A question: I have been told many times that Google Trends is a great business tool. Can you elaborate?
Answer: Google is by far the most used search engine with over 90% of global search traffic, processing over 3.5 billion searches daily.
Each search is performed based on the words entered, allowing Google to understand trends as they occur or on a historical basis. Google also includes searches made on YouTube in the Trends tool.
This rich database of keywords can be accessed by anyone using the Google Trends web page, which is displayed on the Google Trends website.
Keyword research value
If you are in business, you most likely have a website. If you have a website, you want to generate as much traffic as possible to it.
Using different advertising platforms is one way of generating traffic, but if you do your homework, you may be able to get visitors for free (aka organic traffic).
Google’s decision to include your website for any search criteria is incredibly complex, so keywords alone won’t guarantee free traffic, but it’s an essential first step.
There is no better way to search for keywords than with Google Trends because it gets into the ultimate database of what people search for every day.
Assuming you know what search words your potential customers will be using is a very dangerous approach, and one we were guilty of in the beginning.
Since we work in the “computer services” business, we thought focusing on this search term was important, but Google Trends made it clear that it wasn’t the term our customers were using.
The term “computer repair” generates significantly more traffic as shown in this comparison: https://bit.ly/3fhFvvk.
Understand the basics
The site starts with current trends that probably won’t be of much value, so start by entering a search term or topic related to your business.
The resulting data set will be for web searches in the United States (unless you’re doing so from another country) over the past 12 months.
The graph will represent interest in that keyword over the time frame you select which can go back to 2004.
One of the great uses of indicator software is to see seasonal changes in keyword usage which can be seen clearly if you use ‘tax software’ as a search term and change the time frame to 5 years: https://bit.ly/ 3uKs9OV.
The highest peak each year is at the end of January and the beginning of February, and can be seen by hovering your mouse over the middle of the chart and dragging it side by side.
This intelligent information can be used in both online and offline marketing initiatives because it shows when customers are most interested in this product category.
If a search term has multiple meanings, you can use the Category option to refine the data to get the appropriate meaning.
You can also change the data from web searches to image, news, shopping or YouTube searches.
Additional Insights
Comparing search terms is another valuable option for market research in indices. If you add a tax preparer to your Tax Program data, you’ll see the difference in search volume as well as the similarity in annual peaks: https://bit.ly/3w441XH.
As you scroll down, you’ll see interest by sub-area and related topics and queries that can lead to other valuable search terms.
I highly recommend learning how to use this tool for anyone involved in business development or marketing.
Ken Colborne is the founder and CEO of Data Doctors Computer Services, datadoctor.com. Ask any technical question on facebook.com/DataDoctor or Twitter Tweet embed.