A Beginner’s Guide to Using Google Trends

canstockphoto10177889If you are like many website owners, you appreciate the fact that understanding the popularity of trends and search terms is an excellent way to hone your current marketing campaign as well as to better understand what your competitors may be doing. You will be pleased to learn that this can now all be accomplished with the help of a system known simply as Google Trends. So, how can you use this platform and what are some of the benefits to be experienced? Let’s have a brief look at both of these questions.

The Power of Visual Presentation

There have been other keyword search tools over the years. One of the biggest differences in regards to Google Trends is that you will not see “static” and generic information, but rather how popular the term has been over the past few years. We can think of this as the “evolution” of a keyword or key phrase. As all of this data is provided to you in an easy-to-read graphical format, you can quickly determine which terms are getting the most hits and which ones have faded off of the radar.

Interactivity is Key

Google Trends has been created under the assumption that not everyone is a marketing and analytical guru. So, much of the rather technical presentations and terminology have been done away with. These are replaced by colour-coded graphs, bar charts and even interactive maps which will show you the countries that employ a certain term the most. As opposed to statistics and percentages, you can enjoy a real “visual” feel. What may have taken you a great deal of time to interpret can now be understood in a matter of seconds.

Relative Popularity

Another interesting fundamental in Google Trends is that you are able to see the relative popularity of a term over time. Why is this important? If we imagine that you are the owner of a hiking website, certain times of the year and even sporting events may have a very real impact upon the types of terms that are used. By knowing which are the most popular during a relative time frame, you will be able to better increase your exposure within the search engine. More targeted keywords naturally equate to a greater number of inbound hits to your website.

Knowing Your Competitors

Another attribute of Google Trends is that you will be able to view the popularity of your competitors over time. If you note that they have had a sudden “spike” within a graph, you can then research online news stories to see what may have caused such a fluctuation. To put it another way, Google Trends gives you the clarity and the insight that are both necessary to understand how you stack up in comparison to others within your marketplace. In this past, this would have been quite time consuming while the results would be intuitive at best.
These are some of the hallmarks that have made Google Trends quite popular within the marketing community. Most importantly, it is absolutely free to use! If you are interested in developing a better understanding of your audience and competitors, Google Trends is an excellent tool to employ.

Do you use Google Trends to aid you in content marketing and SEO? Please leave your comments below…

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