The Biggest Survey Of The Year By Serpstat: Digital Antitrends And What You Shouldn't Do In 2020
How To Use Google Trends For Keyword Research



So, what's so special about Google Trends? Can it really help you do SEO? To answer that question, it's important to understand the nature of search optimization. SEO is an extremely fast-paced environment with new methods and techniques popping up all the time. So, in this post, I want to show you how you can use Google Trends to upscale your keyword research and take your SEO to the next level.
Tracking season interests
Some keywords are having a quite steady demand. For example, keywords related to business are popular throughout the whole year. But some keywords are only getting momentum during certain seasons, such as Christmas, Halloween or Super Bowl.
In the screenshot below, you can see that Halloween-related search terms start to get more traffic starting in July and the audience's interest keeps growing up until the end of October.
This situation repeats year after year so we can talk about an actual trend here.

Serpstat analyzes Google Trends, and according to the following screenshot, the interest in the Halloween theme has already started to raise now.



General trend (growing or decreasing)
Keyword research is generally a time-consuming exercise, but finding keywords with a growing popularity trend one by one can be especially overwhelming. And we marketers don't like manual work, do we?
In Google Trends, there is a great feature that allows you to lookup a broader scope of keywords related to your niche - that is, a search by "topic". Compared to "search term", a topic search gives you a much clearer view on what the users are interested in.

What you should remember is that evergreen content gives you the highest chances to get to the top of search results. Google Trends allow you to uncover those evergreen topics — the audience's interest in them is steady over the time or even shows and increasing trend.
Coming up with new content ideas that have the highest chances to go viral


Additionally, you may check out more advanced keyword research tactics, such as TF-IDF analysis recommended by Aleh Barysevich:
Spotting hot topics (especially good for running PR campaigns)
Using these topics in your PR campaigns is great as it allows you to pitch your content to journalists and media that wouldn't otherwise be as interested to write about your industry in general.
The secret is to find the hottest topic of the day and the right angle to talk about your business within that topic.
You can find the most popular topics of the 2019 in Google Trends Year In Search section.

Because content marketing is often about brand building (not just clicks or links), Google Trends can help show the long-term impact of inbound efforts, whether those are more general or to popularize a specific term. Companies that have coined "brand-owned terms" are an interesting example. As we found, the rise of companies like HubSpot and Drift correlates closely with the growth of interest in terms they coined, like "inbound marketing" and "conversational marketing.
A related use-case: You can look back historically to find out when a term became popular and reverse engineer the strategy that helped it take off. For "growth hacking," for example, the catalyst was a follow-up blog post, not the initial publication of the article that coined the term.
Let me explain: take for example MailChimp, the total searches for Mailchimp are bigger than the all non-branded keywords combined. This tells a lot about how big is this brand and how well-positioned is in the mind of consumers when searching for email marketing tools. They don't even search "email marketing tool", they search for Mailchimp as their first choice.
1) it's cheap
2) it's always on position 1, no matter how many algorithms Google releases
3) it's always above the competitors
If you add volumes, then it's the perfect keyword to rank for.
For example, explainer videos are explosively rising in popularity nowadays. Instead of "explainer video", go for longer keywords such as "best-animated explainer video". The long-tail keyword might not have the highest chances to go viral, but it has a steady growth.
Coming up with new content ideas that have the highest chances to go viral
We send out a short questionnaire to our subscribers to figure out if they would like to learn more about the topic. If yes, we follow up with another open-ended question to understand what aspects they're most interested in. This ensures we satisfy user intent and it gives us a way to make our content a little different from everything else. Of course, we don't do it for every piece but if the term is valuable to us then it's worth going the extra mile to get it right.
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