How To Take Full Advantage Of Google Trends

Google Trends shows you current trends, as well their evolution over time. On its homepage, you can see various examples and featured insights. To make the most out of this powerful free tool, we’ve gathered some of its interesting features to see how we can use Google Trends for your marketing strategy.

Interesting Google Trends Features

For each of the terms that you look up here, you can choose to see information for just that search term or for a topic, which is a broader range of related terms. You will be able to see their evolution over time, as well as related topics or search terms. You can also filter them by “rising”, to see recently popular terms, or by “top”, which shows the most popular ones of all time.

You can look up searches per country and see their evolution over time and compare terms. These results can be aggregated by sub-region, metro, and city to get more specific results.

Same with category: You can run a search under the category of “food”, for example, to see relevant results and see their evolution over time to compare terms.
You can also filter by web search. This will let you choose terms that are popular on Google Images, Google Search, or Youtube.
Google Trends is home to Year in Search, a collection of popular terms that is published at the end of each year. The results will be divided according to categories such as “actors”, “how to”, or “define”.
The Trending Searches page will show you the most popular topics searched on Google that particular day. You can also check Realtime Searches here to see what’s popular currently and stay updated.

What can you use Google Trends for?

Now that you have a fair idea of how Google Trends works, let’s put it into practice:

1. SEO

Keyword search volume: this is one of the ways you can use Google Trends for SEO. The evolution of a term presented in this tool gives you an idea of the popularity of that query. It’s important to know however that the search volume on G Trends is relative.
Keyword research: you can also perform keyword research on Google Trends. When you search for a keyword, you can use its related queries and topics to come up with new content, and also new keywords to produce that content. You can use the same keywords you see on the list or see if they have anything in common: are they all mentioning location, for example, “salons in Ohio”? Maybe location is important to include in your keywords, as that’s the way people are searching.

2. Social media

Planning content: If you work in the social media marketing or any related field, you will know how important it is to plan. Make a list of all the topics and ideas that pop up in your head for the upcoming quarter (or year) and run searches for all of them. You might want to produce each of these content when a search peak is approaching because, during this time, people will be most interested in that topic. Make sure to also check Youtube search.
Trend tracking: Just like the name suggests, Google Trends also lets you track trends. If you are running out of ideas or you’d like to hop on to a hot topic, go to Trending Searches and detect topics your brand can create content around.

3. Product management

Seasonal trends: Some products have clear seasonal peaks, such as ice cream. Ice creams are sold much more during summer than winter. So if you’re in an ice cream store, you might want to look for a complementary product that will help you in those drips. Come up with a list and look them up on Google Trends. If the search evolution fills the gaps for your current product, it might be a good match!
Niches: This applies to both products and locations. Search for a particular product and make sure that you filter according to city or region. This will help you to locate where the highest interest for that product is. You will also be able to save a lot of money by avoiding big advertising costs from targeting the wrong audiences.
New products: Are you planning to venture into other products? You can search for the products that you sell and go to related topics. This will give you a list of potential new products. But make sure these products are suitable for your brand or portfolio.

4. Brand management and competitor analysis

Search for popularity: This is pretty simple. You can run searches for yourself and your competitors and monitor the search volume. You can do this for your industry, brand, or product categories.
Competitor comparison: Compare your competitors’ popularity with yours or with that of other companies.
Related topics: What are the queries that your brand, as well as your competitors, are associated with? What do people search for when they look at your competitors?

Tracking Google Trends With Stillio

Have you seen how much you can accomplish using just one tool? But even then, all this requires quite a lot of manual work, going through each search and monitoring each new trend. Luckily, Stillio is here to accelerate the process!

Using Stillio, you can automate website screenshots of Google Trends that will be updated daily, weekly, monthly, or even in gaps of 5 minutes. You can take screenshots of searches in various countries and regions. This will help you have a record of historical search volume, popularity, and related terms.

Save all these screenshots in your Dropbox, Google Drive, or any other cloud storage for easy access. You can check Stillio whenever you want and all the information will be there so you can plan content, perform a competitor analysis, or any other process we’ve mentioned above.

The pricing starts at just $29 for daily screenshots of 5 URLs.

Conclusion

Google Trends is definitely your ace in the hole. With these tips and features (and Stillio to automate the process) you can take full advantage of this tool!