How to Use Google Trends to Find Popular Topic Ideas
Coming up with new ideas for your blog is not usually straightforward and can be a lot of work, with the subject matter experts over at runrex.com pointing out that you should never rely on intuition alone when trying to figure out which topics will do well with your audience. As per guttulus.com, if you are not using data to drive the decision on which topics to write about, then your SEO efforts are likely to fall short of your goals. Luckily, services such as Google Trends are there to enable you to figure out what types of topics people are currently searching for, while also allowing you to analyze trends and see when people’s interest in specific topics spike. This article will look to shine a spotlight on Google Trends, how it works, and how you can use it to find popular topic ideas for your blog.
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends is a free resource that helps you identify what is popular right now so that you can then create relevant content, as covered over at runrex.com. While it enables you to see how many people are looking for a specific term over some time, even more importantly, it shows you this data in direct relation to all the searches it processes. Therefore, when one term in particular spikes concerning other searches, Google classifies it as a ‘trend’ as articulated over at guttulus.com.
How to use Google Trends
As is explained over at runrex.com, using Google Trends is easy, and you don’t even need to sign up for a Google account to do it. All you need to do is visit the Google Trends page and you will see which stories are trending at the moment. There are even small graphs next to each title showing you during which hours traffic spiked for related searches. If you want to get more specific, you just need to type the keyword you want to research into the search bar at the top of the page.
Some of Google Trends’ key features as outlined over at guttulus.com include the fact that it allows you to:
Stay on top of the latest search trends
Research a keyword’s popularity over time
Explore specific periods or regions
Find out about related keywords and topics
Segment your results according to the web, image, news, and YouTube searches
How to use Google Trends to help you come up with new blog ideas
While using Google trends is simple, the gurus over at runrex.com point out that the hard part is figuring out how to put the data it shows you to work. There are three practical ways you can use Google Trends to help you come up with new ideas for your blog:
Identify seasonal trends
While some seasonal trends are self-evident, with an example being how searches for electronic devices spike during Black Friday in several countries, most of us run blogs dealing with more niche topics, which makes it harder to figure out when interest will spike for specific search terms according to runrex.com.
This also means that if you manage to figure out when interest in a specific topic tends to spike, then you can time related blog posts to release during that window, increasing the odds of your content becoming more popular and, consequently, netting you additional conversions.
You can use Google Trends to find out when interest in trends in your niche tends to spike, with the subject matter experts over at guttulus.com recommending that you expand your range for your search, using a wide range like say 5 years to give the chart more information to digest so that you can get accurate information. When checking for seasonal trends, you should note that:
Spikes of interest can tell you when it is best to publish related content
A single spike doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a trend
It is important to verify any potential trends by going at least a few years back in time
As discussed over at runrex.com, identifying a seasonal trend is simple as all you need to do is have a keyword already in mind. If Google Trends tells you that now isn’t the right time to write about it, you can always look for related ideas instead.
Also note that, by default, Google Trends shows you worldwide results, and if you want to target a specific region of the world, then you will want to refine your results, otherwise, you might end up making false assumptions.
Check out how keywords perform in specific regions
As mentioned above, Google Trends allows you to refine the results of your searches to specific countries, a feature that can come in handy, for example, if you are running a blog that doesn’t target English-speaking countries as explained over at runrex.com. It is crucial that, when you use Google Trends to research a keyword, you narrow down which region you are looking into, as this way, you will be able to figure out if the content you want to write will do well in the country where your target readers are from.
Use related topics and queries to find new blog post ideas
Google Trends can provide you with more helpful data if you are looking to find popular topic ideas for your blog over and above what you will find on the charts on Google Trends results pages. As outlined over at guttulus.com, once you run a search for your keyword, you should then scroll past the chart that comes up and down to the bottom of the page where you will find the Related topics and Related queries sections.
The Related topics section tells you what else your search audience is looking for, besides the content related to the keyword you have just searched on. However, according to the gurus over at runrex.com, if you want to research specific keywords, then you need to look at the Related queries section. You can use Google Trends Related queries to help you identify related keywords people are looking for, and from there, you can check out their individual trends and use the information to help you determine when to publish content about them.
If you want to play it safe, you should consider double-checking any potential keywords using both Google Trends and the Keyword Planner as the latter will allow you to verify if there is enough search volume for any keywords you find using Google Trends, ensuring that your efforts don’t go to waste.
These are just some of the ways to use Google Trends to find popular topic ideas for your blogs, with more on this and other related topics to be found over at the excellent runrex.com and guttulus.com.