This is an article “Here’s How Google Trends Can Boost Your SEO Keywords” by Marc Primo Warren
Google Trends is a valuable tool whenever you perform your keyword research and want to know which ones are of interest to your target audiences. Most elite marketers understand the importance of data and infographics and how this helps create strategies that engage website visitors. 38% of SEO practitioners use statistics derived from data and infographics this year, on top of the 45% already using them. For both keywords and infographic content, Google Trends is invaluable in how you craft your SEO strategies effectively.
Many get confused about how Google Trends data directly reflects a query’s search volume in a specific period. The truth is the platform’s trend curve may look similar to your Google Keyword Planner (GKP) tool results. Still, the difference lies in how GKP shows absolute search volume data and Google Trends reflects the relatively popular topics within a search query.
It’s essential to note that trends are erratic, which makes search data inconsistent. For every data point, Google tools divide the results by total searches per location and the time range each point represents to compare relative popularity. In short, relative popularity derived from Google Trends is simply the ratio of a data point’s search volume against the sum of the total volume of all search queries made.
With that, here are some tips that can help you improve your keyword and content strategies using Google Trends:
Know what people are talking about and when to promote your product
Every keyword’s search volume result is seasonal. If you are selling a raincoat, fewer people will be searching for keywords related to your product during the summertime.
To prepare and know when the right time is to promote your product online, you should take note of two critical factors:
Develop content according to seasonal relevance - if you have a seasonal product or know when search query volumes reach their peaks, you might want to create more relevant content that can push your product when people online are more interested.
Optimize exciting pages relevant before the peak season - once you have prepared enough material to promote your product for its peak season, review your Google Trends search volume results and assess its peak and bottoms to stay on track of what people are talking about months before launching a campaign.
Complement these steps with link-building efforts before the peak season starts to immediately gain gradual ranking spikes as volume slowly increases during the search period.
Avoid keyword unicorns
When searching for the right keywords for a given topic, make sure that you run it over Google Trends before developing content to avoid keyword unicorns. Creating content with higher average monthly search volumes may be a good idea but looking for a similar term with the same keyword difficulty but with lesser search volume is always best.
Most of the time, authoritative brands think that brand popularity automatically puts them on top of the Google search engine results page (SERP) rankings. Remember, keywords or standard industry terms are not exclusive to anyone, and owning more unique terms that your target audiences can understand with lower search volumes but with high keyword difficulty scores can work better for your content.
Using keywords with lesser average monthly search volumes have better chances for a longer and steadier search result than overused keywords that can drop off suddenly just as fast as they became popular.
Always go for the most relevant topics
Doing a quick type on www.trends.google.com will help you find search queries that have made leaps and bounds over the past day, which can inspire you to develop content around them. Being on top of what’s trending and collating credible data for your infographics helps make your web pages rank higher on SERPs.
Moment marketing strategies such as this one gives minimal windows of opportunities. Still, if you learn how to capitalize on the moment efficiently, it can give your website a quick boost. Consulting Google Trends regularly lets you highlight which topics most people are talking about and helps you work around your keywords, data, and infographics for more relevant content.
Now that you have your keywords, data, and the latest information on a topic, you can incorporate them into your infographics. Doing so can significantly improve your content’s appeal and understandability and make them more engaging to visitors. The best thing about infographics is that they make your content more shareable on social media, which means better chances for higher traffic to your website.
Map out your content calendar
Google Trends can also be helpful when planning out your content calendar. Now that you know your peak seasons and what topics are trending online, making notes of what relevant content you can release per month becomes so much easier.
For example, you have a blog for recently released films and want to know which content you can put out even after the release dates of the films you are about to feature have long passed. You might want to keep the talk going by noting awards season if the film happens to be in the running for some awards.
You can see what topics peak each month on Google Trends, and chances are, since your niche is quite popular, many will be talking about it online, and it will be easy enough for you to create a content calendar based on them.
Find more useful keywords
For non-peak content, you can rehash them so that they remain relevant according to what topics are trending during the month. By updating some facts and drumming up events for your peak season, you can keep your content, keywords, and visuals fresh to get better chances of ranking on SERPs.
While on Google Trends, tap into the ‘related queries’ tab to see what users search for when they type in your keywords. Review what other keywords are reflected on the top and rising columns to discover more low volume yet competitive keywords you can use during the non-peak seasons. Aside from this advantage, you also get an idea of what your target audiences are looking for at every stage of their search journey to help you develop more relevant content for each buyer persona.