Google Trends for SEO
DANIEL WAISBERG: Hi,
I'm Daniel Waisberg, search advocate at Google. HADAS JACOBI: And I'm Hadas
Jacobi, Google Trends engineer. And welcome to another Google
Trends tutorials episode. DANIEL WAISBERG: In
this video, we'll talk about how to use Google
Trends to help your site be successful in Google search. We'll discuss SEO
tips that can help you produce high-quality content
inspired by search interest. HADAS JACOBI: For
example, we'll go over techniques like keyword
research, content optimization, and content planning. If you missed our
previous episodes and need to refresh your
knowledge of Google Trends, make sure you watch them, too. [MUSIC PLAYING] DANIEL WAISBERG: Search
engine optimization, or SEO, focuses on two main areas– helping search engines
understand your content, and also helping users find your
site by improving your presence in search results. I would hate to be the
first one to tell you, but there are no special secrets
that will rank your site first on Google. [GASP] However, there are
several best practices that can make it easier
for search engines, not just Google, to crawl,
index, and understand your content.
We have listed the most
important SEO techniques you should follow in the
SEO starter guide linked in the description, so
make sure to check it out. SEO techniques involve
a lot of areas, including technical
or policy requirements and content optimization. In this video, we won't
discuss technical or policy requirements. For those, you might be better
off using Search Console. You can check out my
Search Console training series, also linked
in the description, to learn more about it. HADAS JACOBI: We can summarize
how Google Trends can help SEOs into four main areas– staying up-to-date with the
rising topics and terms, performing keyword research,
creating a content calendar. And to know the
fourth, you'll have to watch the video till the end. Let's go into each
of them in detail. One of the important
aspects of SEO is to be continuously
on top of rising trends, knowing when a new topic
or search term is becoming popular in your industry.
For example, if you do
SEO for a fashion company, you might want to know when new
brands are starting to rise. If you cover sports
for a news company, you might want to know
when important athletes are in the media. Or if you sell
computers, you might want to know which models
are getting more popular. If you know a search
term is rising or likely to rise
in the future, you can get ready with high-quality
content for search users. But you need to be alert,
ready to grab the opportunity as it comes, just like that. Google Trends offers you
multiple ways to monitor trends. You have the Trending Now
page especially for you to monitor what's been
trending recently. There's another video in this
series about the Trending Now section, so if you
haven't watched it yet, you definitely should. In that page, you'll
find different ways to export the data. You can export the table you see
to Google Sheets, to a CSV file, or just copy it
to your clipboard.
The last option is an RSS feed. You can subscribe to
it using a feed reader. And lastly, you can always
navigate to the Explore page and check what are the rising
or top terms and topics for different locations, date
ranges, categories, and Google properties. To do that, click Explore
at the top navigation, which will take you to the page
without triggering a search term. This means that
you'll see the trends based on the filters you chose. DANIEL WAISBERG:
Google Trends can also be extremely valuable when
performing keyword research. This is the practice of
identifying the words and phrases your audience
uses to search for information you offer. You can use Google Trends to
identify terms and topics that are relevant to
your target audience and identify which of them has
a high or fast-growing search volume. Let's say you have
a cheese website, and you'd like to
know what people are searching related to it.
The first thing you can do is
to search for the topic cheese and check the trends
for the past five years. It seems pretty stable. If you scroll down,
you'll find two cards– one for related topics and
one for related queries. Choose Top in the dropdown
to get ideas on which topics and queries already
generate a lot of interest, and choose Rising to get a sense
of what has been getting more attention lately. Don't forget to look further
through the pagination if available. You'll notice that there may
be queries in other languages. You can use that to
decide whether you want to translate your
content or keep it only in your main language. We discussed how to analyze
different languages in our video on advanced tips,
so check it out if you're interested in
learning more about it. You can also compare
different types of cheeses to identify content
gaps on your site. Example– let's compare gruyere,
brie, Parmesan, ricotta, and cottage. If you see this
data and you realize you don't have a ricotta
section on your site, you might be missing
out on traffic.
When you scroll down
this page, you'll find data for each of the
selected cheese types. You'll see which
country searches for which cheese,
and also related queries for each of them. Lastly, you can use the
Related Search Terms card to find close variants
to your main keywords. You can do that by looking
at the search terms you're focusing on and checking
related terms that could also be relevant to your audience. HADAS JACOBI: Hopefully,
we've given you some ideas on where to start
before creating content. Let's look now at how
to prioritize them. You can't write about
everything at once. To structure these ideas, pick
the trending topics and queries you found interesting, and
create a content calendar.
To help you prioritize the
topics you'll focus on, try to find seasonal
trends in the data. For example, if you
look at search interest for the past five years for
gruyere and brie cheese, you'll notice that they
have a very clear pattern. They both peak around
the end-of-year holidays. With that information,
you can plan ahead and have high-quality content
available on your site a little before that
time so that, when people search for those terms,
your content will be ready for them. One thing to keep in mind is
the location of your audience.
When setting your
priorities, you should make sure you're
optimizing for the right people. For example, if your audience
is in the United States, maybe you should create
content about both gruyere and brie for
Thanksgiving, and also towards the end of the year. But if your audience is
in the United Kingdom, you might want to
focus only on brie and mostly publish with the
end-of-year holidays in mind, and maybe throw in some
stilton while you're at it.
DANIEL WAISBERG: Since
you watched so patiently till the end,
here's a bonus tip. Google Trends can
be a great source when planning your video
strategy on YouTube. Everything mentioned
in this episode is also relevant for
YouTube searches. Let's say you're trying to get
more visibility on YouTube, and you're working on
improving your channel SEO. There are a lot of
things you should do when it comes to
your video content, but you can start by
focusing on your video titles and descriptions. Suppose you're considering
two different areas to create videos for– cheese recipes and
cheese sandwiches. Search for both terms
on Google Trends, and you'll find something
similar to this, depending on the time frame you look at.
Here, we're looking
at web search results, and you can see that searchers
are more interested in recipes than in sandwiches. However, when you change from
web search to YouTube search, you can see that the
trends are the opposite. People are more interested in
cheese sandwiches on YouTube. Try applying this kind
of analysis and others we discussed previously when
defining your YouTube video strategy. It's important to understand
your audience before you start investing in video creation. Google Trends can help you
avoid smelly content strategies. It will show you what's hot
and what's getting moldy so your ideas stay fresh. HADAS JACOBI: I
hope the suggestions we discussed in this video
will help you succeed on search and create more
relevant content. Google Trends can be
very helpful for SEOs to stay up-to-date with
rising topics and terms, to perform keyword research,
to create a content calendar, and to plan video
strategy on YouTube.
DANIEL WAISBERG: Don't forget to
subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube channel to be
the first to watch our upcoming videos. Stay tuned. [MUSIC PLAYING].
