A free tool developed by Google, Google Trends provides users with insights on the popularity of a topic or keyword over time.
This tool is particularly helpful when you’re planning your businesses content strategy, as it provides information on when people start searching for a specific topic or term. This means that you’re able to plan your content marketing accordingly by publishing material ahead of the trend.
For example, Google Trends may show a rise in searches for ‘Christmas markets’ from September to November. Consequently, any content created in December might miss the high seasonality of the search term.
That’s not to say that you can’t write about Christmas markets all year round. Google Trends helps identify the best times to allocate your resources so that your content has the best opportunity of being seen when these seasonal searches begin.
How do you use Google Trends to find when people start searching for something?
Google Trends is an easy tool to navigate. To find data on when people start searching for a specific keyword or topic, enter your query in the search field and hit explore.
From here, you’ll return a screen full of data, including interest over time, interested by sub-region, related topics and related queries.
In this instance, we’re tracking interest over time to determine when searches begin. You can tailor the time range to analyse data from the past hour, day, week, month, year or even decade.
By using “Easter egg hunt” as an example and examining interest over the course of five years, we can see a shift in search behaviour. In 2019 and 2020, searches for Easter egg hunts began at the beginning of March. If we look at the data from 2021, 2022 and 2023, we can see that searches started much earlier, in January.
Based on these statistics, January would be the best time to schedule content relating to Easter egg hunts in your digital marketing strategy. You can personalise the data on Google Trends to display the search popularity of a certain term in different cities and countries.
If we use the term “Easter egg hunt” and modify the report to only include searches from the Isle of Man, the data reveals different search behaviour.
From the Isle of Man, 51 searches for “Easter egg hunt” were made between the 5th and 11th of November 2023. Similarly, between the 13th and 19th November 2022, 57 searches were made for the same term.
This shows that people on the Isle of Man are curious about Easter egg hunts, even in the festive season. A hoppy new year!
When it comes to planning your content strategy, you can use Google Trends to identify the peak season of your target search terms. This way, you’ll find it easier to rank and stay ahead of the trends.
Need some help developing your content strategy? Contact the friendly team at Engage Web today.
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This is a fantastic guide to using Google Trends! I’m going to try that out. Thanks for sharing this helpful resource!