How To Use Google Trends For Keyword Research

Keyword research is a crucial part of your SEO success also because of how search engines, including Google, work. Users search things online via search terms, or keywords. Many recent studies, including the one delivered by Rand Fishkin, indicate that keywords are one of the top-3 reasons why a certain page ranks better in search than the other.

Lastly, it's important to mention that keyword research is essential if you want to get relevant traffic to your website. Not all keywords are similar in terms of search demand and competition. Some of them have an insane number of searches and nearly zero competition. For instance, here's a search phrase "how to cook broccoli" that has over 20k searches per month based on the Serpstat data only in the US. And it's competition is as low as it gets (it doesn't get any lower than 1 on a scale of 1 to 100):

This peculiar example was pointed out by Lukasz Zelezny at the recent Digital Olympus conference.

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.

The first group of keywords that can be revealed with the help of Google Trends are seasonal search terms.

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.

What does this mean to you as a marketer? Get ready for your next seasonal campaign ahead of time. For instance, if you're planning to sell Halloween-related goods, start preparing your content marketing campaign well in August so that it is up and running in September.

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

But as they say, there is what everybody does and there is a smart way to do things. Seasonal content can become evergreen if you simply update it with new offers. Moreover, your previous campaigns should give you an idea of which products sell best. Put them to the top of your page and get rid of the ones that didn't sell well before.

Here's proof. A minute-long checkup of the wholesalehalloweencostumes.com, a website on the third position for halloween costumes, shows that their positions are not as strong as one could think. The data shows that they have 451 referring domains, however only 100 of them have sufficient domain rating (above 40). This means, they can easily be outranked with a few months of dedicated link building efforts. This is how long is takes to build 100 links in a pretty slow mode.

Creating a successful content strategy requires not only the understanding of how exactly your users search for things or answering their burning questions. It demands focusing on keywords that have a positive trend. That means, the notion and its corresponding keyword is not decreasing in popularity year over year.

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.

On a screenshot below I compared the trends for two topics: "link building" and "digital PR". Even though many agencies do digital PR and very few focus specifically on link building (speaking of which, shoutout to Alex from Digital Olympus who's doing an amazing job when it comes to link building!), the numbers tell a different story:

As you can see, not only the users' interest for link building is way bigger than for digital PR, but it also keeps growing over time.

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.

Before looking for hacks and non-standard solutions, you should always run a traditional keyword research. It allows you to uncover how exactly your users are searching for your products and services. Keyword research tools come in handy here: for example, with the help of Serpstat, you can get a list of keywords related to practically any search topic. Additionally, you will see their search volume and competition level to find the most effective ones.

However, only in Google Trends you can see what keywords are not only popular at the moment but also have a steady growing popularity trend.

Coming up with content ideas requires time, so book some time in your calendar to do it. Don't dismiss the "natural" keyword research: brainstorming with your team or sing mind maps can bring in some great results. Also, there are many tools that allow you to look not only for specific search terms, but also topics and whole clusters of topics — for example, Answer The Public.

Additionally, you may check out more advanced keyword research tactics, such as TF-IDF analysis recommended by Aleh Barysevich:

For more ideas for your future content, dive into this fab post.

Google Trends is the perfect tool to use if you want to find the most resonating topics in the society.

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.

Here, you can get enough data for a small research. For example, based on the data from this section, you can make an infographic showing how the public interest to a certain topic is growing over the time, how long a certain event stayed in the new agenda, what media got the most traffic, who is trying to monetize it (and how) and so on.

Keyword research is a substantial part of any SEO's duties. Online search is a living and breathing thing and no optimization methods stay up-to-date forever. Using Google Trends for SEO helps you stay on top of things as it allows you to see the direction in which the public's interests are developing. And knowing this, you can serve your users not only with the results that they want to see today, but also with what they will want to see tomorrow.