Content Marketing | Online Marketing | SEO

How to Use Google Trends for SEO and Content Marketing

Google Trends is a free and often underestimated tool for search engine optimization. It offers a variety of useful possibilities for SEO measures as well as for content marketing.

Read how Google Trends works and what you should certainly use it for.

Understand the Data

First of all: Google Trends does not provide absolute figures. If you want to know the search volume of your keywords, you need Google AdWords Keyword Planner or a similar keyword tool.

Instead, Google Trends shows the relevance of search terms in relation to each other. The highest point in the graph, the most relevant region or the most important search term each correspond to 100. The remaining data points have a corresponding value of 0-99.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is an important part of SEO and Google Trends is an excellent tool for this. It enables you to discover valuable insights with little to no effort.

Trend Topics

Explore the categories “daily search trends” and “real time search trends“, either for your country or worldwide. The following image shows the top search trends for the United States from Oktober 7, 2019.

Google Trends Real Time Trend Topics

Topic Comparison

Are you unsure which topic to write about next? Why not check your content plans in Google Trends and choose the topic with the greatest relevance (in the following example we compare the topics autumn and harvest festival).

Compare Search Terms with Google Trends

Seasonal Trends

With Google Trends, you can also check seasonal relevance of topics and align your content marketing accordingly. As you can see from the following example, it makes little sense covering skiing topics during summer. With Google Trends you can identify such seasonal trends but also discover less obvious trends over the course of the year.

Discover Seasonsal Trends with Google Trends

Brand Monitoring

Measure your brand’s relevance against the competition with Google Trends to identify if you should invest more in branding. The following chart shows the development of relevance of international media.

Google Trends Brand Monitoring

Keyword Research

Thorough keyword analysis should always be the foundation of your search engine optimization. Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner is a proven tool for this first step. When using Google Trends in addition, you will get much more out of your keyword research.

Finding keyword ideas with Google Trends

And this is how you go about it: Enter your search terms in Google Trends and find the most important topics and search queries that generated interest over the selected time period. Utilise this tool to identify up-and-coming keywords, as the following example for the search term “fondue” shows.

Find Keyword Ideas with Google Trends

Recognising keyword trends

When planning your search engine optimization strategy, it is not only important to know which keywords have high search volumes at the moment. It is also crucial to understand which keywords might have potential in the near future. Therefore, compare similar keywords in Google Trends to see which ones are moving up or down (be careful not to mix keywords and topic searches as they are measured differently).

Find keyword Trends with Google Trends

Recognising Local Relevance

With Google Trends, you can analyse if local or regional searches impact the relevance of your keyword. In Switzerland, tennis star Roger Federer currently has the greatest relevance in the canton of Ticino, followed by the cantons of Jura, Vaud, Neuchâtel and Uri.

With Google Trends, you can analyse if local or regional searches impact the relevance of your keyword.

For a detailed description of how to use Google Trends for keyword research read our blog post “How to use Google Trends for keyword research“.

However, incorporate Google Trends into your toolset now to discover even more interesting possibilities for your search machine marketing.

 

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