Google Trends is more than worthy of a bookmark on your browser. It fundamentally lets you plan your online marketing strategy year on year when your campaigns are going to achieve the biggest impact.
It does this by exposing how the world uses the internet, revealing how often specific keywords, topics and phrases have been searched for over various periods of time.
While the Google keyword planner within Google Adwords shows exact search volume data for specific terms, Google Trends shows the popularity of a query or topic online.
The graph below showcases this perfectly, highlighting the term ‘transfer deadline day’ in the UK on 9th August. If your products or services are used by males, you could utilise this demographic and run remarketing campaigns on relative websites they will visit during this time.
Here’s a couple of ways you can use this tool to optimise your online campaigns:
1.Tis the season – identify the key seasonal trends
A huge number of products or services search volume relies on and is affected by seasonality. Google Trends not only gives access to the UK’s way of searching, but the rest of the world too.
Let’s say you’re selling products or providing a service in correlation to the hot weather and holiday season. Here is the search data for ‘sun cream’ within the UK.
The same search data is shown on the graph below, but for Australia.
You can see from the above graphs that search volume for sun cream peaks in July in contrast to December for the UK. Whereas in Australia, search volume for sun cream hits it’s a peak in December and is at its lowest in July, providing great campaign insight for planning.
So, what can we do with this data?
- Create relevant online marketing campaigns to coincide with search trends as this is when users are most likely to be demanding your products or information on your service.
- Plan and optimise relevant pages on your website in the run up to the peaks. It is a waste of time to start optimising your content when the peaks hit as you will be forever chasing your competitors who are ranking higher. You need to prioritise this 1-2 months before the peak arrives.
2.Utilise the ‘related queries’ tool
Google Trends not only reveals the trend popularity of topics, it also divulges into the queries people search for in relation to that topic.
‘Back to School’ is every parent’s worst nightmare. The stress of making sure all their children have the correct school uniform and stationary supplies is challenging. As you can now buy pretty much everything online, why not capitalise on this and target parents searching at peak times, offering them your products (a saviour!) right when they need it most.
For example, as you can see from the above trends, people searching within the ‘back to school’ topic also look for ‘calculators’, ‘backpacks’, ‘hairstyles’ and ‘uniforms’.
Not only does this provide keyword insights so you can bid on terms you might not have thought of previously, it delivers a better understanding of your customers journey to purchase online for maximum impact.
Do you feel like you need help using real-time data to gauge your marketing strategy? We can help you discover what matters most to your targeted audience and more importantly when. Get in touch today.