Keep Your Business in the Loop : How to Use Google Trends for SEO

Google Trends is Your SEO Strategy's Best Friend

Google Trends is a Google-owned website that analyzes the top search queries over a certain period of time. A basic understanding of Google Trends and its uses will help you create quality, content that will increase traffic and sales. We'll show you how to use Google trends for SEO. Remember that SEO is a key ingredient to your business's inbound marketing strategy. 

Google Trends is a free resource so you might as well use it to your advantage. Just follow these simple steps so you can improve your SEO and stay in tune with what your customers are searching for and why.

Start Broad:

While it's true that effective SEO includes a list of customer/client specific keywords, analyzing trends requires a slightly different strategy. Google Trends recommends that you type a broad topic like, "marketing," "COVID-19", or "Baseball" before narrowing your search. This will help you see at what time certain trends have peaked.

Once you've chosen your trend, you can narrow it down by category, region etc. It's important to note that what's trending on Google isn't always what's trending on the news. It's about keyword popularity. This is helpful because you'll be able to get inside the minds of your customers and clients.

Decide on Long vs. Short Term Trends:

Google Trends' timeframe ranges from the past five years to the past few hours. While it may not make much sense to search for trends from 2015, remember that analytics tell a story. It's worth noting when a trend has a similar trend pattern throughout the years. "Marketing," for example has had a consistent peak and dip since 2015.

Considering over 600,000 businesses open each year, we're not surprised to see that marketing hasn't gone out of fashion! Small businesses do wonders for our economy and culture. But competition is an inevitable factor and SEO is what helps your business stand out from the crowd. 

Get Geographic

Be sure to include location in your Google Trends search. This specificity will help you understand context. Trends also offers a Comparison feature so you can type in multiple keywords. If you type in "weight loss" into Google Trends, you'll see that it's trending the most in Mississippi and a few other southern states.

If your business is in the health and wellness industry and you have locations in the south, it might be worth crafting a blog or microblog on weight loss topics and patterns that you can share on your website and social media. Be sure to include what makes your business unique and trustworthy.

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