What is Google Trends, and why do digital marketers need it?
Google Trends is a comprehensive tool that can help select search query trends to work with and find fresh ideas to fill your content marketing plan. That’s why it’s essential to understand all of its features, which we’ll break down in my publication.
Google Trends is a free tool for defining the popularity of search queries and getting information about major Internet trends. In addition, Google query analytics lets you determine whether people are interested in a particular product or event in the world.
To start working with the tool, you need to go to https://trends.google.com/trends/
And enter the query that you want to analyze.
For example, let’s check the phrase “digital marketing”:
And we see that since 2018 there is a growing interest in this area.
So congratulations, now you know how to analyze the demand and trend for key queries.
But that’s not all this tool can do. Let’s look at the fully functional and how to use google trends to their full potential.
You can directly see the top regions or cities in which the query is most popular on the map:
Often, to conduct market research and study the target audience, you need to check related queries. In this case, a block with similar search queries can help you. They can be sorted by top search or by spiked in search.
Top queries are the keywords or phrases most often searched for along with your term within the selected category, country, or region.
Top rising queries are keywords that have been searched for more and more often, along with the specified word during the specified time. The popularity of these queries displays as a percentage of the increase and values for previous periods. If a term has become more than 5000% popular in google search, you will see the “Breakout” message instead of the percentage share.
If you work in an area where there are declared seasonal trends, you can quickly determine this. For example, you sell snowboarding equipment, and you want to understand when to start preparing for the season, buy goods, and so on. We can recognize a clear seasonality in this topic over the past five years when search volumes increase and decrease.
And the graph clearly shows that demand begins to grow in November. That is, to prepare for the season, you should start in September-October.
And a trend search begins a decline in February. That is, you have only three months to sell snowboards. So it is required to take this into account when planning marketing activities.
When a new product appears on the market, it is vital to check whether the demand is stable or temporary. Otherwise, it could happen when you decide to sell this product in your internet store and buy a batch of goods. But it turns out that the trends data demand for this product was only temporary, as it was with the children’s spinners in 2017:
There are three steps to comparing a search query to the previous year or past period.
Step 1 – Add a search query and also add the same in the comparing area:
Step 2 – Hover over the query, three dots will appear, and click on the “Change filters”:
3 – Select the region and time of comparison in the appeared menu. Choose the country and in “Сustom time range” select full 2020 year:
Do the same for the compared query but choose 2019, and you will get the following graphs:
And you can immediately conclude that in 2020 the query “digital marketing” was more popular.
You can also use Google Trends search to compare and analyze your brand with a competitor’s brand. For example, you can use it to find out the strength of your brand and which brand people search for more often. For example, let’s take popular services among marketers Ahrefs and Semrush:
We can conclude that Semrush is the more popular brand, and Google Ads Keyword Planner search volume confirms this:
When the word has multiple meanings, you can filter the results by specifying the appropriate category to define when you search “apple” as a company or a fruit.
To refine your query by category, select one of the suggested topics while you type:
or click on “All Categories” (1) and select the appropriate topic (2):
And you will see the number of search query volumes in a particular topic.
You can use punctuation marks (+, -, “ ”) to filter your search results.
| Keyword | Description |
|---|---|
| Digital marketing | Search queries containing the words “digital” and “marketing” in any order will appear in the results. Queries such as “digital marketing course”, “digital marketing agency” or “digital marketing strategy” may be presented.The results will not include queries with errors, misspellings, synonyms, or singular or plural forms. |
| “digital marketing strategy” | Queries that contain the quoted phrase and additional words before or after it may appear in the results. Example: “digital marketing strategy example” |
| marketing -digital | Queries containing the word “marketing” but not “digital” will appear in the results. |
| marketer + marketing | Queries containing the word “marketer” OR “marketing” will appear in the results. |
To stay up-to-date on all events and trends, you can use Google Trends Subscriptions.
To do this:
1) open the top left menu on the home page
2) select the Subscriptions option
3) click on the Add subscriptions button in the lower right corner
To receive updates about noteworthy events, specify a search term or topic, region and frequency of notifications:
To receive notifications about Trending Searches, specify the region, notification type and frequency:
And then, you will receive notifications in your inbox.
If you plan to use google trends often to analyze data and don’t want to create graphs from scratch every time, you can embed them on your site or others on external resources. For example, let’s create a dashboard with data on the free google sites service.
To do this, you need to take two simple steps.
Step 1:
Enter data into google trends, such as a comparison of digital marketing search terms for 2021 and 2020 (1 and 2) and then click on the Embed code (3) and copy the resulting code from pop-up:
Step 2:
Go to https://sites.google.com/ and click on Start a new site:
In the right-hand menu, click on the Embed code option:
Insert the code from step 1 into the form:
After that, the graphs with data appear on your free site, and you only need to add a header, the name and adjust the appearance to your liking:
And in the final step, click Publish button, enter your future site’s address, and share it.
Now your site will be permanently available as a dashboard, like this:
https://sites.google.com/view/digital-marketing-year-versus/
and you can regularly refer to it and analyze the results.
Google Trends is a service that allows you to track current trends, current topics, and search queries. This article broke down what you can use it for and found out its advantages and disadvantages. Google Trends will always help you plan the seasonal trends, find the fastest growing niche and help you find additional directions to expand your business or website. By applying the tips from the article, you’ll always be one step ahead!
