When it comes to looking for information, Google remains the leading choice for the majority of people. It controls around 90% of the search engine market globally, plus receives over two Trillion searches each year.
But how do you understand more about what people are searching for right now and then use this to benefit your business?
Enter Google Trends – a free tool from Google that provides easy and visual access to the search trends that are happening.
In this article I am going to focus on the ‘Trending now’ feature and show how you can use this as part of your content strategy.
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends has been around for a number of years, but has more recently been improved in terms of how it captures and displays the data.
It works by showing how many times people search for specific search terms on Google, which makes it great for giving you an indication of what is popular.
The homepage features topics that are trending across Google Search, Google News and YouTube. When there is a relative spike in search volume and the absolute volume of searches, then Google Trends will start to capture and show that.
There are two main sections in Google Trends:
- Explore – this is where you can explore your own topics and see what is related and trending in terms of searches. This is useful for some initial research.
- Trending Now – this section shows the most current trending searches over the most recent time period (maximum of seven days). This can be filtered by country, time period and category.
Google Trends also collates some trends together, for further exploration. For example, the Year in Search or Climate Trends.
Why use Trending Now
Let’s focus on using the Trending Now feature, as that is what will help you develop reactive content to help promote your business.
One of the main groups of people using Google Trends is journalists, due to the fact that they can quickly spot opportunities for news stories that are based on what people are searching for.
You can adopt this tactic when it comes to creating content for your website, such as news stories, articles or guides. Doing this, as part of your overall SEO strategy, can increase the chance of your website being shown in the search results for those topics. And this means potential traffic to your website.
It also can help to further establish you and your website as an authority on those particular topics – this builds your E-A-T (Expertise- Authority-Trustworthiness) signals to Google.
How to use Trending Now
Using the Trending Now section of Google Trends is straightforward and quick to do, thanks partly to the tool itself being easy to use.
The main Trending Now dashboard will by default show you the trends for the country you are located in, for the past 24 hours.
You can then use the filters to adapt it in order to make it more relevant for your needs. These filters are:
- Trend location – set to your location by default, but you can select the country to display. This is really useful if your business works across different markets.
- Timeframe – set to see when the trending started, by choosing from:
- Past four hours
- Past 24 hours
- Past 48 hours
- Past seven days.
- Categories – probably the most useful filter, if you just want to see trends relevant to your industry or sector. You can see ‘all categories’ or choose from a list of 19 specific categories including: Beauty and fashion, Food and drink or Health.
- Trend status – by default ‘All trends’ are shown, so you can use ‘Show active trends only’ to filter out things that are no longer active.
- Sort by – the default is to show trends sorted by relevance (significant and recent trends), however you can also choose to sort by title, search volume and recency.
There’s a useful export function as well, if you want to take the data out of here and use it further yourself (for example, to build out a keywords list).
Example use
For this example, imagine you are an online wines and spirits business in the UK, which uses your blog to update on what’s happening within the industry.
Using Trending Now, you would select ‘Food and drink’ as the category, which gives the following example searches:
As you can see, the topic ‘champagne’ is the most active trend and has seen a 200% increase in search volume.
By clicking on the trend graph, you then get to find out more about why:
This now reveals a summary of when the topic has trended the most and shows some of the news stories that are contributing to that increase.
You can also click ‘Explore’ which opens up that topic within the Explore section of Google Trends to show you things like what other topics and queries are related. This gives you additional ideas of what to include in your content.
Using this information, you would then create your own opinion piece about ‘the impact of tariffs on Champagne sales’ and publish it on your blog.
What to do next?
Once you have done your research, then you can look to quickly produce the content and publish it. Then give it more traction by sharing it on your social media and email channels.
As with every marketing tactic, I would highly recommend you test this, before committing to it as part of your ongoing activity. You should decide on some ways of measuring it, so you can then see how it is working (or not). KPIs for measurement might include increased search impressions or website traffic to your content pages.
Hopefully this has given you the inspiration to use Google Trends more as part of your content strategy. I would love to know how you get on and what impact you see as a result.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to use Google Trends or search data in general to benefit your business, then contact us today.
