What is Google Trends

Google Trends is an online and free tool by Google that every Marketer should be familiar with. In fact it can can be useful for any entrepreneur. The tool is extremely easy to use for any basic market research type of analysis (and for more complex type of analysis if need be). It allows you to understand the changes over time in the volume of Google searches related to a specified by you Keyword or Topic, in a specific by you country (or worldwide).

How you can use Google Trends data for your business

Below is a non-exhaustive list of scenarios of how you and your business could benefit from the Google Trends data.

1. Track Brand Awareness of your business, vs Brand Awareness of your competitors.

   Use Google Trends to understand if the volume of Google searches for your brand terms is growing faster than those of your competitors. Is the gap between you and competitors growing or decreasing? Note that although Google searches is not the main method of measuring brand awareness per se, more often than not, it gives you a good idea of how well you are doing vs competitors.

   Let’s take car manufacturers as an example and compare Mercedes, Tesla and Toyota. We see clearly Tesla is growing at a much faster pace, and eventually overtaking search volumes of Mercedes (which indeed is pretty representative of the actual market trend).

2. Understand relative volume of search terms for your keyword research process.

Let’s say you want to decide on the best keywords or phrase for your new business venture. In order to do that, it would be beneficial to understand which of the considered by you keywords or phrases are most searched for (ie there is sufficient search demand). In this case we are not so much interested in the trend over time, but rather in the relative volume of searches of the different options.

In the example below, a company wants to launch an e-commerce site selling clothing online. The business is trying to decide on what tagline or headline should be used for their store so that there is enough search demand. Having the right keywords, especially as a page title or a page header will help getting more SEO traffic. After inputting a number of possible options into Google Trends tool, and selecting UK as their target market, it is clear that there is much more demand for certain terms than there is for others.

3. Understand impact of Market (ie Search Demand) on your Search traffic & sales.

If you already have a well established position within your sector, and therefore have considerable share of the market in whatever sector or niche you specialise in, it is highly likely that any shifts on the market will have direct impact on your sales. Seeing Organic or Paid Search sales going down or up may not necessarily be a result of any actions that your marketing team or your competitors are taking. There may be absolutely no changes to your SEO rankings and no changes to PPC competition. Something very often overlooked by Marketers and Commercial teams is the Search Demand. Good news though, Search Demand is something that is actually very easy to track using Google Trends.

Let’s take a very obvious example of the Online Groceries during the COVID-19 pandemic around March 2020. Pretty much all online supermarkets and groceries suddenly saw an unprecedented increase in demand, coming mainly from Search traffic. We can very clearly see this sudden increase in demand looking at Google Trends tool (US as an example below).

In typical cases of course the change in the demand would be less obvious than it has been in the example above, and companies would have to dig deeper into their data before drawing conclusions. Every online business serious about growth should be encouraged to have in place a reporting process which overlays company’s Search traffic and sales vs Search Demand, ideally at a keyword or topic level.

A simple example of an online retailer tracking SEO traffic vs Search Demand can be found below. A few conclusions can be drawn from the below

• the company is still not growing as fast as the demand is, however the delta is starting to decrease

• the most recent acceleration in the company’s SEO Clicks is primarily driven by a Demand increase

Tip:

Make sure you do regularly backup your Google Search Console data so you can measure long term market trends (by default Google Search Console interface is limited to only last 16 months, so unless you do backups, you will only be able to calculate growth rates for a maximum period of 3 months). And make sure your backups do include keyword data as you will want to monitor market at a keyword and/or topic level.

Google Trends reporting and automation

In this article we will go through the different ways you can extract and automate your Google Trends data.