Over 275 billion Google searches are performed every month.
How can get more of that search traffic to land on your website?
Optimize your website for SEO. And for what people search for.
For example, my post on LinkedIn Freelance Profile: Ultimate Guide has consistently ranked on Google for spots 1-2 for many years.
I spotted this trend back in 2015, which is when I wrote the original post.
And I wrote a super extensive guide.
Google Trends is a powerful tool that can be used to increase organic search traffic to your website.
In this post, we’ll see how to use Google trends to:
Optimize the way you select your blog post topics.
Help you learn about your audience's interests.
Analyze which products your company should sell.
Find the best keywords & search terms for driving more traffic.
Use this technique to increase organic search traffic to your post, e-commerce website, or blog – a key element to the successful growth of your business.
Why Google Trends?
Google Trends can provide your business with valuable search data and analytics that can be extremely beneficial if used correctly.
And one of the best things about Google trends is that it is very simple to analyze and research the data.
To simplify matters I've divided the post into three main sections – discover, analyze & optimize.
In addition to the productivity tips, I'll also share a few fun and interesting tips that are unrelated to business.
Ready? Let’s get started.
Discover
The first and most obvious use for Google trends is to discover trending topics. I like comparing this to an online newspaper where people go to read the daily news.
When you visit Google Trends, you’re presented with tons of interesting information about worldwide trending topics, which is divided into two main parts – trending now and top charts.
Trending Now
As the name implies, this section presents real-time data of currently trending topics that raised significantly in terms of search volume.
You can filter the results by country and by categories – all, business, politics, cities, entertainment, lifestyle, nature, science, shopping, fashion, sports, travel & leisure.
Top Charts
Top Charts highlight topics with high search volume during certain periods of time.
These charts are also sorted by categories, but here they are sorted by topics as well – actors, books, business people, cars, games, movies, music, people, politics, and many others.
Google Zeitgeist
At each year’s end, Google releases a video accompanied by data about the most searched topics of the year. You can view Google Zeitgeist videos back to 2004. “Zeitgeist” by the way, means “the spirit of the times.”
Analyze & Optimize
The second use of Google Trends is for analyzing data.
Whether you are a blogger, salesperson, business owner or anything else involving reaching out to people, this is the best place for you to analyze and understand the interests of your audience & clients.
Best keywords & search terms for driving more traffic.
Want to write a blog post about WordPress?
Insert “WordPress” into the search query and filter the result to “past 7/30/90 days”. Scroll down to the Related Searches and select Top or Rising in the Queries tab. This will present top rising search queries for your search term for the date range you've selected.
This is the exact data you need for making the most out of your blog. You should leverage this gold-like information to get ideas about blog posts and trending topics (i.e. WordPress plugins, Free WordPress Themes).
Furthermore, if you want to take things to a whole new level, combine the results from Google Alerts together with Google's keywords planner.
This will allow you to dig into the data and explore the best performing search terms, keyword competitiveness, and much much more.
Business owner– Analyze which products your company should sell.
Do you own a tennis equipment store? Insert "Tennis" into the search query, filter the Category Results to Shopping, and set the time filter from 2004 to the present.
Then scroll down to the Queries tab and view the Top Queries.
Once you get an idea of the top product categories, you can refine your search even further by clicking on a particular result (e.g. Tennis Shoes).
This will give you an indication of which products within that category are most commonly searched for.
Once you know what the top products are, you can compare multiple products (for example “Nike Tennis Shoes vs. Adidas Tennis Shoes”) to get a better understanding of what searches people are performing.
This technique becomes even better with the ability to filter results by country & region which is great for local businesses.
Selling SEO-related services?
Test “SEO Tools” vs. “SEO Techniques” to determine which of the two phrases has more search volume. Use this data when building your business or when describing your specific services on your website.
Applying the above tactics to generate more leads
If you are serious about your business, and I sure hope you are, use the above techniques and implement them throughout your work.
If you want people to visit your website and eventually make a purchase of some kind, you've got to write about topics that interest your audience.
You might be a phenomenal writer, but if people are not interested in your topics you are losing opportunities.
Google Trends is a free tool, so what are you waiting for? Use it to analyze and optimize your business for better results.
Additional Google Trends Features
Visualize trending topics in full screen
This is definitely one of the coolest features on Google Trends.
This feature allows you to visualize up to 25 trending topics simultaneously in a super minimal but beautiful way. It could probably be a fun thing to display in a boring waiting room outside your office.
Embed trending topics
If you would like to embed data from Google trends (hot trends charts or graphs), you can easily do so by clicking on the embed button <> and then copying the html code into your website.
Summary
Even though Google trends can be used just for fun and exploration, it can also be leveraged as a super powerful tool to add to your arsenal of tools.
Here's what we covered in this post, and what you should do next:
Start by exploring trending topics in your niche.
Move on to analyzing and researching that valuable data, comparing test terms and keywords using comparison tools.
Optimize your website's content with the information you have to drive serious amounts of genuine targeted traffic to your website.