5 Ways to Use Google Trends to Create Super-Targeted Content

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Tommy Stone, Chief Sales Officer at MotoCMS.

If you’re into the content marketing thing and strive your content read, you can’t ignore the interests of your online audience. But how do you learn where the crowd is? How do you deal with finding out what publications they’ll definitely read?

These questions may sound puzzling. However, they stop to be so once you make great friends with Google Trends content marketing. That’s an astonishing (yet often underused) free tool that helps you recognize the hottest topics that get audience devouring your content.

So, do you want to master creating super-targeted publications with Google Trends?

Good news: In this article, we walk you through 5 most exciting ways you can benefit from Google Trends content marketing.

Reading this article, you’ll find out:

• how to single out not only hot, but also trending key-words for your articles;
• how to discover viral niche-related topics and their correlates;
• how to get insights about your online rivals with Google content marketing;
• how to devise a content strategy for the year, analyzing Google Trends;
• and, finally, how to generate a buzz in social media with Minute Google Trends.

Want to see how it works right now? Then, let’s get down to business!

The Basics: What Is Google Trends?

Source: Google Trends

Google Trends is a free web service, which arms you with insights to what’s going on within the most popular search engine in the world. It has more to it than simply showing you what topics are sought-after today. Instead, it puts trendy topics (or any topic you can think of) in a context, showing you a variety of useful data.

Here come the insights Google Trends arm you with:

• interest to a chosen keyword (you get a graph showing where it goes);
• topic popularity breakdown by regions (in a form of a map);
• keyword popularity comparison over time and in variegated regions;
• keywords-related popular queries (in a form of a list).

Google Trends service has a bunch of filters and options to help you make your requests more precise. And this is the point where Google Trends content marketing gets useful for creating super-targeted content. Bear with us, because we’re going to demonstrate you how this all works and walk you by hand.

The Scope of Google Trends Insights

How much the humans can learn from Google Trends? Truly a lot.

Google Trends is an immense database with sound research potential. It’s been used as a basis for a number of intriguing social studies and provided some unexpected revelations.

For example, the research by Ginsberg et al. (2009) indicated that Google Trends traced and predicted an influenza spread prior to this was done by such authorities as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Another study has shown that steep rise of interest in specific financial terms predicts upcoming loses in financial markets.

Just think about this for a moment: worldwide public interest to blockchains and Bitcoin peaked with the highest interest of 100 points on December 17 -23, 2017. These very days, the price for 1 Bitcoin reached its all-time maximum of $19,343 and saw a downfall in a lamentable downward pattern.

Source: Google Trends

This all proves that Google Trends is a reliable prediction tool.

At this point you realize, that you don’t have to conduct a study and write a scientific paper to benefit from Google Trends content marketing. Instead, you can simply analyze Google searches, compare Google search trends and uncover what super-targeted content is currently disseminating.

5 Ways to Benefit from Google Trends Content Marketing

So, stick with us here and we’ll look into some hottest ways to work miracles using current Google Trends .

1. Single Out Keywords and Topics On the Increase

What is the service you use to single out keywords for your next article? Let’s say, you (similar to SEO-versed content creators) use the authoritative Google Keyword Planner. Frankly, this is the best option. However, you may use any other keyword research tools as well.

So, let’s imagine you came up with the list of keywords with fitting search numbers with Google Keyword Planner. This is the right moment to analyze Google searches for the keywords at Google Trends and check how well they score in perspective. Doing so, you’ll get the insight whether these popular keywords are on the rise or losing ground in a downward spiral.

Let’s see exactly how this works:

Let’s say, you’re into fashion blogging and you plan to write an article either about the bomber jackets or about statement straw hats that are recently in a spotlight. Current Google trends will help you decide on which topic of the two has more potential to generate buzz.

What do you do? You compare Google Search trends for both keywords to see which one is on its rise. To get a clear picture, we set the time span to 90 days to see the current audience preferences and where it all goes. Here’s what we get as a result:

Source: Google Trends

Now, it’s evident to us, that the readership is more into bomber jackets than into straw hats. Moreover, the interest to bomber jackets is again on its rise, while straw hats lose their popularity with the advent of colder days.

And boom! You’re there. Now you know, which of the 2 keywords with next to equal search volumes has a sounder potential as a topic for your upcoming post.

So, compare Google Search trends, add a new plane to your Google content marketing efforts and ensure that your posts enjoy a sound exposure after publication.

2. Uncover New Topics Your Readership Is Keen On

The next way you can employ current Google Trends, is using the service for content ideas. What are the adepts of your niche hunting after these days? You can get the answer to this question if you explore “Top Charts”.

So, let’s say you’ve got no idea what your next post will be about. You know your target audience and niche, and just need something they will find interesting. How do you find out what it is? We explain this below.

To find new topics that your readership is keen on, navigate to ‘Top Charts’ page at Google Trends. You’ll spot it if you unfold the menu of the service:

Source: Google Trends

Once on the ‘Top Charts’ page, you’ll see the top filters, where you can indicate your target country, current month and the niche you’re interested in. Let’s say, you’ve got a lifestyle blog, so you can select the ‘Lifestyle’ category at the top and you’ll find the hottest topics in the given blogging niche:

Source: Google Trends

Have spotted some pretty exciting blog post ideas? Great! Just click the search term that sounds good to you and find out popular related searches and queries.

If this isn’t the case, why don’t you just drop by “Trending Searches” page? (It’s also available under the hamburger navigation button on the left). First, you’ll see the most popular searches for the country in general.

What’s the catch?

To find niche and country specific trending topics, click on the ‘Real-time Search Trends’ and set up the filters. Let’s say, below, we’ve opened up the hottest content topics for healthcare and medical blogs in the UK:

Source: Google Trends

If you’ve favored any of the listed topics, do not hesitate to unfold the topic block by clicking on it for more ideas and related searches. Simple as that!

3. Create a yearly calendar of publications

No doubt, some topics get popular in a certain period of the year. Do you have certain hero topics you want to cover this year? To get the most of your posts, analyze Google searches at Google Trends and see whether there’s a specific interest to your topic in any given period of time.

Let’s get to our “straw hats” topic. It lost to bomber jackets above in this article. But if we check its popularity, we can see that it was a great trending topic back this May- June:

Source: Google Trends

Then, we want to see if the popularity of this topics has such a surge every year. Let’s switch it to “2004 – Present”:

Source: Google Trends

You’ve hit it! “Straw hats” searches peak in prevalence each June – July. So, enter the ‘Straw hats’ topic to your fashion blog editorial calendar with a post due in May – June.

Not surprisingly, not every topic has calendar-related surges in popularity. For instance, if you look up ”simple website builder”, you’ll see that such a term is popular the whole year round. So, you can generate a post about simple website builders any time, attracting pretty much the same amount of traffic.

4. See How Well You Score

Everything on the web find its reflection in Google trends. Want to uncover how well you and your rivals are scoring? Want to see the queries that people often associate with your brand and the niche? You can get the ideas if you run a brand Google Search trends comparison.

Let’s see, what insights such a comparison may yield. For example, we ran a comparison of popular coffee chains (excluding Starbucks). First of all, we can see how good they fare in terms of prevalence:

Source: Google Trends

Secondly, we can dwell on brand’s prevalence in different regions of the world:

Source: Google Trends

And, lastly, you can see the trending queries for each coffee chain name. This is the place, where you may get some content ideas flashing inside your mind:

Source: Google Trends

5. Go Viral With Minute Google Content Marketing

Google Trends content marketing both gives you perspective and lets you tap into Minute Trends. If in the former four ways to benefit from Google Trends content marketing we talked mostly about analyzing Google trends in perspective, this time we’re going to talk about getting the most out of Minute Search Trends.

You can use them for the so-called ‘real-time’ content buzz. In fact, Minute Trends don’t make a good topic for an article. However, they can get you a viral social media publication.

For example, this Oreo tweet published during a 30 mins power-out during Super Bowl in 2013, made it to 15000 retweets because many people found it relatable:

Source: Twitter

Final Remarks

Google Trends is a big thing for creating smashing content and winning the popularity game on the web. We wish you good luck in benefiting from these 5 insightful strategies of winning over the readers’ pool with Google Trends.

Have you had any experience with the service? Have you gained new ideas with it? If you know any tips, share your advice in the Comments section below.

Stay tuned!

Tommy Stone is a Chief Sales Officer & Customer Care Manager at MotoCMS Inc. MotoCMS Inc. provides business owners, entrepreneurs, and web developers with an intuitive and easy-to-use website builder. MotoCMS Inc. became a global solution and helped to implement millions of projects already. He has over 7 years of experience in a web development business. Working with customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and being an expert in a web development area, he helped thousands of businesses to go online. Check out MotoCMS“