Target Your Market: How to Win the Internet with Google Trends

Google Trends is a website offered by Google to find the latest trends in searches over time. By searching on a certain topic you are able to quickly see the search volume. In June, Google Trends did some revamping to include real-time data.

Google Trends was used before the revamp to look at and analyze trends from the recent past. Useful? Of course! But now, the usefulness has really grown. If you’re a marketer (or even just interested in current events) and you’ve never explored Google Trends or haven’t seen it since the revamp, it’s time to check it out.

How to Use Google Trends As a Marketer

Opening the Google Trends homepage will show you at a glance (maybe even better than Twitter does) what’s happening now. Clicking on trending stories will show you data about when they started trending and will give you links to news stories and other content about them. 

All of this is neat, but how will it help you as a marketer? The best features on the page, if you ask me, are the two dropdowns in the upper right, allowing you to filter data by category and location, as well as the search bar. 

Let’s say you run some sort of health-related business - a clinic or dietician or medial supply store. Choosing “Health” in the dropdown will immediately show you what people are interested in right now in your industry. Catering to what your audience wants to know right now on your site’s blog or social media is a powerful tool! Once you click on a topic within Health, you’ll not only see a trend line, but also searches by state and related topics.

That was too easy.

Ok, let’s make this harder. Say you’re a home improvement contractor. You don’t fit neatly into any of those pre-determined categories in the dropdown that Google Trends currently displays curated data for. Can you still use the tool? Of course!

Let’s use the search bar and type in “home remodel.” The trendline and regional interest graphs are fun to look at, but they probably won’t help you come up with content. But when you scroll down to “related searches”, here’s where it gets good. The “Queries” table will tell you what people are searching on in relation to your topic. If you toggle the table from “Top” to “Rising”, you’ll be able to see which of those terms is currently growing in popularity. So when I click on Rising, the top breakout query is “home depot bathroom”. So now maybe I’ll decide to write a blog post about why going with a professional contractor is necessary for an entire bathroom remodel, rather than buying everything at Home Depot and doing it yourself.

Also, no matter what category you fall into, surfing the Top Stories on the home page in search of content you can relate to is never a bad idea. Just remember to always make sure your content is relevant to your business or organization and targets one of your audience personas.