Most of you have probably heard of or used Google Trends. If you haven’t, Google Trends is a free Google tool used to analyze trends in search behavior.
It can be fun to see the history of a search term’s popularity over the course of the years. Google Trends can be used for much more than just passing the time. It can be used to help you when you’re creating content. You can find out the right time to post content throughout the year, create content around an upward trend in your industry, and brainstorm new ideas for content.
New Content Inspiration
You’re brainstorming new ideas for content and you’re coming up blank. Luckily, Google Trends has a related queries section that you can use to help the gears start turning. Along with the related queries, you can sort the queries by “Top” and “Rising.”
“Top” is categorized as being the most popular search queries. Top queries are based on a scale of 100, with 100 being the most common search, 50 is searched half as often as the most popular, and so on. “Rising” are the queries with the biggest increase in search frequency since the last time period. Rising results are marked with a percent increase and “Breakout.” Breakout means the search term increased by more than 5000%.
Take this information and use one of the more popular terms and turn it into content like a blog or video.
Seasonal Trends
Timing can play an important role when creating content. What I mean by that is, you may really want to create content around a topic, but it may not be the best time to focus on it.
In this example, we’ll use the convenience store industry. In convenience stores, you’ll see everything from snacks to coffee to the latest seasonal treat or beverage. Let’s say someone’s writing a blog about hot chocolate trends in convenience stores. We know hot chocolate is popular during the cold winter months. When exactly do we see a rise in interest around hot chocolate? According to Google Trends, for the last five years, we see the rise start at the end of September and hits its peak around mid-December.
Knowing this information for hot chocolate and other seasonal terms, you can create a timeline of when to start creating the content and when is the best time to start distributing that content.
Upward Trends
At different points in the year, you might notice trends going up. For example, in the medical industry, ventilators saw an upward trend in the month of March. While you may not be able to turn this term into content for your company, you do want to make sure you’re following the trends in your industry. When these upward trends occur, you want to put your time into creating content around those.
If you’re having trouble deciding when to create content around a topic or having trouble thinking of a topic to create content around, remember these 3 ways you can use Google Trends to help out.
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