There’s a lot of noise on which is the best tool for SEO and content marketing. Many businesses claim to have the best data, the most features, and the deepest insights. However, when it comes to understanding how your content is going to perform, Google Trends is still the best free tool out there.
Other tools like Google Analytics and Search Console show you what’s happening on your website, but they don’t necessarily tell you what to do next. Google Trends data, on the other hand, can be a valuable predictor of content performance.
Google Trends is a public web facility provided by Google. It allows you to see how often particular terms are being searched for on the internet. The data is anonymized and aggregated, so you can’t see what any individual is searching for.
In short, it is the only keyword research tool that offers insights based on actual Google search data.
12 Tips On How to Use Google Trends for SEO And Content Marketing
Google Trends might not show you the absolute number of searches for a certain keyword. But it will show you how often that keyword is being searched for relative to other keywords.
This is extremely valuable data that can be used to predict the future performance of your content.
Here are 13 tips on how you can use Google Trends data to improve your SEO and content marketing:
1. Conduct Keyword Research
Find the most searched keywords using Google Trends and incorporate them into your content to improve your SEO and content. Simply enter the keyword into the search box on the homepage and see how it performs relative to other keywords.
It runs a search of the most searched keywords by default, but you can also change it to look at different kinds of search data like YouTube search. It generally returns a graph of the keyword’s popularity over the selected time frame. You can easily expand the date range to get a longer-term view.
Compare the keywords data over the past year with the data from two or three years ago to help you understand if it’s a fad or a true trend. This will give you a better idea of whether to incorporate the keyword into your content strategy.
For instance, if you’re an SEO agency, you might want to target keywords like “link building” or “local SEO.” You can use Google Trends to check the popularity of these keywords over time and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
2. Find Related Keywords
Its ability to recommend related keywords that are currently growing in popularity is powerful. Simply type a search term into the homepage, and the site returns a list of keywords it considers as closely related to your search.
This is a great way to quickly generate a list of relevant keywords to target in your content. And since you can see the exact % search volume increase for each keyword, you can prioritize which ones to target first.
Let’s circle back to our SEO agency example. If you want to target the keyword “link building,” you can use Google Trends to find related keywords that are currently growing in popularity. You might want to target keywords like “link building SEO” or “link building services.”
In our experience, the related keywords feature is more accurate for larger, more general terms. So it’s worth doing a few searches to see which related keywords are most relevant to your business.
3. Explore Related Topics
Not all related topics will be relevant to your business. But it’s worth exploring the list to see if any jump out as being a good fit.
To find related topics, type a keyword into Google Trends and scroll down to the section titled “related topics.” This will return a list of broader topics that are related to your keyword.
Going back to our previous example, here’s what the related appears: