Google Trends is a search trend feature that shows how popular a given search term is on Google. Here is what Google Trends can help you do:

Google Trends Can Help Find Niches

Google Trends is a free tool you can use to find a trending niche. By plugging in your niche ideas into Google Trends, you can see whether or not people are searching your niche and if there is increasing or decreasing interest. This search is an excellent start to brainstorming whether you are looking to start a new blog or ramp up your e-commerce site. One thing to note when looking for seasonal trends is to search using the “2004-present” option rather than selecting the “Past 12 months” option. There is also a “Compare” button you can utilize. When comparing how popular your niche is vs. other potential slots, this is an excellent feature to use.

Google Trends Can Help Find Relevant Product Categories For Your Online Store

Once you have your niche decided on, and your store created and focusing on that niche, why not try and expand a bit? You can use Google Trends to help you grow your online store or blog into other verticals. Type in your niche and scroll to the bottom where you will find “Related Topics.” You may discover that the “Related Topics” have nothing to do with your niche but may make sense as categories for your online store. A person who searches “garden gnome” is likely also interested in “garden ornaments” or “zombies.” As you search through some of the “Related Topics,” there may be some topics that don’t make sense for your business. For example, “Travelocity” is listed as a Google Trends related topic for “Garden Gnome.” Even though this isn’t relevant to what your online store is about, you could always write a blog post about Travelocity’s gnome.

Google Trends Can Help With Keyword Research

Google Trends Can Help With Promotions Based Off Of Seasonal Trends

Seasonal trends can play an essential role in your business’s success. Throughout the year, there’ll be ups and downs that will impact your sales. During your peak season, competition and sales will increase in full force for raised garden beds. During the drops, you might start selling other products like indoor grow systems or greenhouses.

Google Trends Can Help Update Content Freshness

Throwing your website’s top-performing keywords into Google Trends can help you find blog topics for your website. Coordinating your content freshness around the search term’s peak season is an excellent way to help boost rankings. Do this on your top-performing articles and update the material as you see fit.

Google Trends Can Help Create Newsworthy Content

There is a section for trending searches on the homepage of Google Trends. These searches are the hottest topics of the moment, allowing you to browse daily trending searches, realtime search trends, and search by country. Currently, most of the trending searches are regarding the Coronavirus. You can, however, find some buzz-worthy stories that tie into specific niches. If your online store targets anything related to these searches, why not write a newsworthy article on the topic? Occasionally covering trending stories on your blog can help drive high volumes of traffic back to your website as well as help improve social media engagement.

Google Trends Can Help You Find Niches By Region

Finding niche topics by region is one of the more exciting features of Google Trends. In this example, let’s see how raised garden beds differ between Louisiana and New York. Right now, the search volume for “raised garden beds” is on the rise in New York. With this new information, after you have created an ad for raised garden bed kits, you are better off targeting individual states like New York rather than the entire United States. Since there’s growing interest in New York over Louisiana right now, you’ll be able to capitalize on this on Facebook, Google Adwords, or whatever paid campaign you choose. Cross-referencing all the states to determine which ones are seeing the trend rise is a great way to increase your chances of landing sales without wasting money by targeting places where interest is lagging.

Google Trends Can Help Monitor Competitors’ Position

Monitoring your competitors and watching how well they’re performing against your brand is another good use for Google Trends. Let’s take a look at Home Depot vs. Lowes and compare how they have been showing over the years. We can see that in 2008, the two brands were performing at about the same level, with Home Depot having a slight advantage. However, after 2017, we see the evident rise of Home Depot coming out on top. This decline should signal to Lowes that they may need to start analyzing their marketing channels to try to understand how they can improve. You can compare up to five search terms or competitors with the compare feature, helping your brand gain more significant insight into your search audience and keep you ahead of your competitors.

Google Trends Can Help Boost Your YouTube Videos

Another neat thing to note about Google Trends is that you can use it to improve your reach on YouTube. After heading to YouTube and looking for “raised garden bed” videos, we noticed that the top videos used the keyword “How to Build Raised Garden Beds” or “DIY Raised Garden Beds.” After plugging these terms into Google Trends, we notice that in February, this search term skyrocketed in interest. How can you capitalize on traffic during this time? Create a video on how to build a raised garden bed using your online raised garden bed kits. If you have an email list, you can send an email during February to boost your video and repeat this process each year. Promoting your video works exceptionally well with old videos, as Google will see that you’re promoting your older video content. In turn, Google will likely reward you with a higher position for your video so you can get even more views on it.

Google Trends Can Help You Decide When To Promote Google Shopping Ads

Google Trends can help you determine the best time to create Google Shopping ads. For your online garden store, you want to promote a new raised garden bed kit. Between February and July, there are high volumes of searches for raised garden beds in Google Shopping. So, based on this data, you might start selling and promoting your raised garden bed kits between February and July and again in September, where it has a small spike in searches each year. Google Trends is an enormously valuable SEO tool that no digital marketer should go without. Find out more about Google Trends at trends.google.com.