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From the SEO perspective keywords are very important. If you fail to identify the right keywords for your website or videos then you will struggle to get success.
If you know the importance of it then you definitely try lots of tools and methods to refine your keywords strategy. Among them, we are sure you’ve tried Google Trends too.
Let us tell you a secret… you’ve not leveraged the full potential of Google Trends.
Yes, we know you’ve explored all the options but we are not talking about them. Here we will teach you how you can use Google Trends for keyword research like a pro.
So without any waiting let’s get started!
What Is Google Trends?
Google Trends is a free tool that gives you real-time insights on what’s trending. That’s not it, you can explore how popular search terms are performing over time.
The reason is simple. It gets access to a huge database of Google searches to show how often people have searched for a particular word or phrase.
Why not, after all, it’s a Google product.
It is a fun-to-use tool until you realize how it can turn things for you. Once you start using it to discover new and untapped keywords then suddenly you will realize how powerful it is.
Features and Data Offered By Google Trends
Some of the specific data Google Trends provides includes:
- Search volume for terms over hours, days, months and years.
- Related/competing search queries people gave input for.
- Top search interests by location and language.
- Trending breakout searches gaining momentum.
- Interest level comparisons between search terms.
- Demographic segmentation of search interests.
Why Use Google Trends?
There are several reasons Google Trends can be hugely beneficial for Search Engine Optimization (SE0) and content research, creation and optimization:
- Identify Seasonal Trends: Spot peaks and valleys in keyword volumes year-round
- Find Keywords Opportunities: Uncover emerging trends and breakout terms
- Audience Research: Better understand searcher demographics and needs
- Validate Content Ideas: Confirm interest for articles based on search patterns
- Gauge Content Performance: Benchmark own keyword rankings versus competitors
- Drive Topics/Angles: Use related queries for content and title inspiration
Essentially Google Trends informs content production to match real audience interests.
This gives advantage to rank faster and capture more qualified organic traffic as search demands escalate.
It transforms keyword research from guesswork into data-driven content creation fueling sustainable SEO growth!
1. Analyze Seasonality and Trends For Main Keywords
Open Google Trends and enter your main keyword or topic. Let’s say you decide to write a blog post and create social media content for a USA audience about “easy family dinners”.
Begin by analyzing search patterns for “easy family dinners” by selecting the 5-year timeframe under the Date section.
Examine the interest graph for peaks.
Notice clusters around the start of school years and Thanksgiving/Christmas.
This suggests that interest in easy family meals increases during busy times when convenience is essential.
However, search volume decreases during the summer months. This is likely because parents have more free time with kids out of school, so dinner ease and convenience are less of a priority.
Structure your content calendar around these seasonal trends to create relevant content for families during the busy fall and holiday seasons.
Closely examine search volumes year over year. Identify an overall growing trend in the long term. Compare December 2019 to December 2023.
You’ll find that search volume has increased by 46%. This shows that seasonality is a factor and that convenient dinner solutions for families are gaining popularity. Ride the upswing with relevant content.
Repeat this process of identifying seasonal spikes, dips, and multi-year trends across your main target keyword cluster.
This will give you a broader data-driven perspective to understand when readers have pain points.
Then you can help them with content that is timely and relevant to their circumstances.
2. Discover Related Queries and Subtopics
Once you’ve analyzed the seasonality and overall trends around interest in your core keyword, such as “easy family dinners,” you should dive into harvesting subtopic ideas by exploring the Related Queries report.
Within Google Trends, click on the Related Queries tab, which shows the top additional terms people searched for that are relevant to your original main keyword.
Going through this list gives you a wealth of possibilities for sub-angles that you can cover related to the parent topic.
Continuing the core keyword “easy family dinners,” some of the top Related Queries are:
- easy weeknight dinners for family kid-friendly
- chicken and dumplings
- easy casseroles for dinner
- all recipes
- easy meals for large family gatherings
You can spot additional opportunities around meal planning for larger families, budget-conscious cheap meals, picky kid-approved ideas, and serving quick options like easy dinners.
The Related Queries illustrate specific pain points and situations people are searching for solutions for.
Now you can create targeted sub-topics addressing these use cases in your broader article around easy family dinner solutions.
For example, using the Related Queries insight, you could structure sections within your content like:
- Chicken and Dumplings Dinner Ideas 6-8 servings
- Easy Weeknight Dinners for Family Kid-friendly $5 a Plate
- 50 Table-Pleasing Easy Meals for Large Family Gatherings
- Easy Weeknight Dinners for Busy Families
Not only will you have future headline ideas, but you’ll also have the ingredients to make your overall content mapping more audience-centric and comprehensive.
By positioning yourself as the ultimate solution, you can holistically address the diverse concerns encompassing the overarching topic.
3. Research Geographical Differences
When optimizing your content, you should take into account geographical differences since search volume and interests vary significantly across countries.
If you’re writing content for a global audience, you should use the Google Trends Geographic feature to customize your content to certain areas.
Let’s go back to our example of “easy family dinners” for a moment. You should navigate to the Geographic view within Google Trends to analyze relative search interest for this term in various countries.
The top regions where this term is searched will be automatically populated by Google Trends.
When you look at the information, you can see that search volume in the United States is more than 2.5X higher than in Canada, which is the second-highest searching country.
Therefore, it makes sense to concentrate first on creating content for American readers who are looking for quick and easy family dinner ideas.
However, since this topic is of interest in multiple countries, you should use best practices to cover all your bases.
When you give examples of family meal recipes, you should include traditional American dishes such as burgers, pasta, and pot pie, but you should also include a variety of options such as Indian curries, Mexican fajitas, and Italian pizza.
These references to a variety of cuisines will appeal to UK readers more than just strictly American dishes.
In some instances, an extremely high relative search volume in a particular country for your target keyword could justify the publication of tailored content that is specific to that country.
For example, in the Philippines, the term “remote online jobs” has a search volume that is more than 50X higher than in either the United States or Canada.
By taking advantage of this highly focused opportunity and creating content that specifically targets “online jobs in the Philippines,” you can position yourself as a highly relevant resource for readers in that country.
This will result in increased visibility for your material for those highly specific searches and will better serve an international audience.
4. Mind The "Related Topics" Section
You can use the Related Topics section in Google Trends to spark content ideas and discover complementary articles to write.
When you enter a keyword or subject into Google Trends, an algorithmically generated list of Related Topics appears near the bottom of the page. This list shows other popular search terms and categories relevant to your original term.
These Related Topics can help you in two ways:
- Inspire fresh angles and spin-off topics to cover related to your main article focus
- Validate sub-categories and adjacent subjects that would interest your target readers
For example, if you search for the general topic of “coffee” in Google Trends, the Related Topics range widely from other specific coffee types (dalgona coffee) to coffee makers (Starbucks, Black Rifle Coffee Company) to compliments (Dunkin’ Donuts).
Seeing this comprehensive scope can spark creative ideas in your mind for other articles you could produce around “best coffee makers” or “coffee recipes”.
It can also clue you into relevant sub-sections to include in a broad coffee overview article like popular regional brands or coffee house menu items.
You can then mine Google Trends again for each of the new content title ideas from the Related Topics.
This will help you confirm that there is adequate and growing search volume to support dedicating resources to these topics.
This will validate investing effort into producing Topic Cluster content that maximizes authority and ownership around your core subject – in this case, “coffee”.
5. Analyze Trends for Content Categories
Instead of just looking at individual keywords, you should also leverage Google Trends to research higher-level content categories that represent your website’s overall niche focus areas.
For example, as a personal finance site, some of your core content verticals could include:
- Investing
- Retirement Planning
- Credit Cards
- Debt & Loans
- Banking
- Taxes
You can enter each of these terms individually into Google Trends to view search volume patterns over the past 5 years.
This will help you identify trending areas of increasing or declining interest among readers.
In the Google Trends analysis, you may spot that searches around “retirement planning” and “401k” have grown over 25% year-over-year. On the other hand, interest around “debt consolidation” loans has dropped 12%.
These insights are more than enough to give you an idea about your overall personal finance content areas that are heating up in popularity versus starting to become stale.
You can then shift your content investment and production to double down on retirement and investing related articles capturing growing reader demand.
On the contrary, you may temporarily deprioritize debt payoff articles seeing declining interest recently.
You should still market existing evergreen debt content, but pause from actively creating a ton of new content until searches pick back up.
This higher category-level Google Trends analysis will supplement your keyword-specific research.
It will provide macro-level indicators into trend directions across your content verticals.
This will guide your resource allocation across subjects and determine where you should “double down” versus “hold back” based on reader interest momentum.
6. Compare Google Trends Data Across Tools
By using Google Trends keyword data alone, you can gain valuable insights. However, to enhance accuracy, you should also compare volumes and metrics against other reliable keyword research tools.
Each tool employs slightly different data sources and methodologies, so cross-verifying them will give you better and more accurate results.
Here’s a breakdown of workflow that you can follow:
- Initiate keyword research using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Surfer SEO, and UberSuggest to compile a target list.
- Document keyword metrics such as volume, CPC, and competitiveness for each keyword.
- Input the same list into Google Trends to compare monthly searches and other relevant data.
- Calculate the percentage variance between estimates across tools.
- Determine which tool provides volumes that align most closely with Google Keyword Planner as a baseline.
For example, if you look at the keyword “coffee makers,” Google Trends indicates 22K monthly searches. On the other hand, SEMrush estimates 33K searches, while Ahrefs shows only 19K.
Historically, SEMrush and Ahrefs have aligned more closely, so you can be more confident in using their data over Google Trends for the keywords they index.
However, for niche long-tail keywords not covered by SEMrush or Ahrefs, Google Trends provides the most reliable volume guidance.
Ultimately, you should combine insights from various tools to make informed decisions about focus keywords, particularly when dealing with newer, emerging topics.
Although cross-tool verification requires more effort than relying on a single source, it ensures that you have the most accurate keyword data possible.
This prevents you from wasting time optimizing for over or under-searched terms and helps you identify keyword gaps that might be missed by individual tools.
By obtaining a comprehensive 360-degree view, you can enhance campaign performance and improve content targeting.
7. Uncover Trending Keywords In Google Trends
Google Trends gives you a great opportunity to discover fast-rising, trending keyword opportunities.
All you need to do is jump into one of its most useful sections “Trending Now”. It will show you the top breakout queries that are rapidly gaining popularity over recent hours and days.
Unlike the main keyword analysis section that displays more sustained long-term trends, this Trending report clues you into immediate viral opportunities perfect for timely, hot-topic content creation.
Regularly check the Trending Now tab to spot high-momentum keywords you can quickly capitalize on while visibility and curiosity are peaked. The list updates frequently based on shifting trends across millions of Google searches.
Around major events like the Olympics or pop culture moments like the Oscars, relevant keywords skyrocket:
- “Best dressed MET Gala” surges during the celebrity-filled event.
Country athlete names spike in searches during Olympic competitions.
Through Google Trends data, you can instantly spot rising queries like these gathering huge view volumes.
By rapidly creating content catering to the related information needs, your articles satisfy surging searcher intent.
This allows you to intercept potential rankings wins and become a go-to resource while trends are hot.
Beyond predictable events, you can also discover viral keyword opportunities around unexpected current events, tech releases, politics, and news scandals.
Jumping on these trends guarantees traffic surges and strong engagement.
Combining evergreen backlist content with riding waves from Google Trends‘ Trending Now report allows you to balance sustainable keyword growth with well-timed authority gains.
Having your finger on the pulse of rising curiosities is key for content discoverability.
8. Analyze Keyword Gap Opportunities
You can use Google Trends to find opportunities where people are searching for a competitor’s brand. You can then target those people and attract them to your own brand.
The first thing you need to do is research competitors ranking well in your core topic areas. For example, top players may include sites like Dinnerly and MyFitnessPal based on high rankings for those terms.
Next, enter each competitor brand name directly as the keyword into Google Trends:
- Dinnerly
- MyFitnessPal
This will show you how much monthly search volume exists specifically for the competitor brand names themselves.
You’ll likely see that readers are searching brand names directly dozens of thousands of times monthly.
They likely have a deeper, sustained need and intent around topics tied to those brands’ perceived expertise.
This gives you an opportunity to create content matching the underlying searcher intent for those branded terms.
However, you should optimize the content more broadly around the actual subject matter rather than your competitor’s brands.
For example, you can craft comprehensive “dinner meal planning guides” or “calorie tracking apps” content optimized for those informational topics rather than solely the brand name searches.
By creating non-branded content, you can reach a wider audience and potentially convert more readers to your website. This can help you rank higher in search results for branded keywords, even if you don’t have a branded website.
9. Unicorn Keywords 🦄
This might be a new term for you. It is something that we recommend you definitely need to try especially if you love taking risks.
Unicorn keywords are essentially those super valuable, perfectly optimized keywords that have a magical combination of:
- High search volume & growth momentum
- Reasonably low SEO difficulty
- Low competition currently
- Strong commercial intent & value per click
Combine those unicorn keywords with the Google trends and get some out-of-the-box keyword ideas.
These desired terms have the potential to generate substantial and consistent search traffic with minimal ongoing optimization efforts due to their untapped search demand.
The prime issue with these unicorn keyword terms is they are extremely hard to directly uncover through traditional keyword research.
That’s where Google Trends comes in so handy!
You can use Google Trends to identify emerging trends surrounding topics that are experiencing a sudden spike in search popularity.
These breakout terms often present unicorn opportunities before competition saturates them.
Cross-verify the rising Google Trends keywords with keyword data from your other tools.
If a new term meets the criteria of high volume, low difficulty, and high CPC, it likely qualifies as a golden unicorn keyword.
But wait, unicorn keywords are two-way swords so you need to use them very carefully. Here are both sides:
Pros of Unicorn Keywords
- Massive Scale: Can drive tens of thousands of visitors per month when ranked
- High Conversion Rates: Hot intent + less competition = better on-site experience
- Low Ongoing Optimization: Don’t need constant updating once ranking established
- First Mover’s Advantage: Opportunity to outrank lagging competitors
- Surge Traffic: Ranking gains come in spikes versus slow builds
- High Click Value: Top ads yield $5+ CPCs in some cases
Cons of Unicorn Keywords
- Volatility: If the trend passes, volumes can quickly drop hurting rankings
- Seasonality: Some unicorns are tied to events or holidays
- Attracts Competition: If too much volume, competitors may attempt to outrank
- Risk of Penalties: If growth too fast with thin content, risk manual actions
- Pressure to Update Content: Adding better resources ensures maintained rankings
- Duplicate Efforts: Creating multiple pieces of content on the same topic
As you can see there are big upsides but also risks like seasonality and attracting competitor efforts.
The key is balancing a few unicorn keywords with other more stable primary targets in a diversified portfolio.
Conclusion
Google Trends is a free tool and because of that most of us are not taking it seriously. We have listed the best methods that can help you to pick the right keywords for your project. We recommend you to test and trial our given methods and experience immense growth. Keywords act as a base and when you have the right keywords nothing can stop you from outranking your competitors. If you feel stuck with the keywords game and want some expert help! Then, get in touch with the SEO professionals at Softtrix and supercharge your business visibility with the right keywords and the right techniques.
5 replies on “How To Use Google Trends For Keyword Research Like A Pro!”
Fantastic guide! Mastering Google Trends for keyword research is crucial for any marketer. This blog provides valuable insights and tips to level up your keyword strategy. Highly recommended read! Keep up the good work!
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In this insightful blog, “How To Use Google Trends For Keyword Research Like A Pro!” you’ll uncover expert tips and strategies for leveraging Google Trends to refine your keyword research skills.
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