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Using Google Trends for market research to leverage your content creation ideas

Using Google Trends for market research to leverage your content creation ideas

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Did you know you can use Google Trends for market research and target your customer needs, tailor content strategy, in a much better way?

Whether it’s new ideas you need to blog about or preparing a content marketing strategy, defining your customer’s issues and challenges, or monitoring your brand awareness. There are plenty of tools out there that can help in all that. And one of them comes from our friend, Google. More specifically, we’re talking about Google Trends, a free research tool that you can use to do market research or come up with a solid amount of topics and ideas for your content.

Now, before we start with more in-depth sharing, let us go through basics.

What is Google Trends – introduction

If you are new to Google Trends, it’s a free trend analyzing tool based on popular search queries in Google Search worldwide. You type the term, topic, or a phrase, and the tool shows the interest around it over a period of time. It all helps to get a more detailed picture of topics you want to address or cover in your branding, content marketing, target audience engagement.  Google Trends makes it easy to understand what people search and how that search interest changes over time.

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It was developed in 2016 and since then became a vital tool for both keyword and market research. And more. Google Trends shows data based on location, content type, term comparison, related queries. What’s great about it, you don’t need to have a Google account to use it. Simply visit the Google Trends site and start using it. Another great feature of this tool is they regularly share year’s summary of all the most popular search queries you can further explore to get a better understanding of worldwide trends and how they are relevant to your market and overall work.

How to use Google Trends for market research?

Thanks to the tools like this, market research nowadays is a lot more accessible, faster, not to mention pennyworth. With it, you can discover how your audience thinks, what interests them over time, and what they search online to develop a focused, in-depth content strategy for (hopefully) market domination. That being said, here are the things you can do with Google Trends to achieve that.

Use Google Trends to understand your market’s insights

Maybe you’re looking to expand your business or starting something brand new. Either way, Google Trends can help you determine which way to go. Say you want to work within travel photography niche. So, you’re aspiring travel/photo blogger looking for a way to both offer specific value to your target audience but also start a lucrative business within. Based on the research you did on Google Trends, you can get a pretty solid idea what type of travel photography blog to start.

google-trends-for-market-research-travel-photography-screenshot

google-trends-for-travel-photography-related-data

What do these insights tell us? Well, both related topics and queries show that people want to know more about ways to save while traveling. Phone and internet costs, travel spending, travel insurance, and similar cost-saving travel information. Knowing that you can tailor your content around these topics, explaining – and photographing – all those details that helped you on your travels. So, you’ll make travel agency/credit card/travel gear/photo equipment comparison; share low-cost vs. high-cost travel tips; teach how to enjoy traveling and find work at the same time. You get the idea. And all that from merely using Google Trends to determine your path. Not bad for a 10 minutes work, yes? 🙂

Or, you can use Google Trends to see how your market competitors are doing, what related topics and queries surround them and know how you can use that data to tailor your own strategy. Provide better insights, offer your information related to that data, instead of your competitor. Plenty to do once you get to know how to use this tool.

Use Google Trends to find relevant keywords

As we said earlier, no need to open a Google account. Simply type the term you’ve been thinking of covering and see what comes up. You’ll instantly notice its trend, related queries, interest by region even. All that helps you paint a more specific picture of what your target audience wants and needs. You’ll also get the traction of what Google thinks as related sub-topics around the stated keyword. It will help you build a spectrum of possibly relevant keywords for your content planning. And talking about that…

Use Google Trends to help you develop a content strategy

Google Trends is a great tool you can use to find relevant topics to cover with your blog or website. Using the WordPress example since this is what we cover on our blog, we’re trying to determine what it is our audience would like to know more about.

google-trends-for-market-research-wordpress-screenshot

As we dig deeper into the related topic and queries, we can see that people want to know more about:

  • WordPress dashboard
  • WordPress header
  • Analytics topics
  • WooCommerce
  • Competitor mentions

and more.

google-trends-for-market-research-wordpress-related-screenshot

Based on this information, we can tailor our WordPress content marketing strategy and deliver the most valuable content for your target audience.

Use Google Trends to track interest over time

Let’s say you’re a web developer and you want to know how your market audience behaves around your type of work. As you can see from the example below, we compared three different CMS’s to get insights on how popular and relevant to us, they are:

google-trends-for-market-research-insights-screenshot

So, for the past 12 months, worldwide, WordPress is by far the most popular CMS that gets the most traction and interest. From a web developer’s point of view, this is important because it clearly shows us what type of work could be most lucrative. And that’s working with WordPress. Furthermore, you can explore the seasonality of those queries to determine where is the best time to advertise your work.

From the content side, it’s also valuable information, because it helps to decide which platform to use, for your business or a blog. And if you are choosing WordPress, you might be interested in our premium quality WordPress themes. We take pride in helping people around the world to have only the best and always up-to-date websites by using our themes.

Use Google Trends to get insights on your brand awareness

Get track of what people are saying about you over time. Just type your brand name and look at the results. You’ll instantly get data like what people are saying by related topics and queries. If we lookup the Gutenberg Editor in the past year, for example, we’ll have this result:

google-trends-for-market-research-gutenberg-editor-screenshot

google-trends-for-gutenberg-editor-related-screenshot

What it means is that people are interested in finding out more about it, but moreover, that they still aren’t quite satisfied with it. Disable Gutenberg Editor related query shows us that quite explicitly. Region tells you where from are people most interested in your brand, so you can focus more on explaining them and teaching them more about it. Related topics further explain how the brand is perceived, noting that people need simple editor tool, something that Gutenberg still struggles with. Still, it is a big step forward and a change that will benefit us all, so, be patient and have faith in it 🙂

Google Trends for market research bonus tips

Use Google Trends to discover real-time trending topics to see if you can align them with your work. Knowing and recognizing the latest trends can improve your visibility and brand awareness. Like, if you can make a relevant connection between the World Cup and WordPress and produce a meaningful article, that could be a potential viral content that could bring you exposure and possible leads.

Use + in the query box. Just as in the regular search, the + sign will instruct Google that you want to conduct a group search, and it will give you more defined results.

Narrow your results by defining or comparing categories. See how your market, keyword, brand, or theme exists within Image/News/Google Shopping/YouTube search as well. That will show you where else /if any/ you need to be or give more of yourself to be noted.

Final word

See how easy it is to see how your brand’s doing online, and what people think of it? How easy you can conduct thorough research on your market? Or people’s search intent to come up with specific topics, keywords, ways to disrupt search results with your content and presence?

google trends

I hope this article shows you the full potential of Google Trends and its ways to conduct market research and come up with all those valuable ideas for content writing. Use it to have a deeper understanding of your audience needs, to identify market opportunities, topics to write about, and to discover value in what’s trending. Also, feel free to let me know how it worked for you or if you have any other tips for using it.

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Ivana Cirkovic

Ivana is a Digital Marketing, PR and Social Media consultant with over nine years experience in the field. She is also a WordPress enthusiast and an active member of WordPress community who lives online almost 24/7. In love with Twitter, WP, photography and NYC.

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