10 Google Trends Tricks Every Business Should Know: How to Use Google Trends for Ecommerce
From finding complementary product verticals to increasing website traffic and updating outdated SEO keywords, Google Trends provides valuable insights to shape your eCommerce digital marketing strategies. Here’s how to use Google Trends for product research and content marketing.
What Is Google Trends and How Do You Access It?
Google Trends is a free search feature by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. It uses graphs to compare search volume for common queries over different periods of time. Trends data is unbiased, anonymized, and categorized.
To start using Google Trends:
- Type “Google Trends” into Google Search. The website should come up in SERPs.
- Enter the website.
- Then, type in a keyword into the search bar or choose one of the provided examples. You can also scroll down to see general information about current trends in the US, as well as view a breakdown of how popular each term is in every state.
10 Google Trends Tricks for Businesses and Entrepreneurs
Here is how we utilize Google Trends to improve search visibility and generate more traffic to eCommerce websites.
1. Finding Niches With Google Trends
Because everyone is already going after all the major keywords relevant to your business and because the eCommerce markets are generally oversaturated, discovering new niches and keywords with Google Trends can be highly rewarding.
What makes the use of Google Trends so powerful is that it can show you if a niche is trending or evergreen and give you keyword and product ideas. Finding a niche perfectly suited to your business can help you differentiate your brand, reduce competition and increase profits.
2. Discovering Relevant Product Categories
Considering expanding your product offerings into other verticals? The first thing you should do is Google product trends. When you search for a product term in Google Trends, product searches related to your term pop up at the bottom of the page. So, let’s say you’re a handbag eCommerce store.
With Google Trends, you can find out trending colors, materials, and other product innovations, as well as how much interest has increased for related searches in a selected time frame.
For the most searched-related queries and topics, you’ll see a percentage of the term’s growth. If you see “Breakout” instead of a percentage, it means the search term has grown by more than 5000% according to Google Trends. Best-selling products are also easy to find, providing an opportunity to innovate on existing handbags presently in the market.
3. Using Google Trends for Keyword Research
Google Trends for eCommerce offers the following benefits for keyword planning and research:
- Keyword trend research
- Seasonal keyword trend analysis
- Keyword comparison
- Country-specific keyword
The website assigns a numerical value to keywords ranging from zero to 100. Obviously, 100 represents peak popularity (The higher the number the more searches occur for that keyword.) Keep in mind that while keywords hitting close to or at the 100 level matter, often the most pragmatic and sustainable ones are those with stable growth or steady positions. While they appear less popular, these keywords represent topics consistently searched for year-over-year without much decline.
4. Writing Content About the Current Global and Local Trends
On the homepage of Google Trends, you’ll find a section for trending searches. These are the hottest topics of the moment. While most trends are short-lived, you can leverage them on social media, especially when buzzworthy trends tie into your business niche.
An excellent example of newsjacking (creating content based on current news) was when the meditation app Calm ramped up advertising leading up to and on the night of the last US elections. Drawing from this example, you can see how Google Trends can inform marketing tactics, especially when it comes to creating quick content pieces that ride on the coattails of trending events.
5. Find a Niche Specific to a Location
When it comes to digital marketing, we target audiences based on niche topics by region. We know a target audience in Chicago is different from an audience in LA. For example, at the time of writing, the term “silver jewelry” is more popular in New Jersey than in New York. So, what does this mean?
If you were to create a pay-per-click ad for “silver jewelry,” you’d be better off targeting New Jersey than New York, since there’s growing interest there. This is one example of how to use Google Trends for research, not just in terms of finding out which products are popular but also to determine which regions will bring the most sales.
6. Promoting Your Business During the Seasonal Trends
If your business is season-dependent or sells products or services that are, you can quickly estimate peak sales times in Google Trends. This data can be put to use in two ways:
Create relevant content to coincide with the peak. For example, if you’re a chocolatier, you’ll likely want to emphasize specials during Valentine’s Day.
Optimize relevant content before the peak. So, if you’re a snow removal company, you’ll want clients to be aware of your services before winter. Therefore, you might launch an advertising campaign during the fall.
Essentially, identifying seasonal trends allows you to create and promote content at the right time.
7. Google Shopping Trends
Say you’re selling gym equipment. You could run a search in Google Trends for the term “gym equipment” and filter your results by looking specifically for people who searched in Google Shopping.
This can help you narrow down to searchers who would likely be interested in purchasing products because the keywords they use reveal a specific intention around gym-related products.
Google Trend shopping research offers in-depth knowledge that can deeply inform your sales strategy. It allows you to customize your inventory and marketing offers based on what consumers are looking for, whether it’s seasonally or all year round.
8. Using Google Trends to Update Your Content
Creating content that converts and filing your editorial calendar can be challenging, especially once you’ve already addressed FAQs. Utilizing Google Trends can be a good place to widen your research and help you identify topics your target audience actually wants to read about.
You can literally enter any broad topic in the search bar, and be shown a list of content ideas relevant to you. Producing topical content consistently retains customers. Search engines also love fresh content and rank websites that publish regular, relevant content higher. Sometimes, you don’t even have to write new content from scratch, you can just update what you already have, saving time and money.
9. Analyzing the Competitors With Google Trends
Although not the deepest form of competitive analysis, Google Trends does provide a good, general overview of how often your competitor’s products, brand, or services are being searched for on Google’s search engines. You can also add your company name to compare who customers search for more.
Google Trends lets you compare up to five competitors to see who is growing at a faster rate. If you’re leading, capitalize on regions where your brand enjoys popularity to get the most bang for your marketing dollar. If you’re behind, you can use the data to improve your marketing campaigns.
10. YouTube Video Marketing
Over 50% of consumers want to see videos from their favorite brands. The challenge, of course, is figuring out what types of videos will get the most views. Google Trends is a good resource to understand how consumers’ video-watching habits vary.
For example, if you search “how to cook,” on Google Trends, you’ll notice it has more weekly searches on YouTube than on Google Search. Therefore, if you’re a home or kitchen appliance store, for instance, you’ll immediately realize it’s better to create video marketing content. This useful research process helps you adapt content based on the topics and channels.
Improve Your Ecommerce Marketing With Google Experts
The benefits of Google Trends can help your eCommerce business build a powerful online presence. Now that you know how to leverage it for marketing, product, and content creation, you’ll want to use it with other marketing tools like Google Ads and Google Analytics to get ahead of your competition.
Alternatively, you can hire a professional eCommerce digital marketing company like us! We’ve helped many start-ups and established businesses improve their digital marketing and profits. Contact our marketing experts at Comrade Digital Marketing to get started with your free digital marketing audit.
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