If you’re a frequent flier here, you know we talked about how to optimize your blog posts for SEO and how to build B2B content marketing strategies for organic search (if this is your first visit, welcome to Board!). Creating authentic, high quality blog content is a key strategy for engaging and resonating with your target audience, in addition to improving your website’s SEO.
However, we know how difficult it can be to develop a content strategy that covers a wide range of topics and fits your company. And finding the right keywords to incorporate into your content is like the icing on the most demanding sundae. Sure, keyword finders and ranking programs are great, but they can also be expensive, and those costs can weigh on a company’s marketing budget. This is where Google Trends SEO data comes in.
In case you didn’t know or have never used it, Google Trends is, as Google says, a website that “analyzes the popularity of the top searches in Google Search in different regions and languages. The website uses graphics to compare the search volume of different search queries over time. “
How to Use Google Trends as an SEO Tool for Your Business
One caveat that you should understand is that, as ahrefs.com points out, “a lot of people think that the trend curve is [on Google Trends] is the direct representation of the search volume of the search query over time (as you can see in the Google Keyword Planner). It doesn’t work that way. “
While the Google Keyword Planner shows you the absolute search volume data, the SEO data from Google Trends shows the relative popularity of a search query.
Google Trends Help says, “Trends adjusts search data to make it easier to compare terms. Each data point is divided by the total geography searched and the time period it represents to compare relative popularity. ”So keep in mind that the popularity of a search term in Google Trends SEO data does not always correlate with actual search volume correlated to the same search query. But in most cases it does. Since it does, you can use Google Trends to track your audience’s interest in specific topics over time.
As SEMrush says, you can also sort Google Trends SEO data “by category, type, region, or time period. Once you learn how to use Google Trends, you can take advantage of trending topics, trend forecasting, and related searches to optimize your local and video SEO. ”We’ll get to that in a moment.
In the meantime, check out the video I created that delves deeper into using Google Trends as an SEO tool for your business:
Understand keyword search volume
To refresh your memory, keyword search volume, according to SEMrush, “refers to the number of times a term was searched for within a set time frame. For marketers, this is vital as the search volume ultimately brings the new traffic to your website. With Google Trends, you can enter any keyword phrase and view graphs of how interest in the topic has increased and decreased over any period of time. “
When you want to build your keyword list, you can use Google Trends as an SEO tool to identify potential keywords and phrases for your business so that you can incorporate them into your content at the right time by:
- Optimize your existing content to coincide with the peaks of keyword popularity: for example, if you have a page on your website dedicated to summer activities, it makes sense to optimize that page a few months before summer. If you do this and plan a correlative marketing campaign that links to this page and uses relevant keywords, you will likely see a surge in traffic on this page as the warmer weather hits.
- Create new relevant content related to these keywords: For Pam Ann Marketing, the announcement of Google’s new Core Web Vital metrics was something we knew we wanted to share with our audience, especially when Google next them Month officially introduces.
Avoid temporary popular keywords
When using Google Trends as an SEO tool, it can be tempting to do a quick search for keywords that are seeing a sudden surge in popularity, but if you do a little more research, you may find that your perfect keyword isn’t that perfect after all is.
Ahrefs provides an example of the keyword “yoyo” versus “fidget spinner”. Here is the keyword search analysis for both keywords:
Immediate keyword analysis would suggest that it would be beneficial to include “Fidget Spinner” – which has an average monthly search volume of over 900,000, compared to “Joyo” with only about 47,000 searches per month – in your content. However, if you take a look at Google Trends SEO analysis, you will find that “Fidget Spinner saw a dramatic increase in search queries, but only for 4 months in May 2017. After that increase, search volume decreased almost nothing. In fact, “yoyo” then gained more search traction than “fidget spinner” and its monthly search queries have remained constant since then.
Use Google Trends as a tool to optimize your local SEO strategy
Another of the most useful features of Google Trends is that it also shows you the sub-region, country, and city where a search query is very popular. This, in turn, can help you develop and optimize your local SEO strategy by:
- Create content specifically for your target audience that is in these areas. As you develop your streamlined content strategy, you can use Google Trends SEO location data to develop specific content for regions of your target audience.
- Targeting these specific regions for your PPC strategy. You can use this SEO data from Google Trends to determine which keywords to target these regions when creating your Google Ads campaigns.
You can also use Google Trends to compare the popularity of keywords or phrases across multiple sites. To do this, click on the three dots to display further options and to filter by location. Below is an example of the trend for the keyword “Core Web Vitals” over the past 30 days in the US and the UK and
As you can see, the popularity of the search term differs dramatically between the US and the UK, so content development for Core Web Vitals would have been more effective for the US audience in late May / early June. However, for a UK audience, the best time to post on this topic would be June 8th and May 15-16. June been.
If you are a more local business, you can determine where your products and services are needed locally by filtering your search by state, then filtering by “Interest by subway” or “Interest by city”.
Author: Pam Aungst
Follow @PamAnnMarketing
Pam Aungst, Pam Ann Marketing Owner and Chief Advisor, has been creating websites since 1997 and has worked in internet marketing and e-commerce since 2005. She has an MBA in Marketing and several certificates related to Internet Marketing.
Pam specializes in a comprehensive SEO approach that takes traditional … Show complete profile >
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