If you’re a marketer, investor, or eCommerce business, Google Trends can be a powerful tool.
(If you know how to use it.)
In this post, I’m going to show you actionable ways that you can start using Google Trends today, step-by-step.
So let’s dive in.
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends is a visualization tool that analyzes billions of search queries and topics to show you search growth over time and region.
For example, let’s say you wanted to know the popularity of the search term “scuba diving.” You can type in the term, and Google Trends shows you the data.
It’s no surprise that scuba diving is more popular in coastal regions. But notable, you can see that scuba diving is losing steam over the long term.
From here, you can also check out related topics and queries.
You can also compare multiple keywords and topics to find relationships.
With that, here are some tips for getting the most out of Google Trends.
1. Research Keywords for Organic and Paid Search
Google Trends can be a great place to discover trending keywords. For instance, let’s say you’re looking to market an underwater camera.
Now, check out the related queries section.
You can see that “underwater cameras”, “sealife camera,” and “waterproof video camera” are growing search queries. Google is telling you exactly what people are searching for.
Want to see something cool?
Each of your comparisons has its own related queries sections.
You can collect dozens of keywords in just a few minutes, and even export them to a CSV file.
If you’re looking for regional-based paid search opportunities, the added region and time data allow you to target campaigns to country, state, metro area, and city.
2. Inform Content Strategy
Can’t think of something to write about? Google Trends gives you a window into content people are searching for. And how search demand is changing over time.
For example, based on you waterproof camera search, you can see people are looking for waterproof camera reviews.
We can even use the related topics and queries to determine which products to include in our review.
3. Discover Trending Products
Ecommerce businesses can leverage Google Trends to find trending products to sell.
For example:
From the waterproof camera trend search, we notice that “GoPro” appears frequently. Let’s drill down.
It looks like there are plenty of trending GoPro products we can look into. By clicking on GoPro, we can also see other related products and queries.
It might also be useful to step back and analyze seasonal sales patterns so you know when demand is high.
Now, let’s find another topic.
This time we will search the “beauty and fitness” category over the last year.
Under top searches, it looks like “Hair” is a popular topic.
Looking further down, “Hair oil” appears in several queries and topics.
Now, we are starting to see some actual trending product ideas.
Looks like you’re on to a new product.
4. Compare Competitor Brands
How popular are your competitors? You can use Google Trends to compare your brand to a competitor.
In this example, we compare two popular ecommerce platforms - Jungle Scout and Helium 10.
If you’re a regional business, you can even compare drill down to specific metro areas.
5. Analyze Market Trends
What are the big “mega trends” in your market? Google Trends can help you find them.
You’ve already seen how Google Trends can compare topics and trends in different countries and regions.
Well, investors can use this capability to analyze market trend growth.
Let’s say you’re interested in the renewable energy market. Google Trends can help you discover promising avenues in that sector.
If you search for “renewable energy,” you’ll get related topics.
“Tidal Power” looks like it's been trending strong over the last year.
With a few clicks, you can see how its popularity compares to other renewable energy sources.
6. Track Market Sentiment
Investors can also use Google Trends to analyze public sentiment about a topic, product category, or industry.
Check out the comparison between “What stocks should I buy” vs. “Should I sell my stocks”.
It’s fairly easy to see how this data would help you understand how people feel about different investments.
Here are the results for “best stocks to buy in 2023.” You can see growing searches related to popular stocks. These are search suggestions that you likely wouldn’t find in any keyword research tool.
What Can’t Google Trends Do?
What doesn’t Google Trends do? What’s that missing piece?
Here are some of Google Trends' limitations:
- Relies exclusively on Google search data. Google is the most popular search engine on the planet. But there are other important sources it leaves out: social media, review websites, ecommerce sales data, online forums and more.
- Makes you dig around for trends. If you don’t have a good idea of where to start, you’ll have to be looking for a while to find a trend that interests you. Google Trends also shows all search volume growth. It’s likely that a good portion of popular searches will be irrelevant to you.
- Doesn’t provide an API. Google Trends does not provide a native API. If you want to receive automatic updates of trend information, integrate with other applications, or build your own reports from the data source, you’re out of luck.
The good news?
These are all things Exploding Topics was made to address.
We analyze social media mentions, conversations, and millions of searches to bring trending topics to you.
Unlike most Google Trends alternatives (that require you to know what to search for), Exploding Topics surfaces trends so you don’t have to go looking for them.
In many cases, we identify exploding trends before they take off.
- We discovered Substack, a subscription service for independent writers and podcasters, while it was in its infancy.
- We started tracking OpenAI years before ChatGPT broke the internet.
- Before people were air frying everything, we discovered early trend signals.
Looking for an API?
Exploding Topics Pro Business provides a flexible and easy-to-use REST API so you can retrieve and analyze topics we find in real-time.
With Exploding Topics Pro, you can start your own project, add topics and brands to track over time, access meta trends, and receive weekly reports on emerging trends.
Conclusion
Google Trends is a powerful and free tool. It can help marketers with content ideas, entrepreneurs who want to find a popular niche, and investors who want to analyze market sentiment.
Honestly, the use cases are endless.
The main downside is It doesn’t take trend discovery far enough. It’s mostly helpful for researching trends you’re already aware of. That said, Google Trends remains a mainstay of many people in the SEO and content marketing space.
