queries are popular, users can make informed decisions regarding content creation, marketing strategies, and trend analysis.
Google Trends helps identify emerging trends, validate hypotheses, and uncover potential opportunities in various industries, ultimately aiding in data-driven decision-making.
Best Uses for Google Trends
Google Trends provides insights into how often specific search terms are entered into Google’s search engine, and it also offers information about the geographic regions where those terms are most popular.
Measuring Seasonality
Measuring the seasonality of terms (and therefore consumer interest) is probably the most common use for Google Trends. One of the reasons for its popularity is because it is such a simple process to find reliable data.
By comparing trends across keywords, you can find if there are shared seasonality patterns or differences. By leveraging this information, you can plan content releases, marketing campaigns, and promotions to align with peak periods of heightened search interest. It’s crucial to adjust your strategies during periods of lower interest to optimize outcomes.
Finding Trending Content and Blog Ideas
Similar to measuring the seasonality, Google Trends can offer users insight into what is a topical search – either presently or providing insight into seasonal interest. We can then leverage these trends to plan and create content and generate engagement from searchers.
These trends also give us valuable insight into what sort of interest lies in a specific geographic area.
Regional Variation in Key Phrases
Google Trends can help you identify regional variations in phrases by providing data on the geographic locations where specific search terms are most popular. To find regional variations, look for the “Interest by subregion” section just below the main graph. Click on “United States” (or your selected country) to open a map showing the regional interest.
Measuring the variation in interest in a keyword by region (or even city!) can be massively beneficial in countries like Canada, where the majority of the population can be traced to just a few provinces, instead of assuming an equal distribution of interest. This may impact how a marketing campaign will target provinces if we can trace interest to only a select few.
Competitor Research
If your competitor has enough of a brand presence on search engines, you can even perform competitor research on your competitors to help measure their seasonality or regional interest. To do this, start by entering the brand name into the Google Trends search field.
We can then identify spikes in interest. If these spikes are regular each year this would indicate seasonality to the product or service. If the increase in search queries seems isolated then this could indicate an increase in marketing efforts, not seasonal variance. Regional variation is much the same as comparing any geographic trend as mentioned above.
YouTube Trend Research
Google Trends finds query data across many Google properties including YouTube. After searching for the desired trend, users can change the results to show “YouTube Search” instead of “Web Search”. This will provide results for YouTube queries.
Need Help Analyzing Trends?
Ontario SEO has a team of digital marketing professionals ready to partner –up and break down some of the most important trends to your business. We would be happy to work with you to develop an analysis, content strategy, or anything else you may want to do with your trend data.
