Tapping into Google Trends

Are you selling products or services that are affected by region or seasonality? Or popularity? Your online marketing campaigns could benefit from the database of search information that Google Trends serves up in addition to the real-time search trends.

What Does Google Trends Show?

This often-overlooked tool illustrates the popularity of search terms compared to the search engine’s total search volume index within a designated geographic region (over a selected period of time). You can also get results specific to categories and types of search⁠—image, news, shopping, or YouTube.

Additional data is available such as topics and queries that are related to your search terms and whether they are the most popular (top) or trending upward (rising). If a topic or search term is experiencing a surge in interest, it will be considered a breakout.

Calendar-Based Interest

Those marketing products that are seasonal in certain regions can benefit from knowing when searches for those products are trending. An example would be a business that sells both winter boots and sandals. This graph illustrates that there is always some overall interest in sandals in New Hampshire, though it peaks in late spring and summer. However, there is little interest in winter boots from late winter through most of the summer.

 

 

When you look at the trends for the same terms in the footwear category in Google Shopping, it’s a clearer picture of when people are more intent on purchasing these products.

 

Geographic-Based Interest

When a product can be referred to by a slightly different term in different regions, you’ll want to use the search terms appropriate to those areas. An example of this would be a business that sells skis. The majority of searches in the United States refer to “downhill skis” more often than “alpine skis”. If you are marketing these products in Colorado, California, or New York you will want to target both terms.

 

 

A related example would be the “cross country skis” vs “nordic skis.” You can safely market these in any state where there is demand as “cross country skis.” There are some searches for “nordic skis,” but the majority of your buyers will not be searching with that term.

 

Popularity-Based Interest

Businesses that offer niche products would benefit from watching for rising trends in their marketplace. If you were a toy store, you would have been looking for the interest spike in “fidget spinners” in early spring of 2017 to capture that audience. The “Related Queries” information provided more search terms to add to your digital marketing campaigns.

 

Conclusion

Tap into the power of this tool to identify trends and have your campaigns ready for launch. Don’t confuse the Google Trends graph with the representation of search volume for a term in the Keyword Planner. The planner shows actual search term volume data⁠—the trend graph illustrates the popularity of a search term relative to the volume for all possible searches.

See how Hall can help increase your demand.