12 Ways to Use Google Trends for SEO Ep. 531

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners of EWR Digital. And my name is Matt Bertram. I'm the lead strategist at EWR Digital. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of this podcast. This is podcast number 531. We were having a little vitchiness happening right before we got on. And whose end was that on, Chris? It was possibly on my end. I mean, the numbers were smaller on my end, so it was possible. I still don't know exactly how you're glitchy on my end, if I've got kind of equivalent download. It's like a double-sided coin, Chris. It's always your fault. Yeah, it's a heads I win, tails you lose. All right. Let's jump right in here. We are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas. Matt and I, what are we, like, we're your SEO gurus. We're your enterprise SEO guys. We do have a review. Let me jump into that. This review is from AJ, AJ, and it says, and it's up on Trustpilot. It says, wow, just wow, thank you. Matt answered what I thought was going to be a typical sales call. He took the time to look at my website, be supportive, and give me practical tips based on my budget. I'm a small business medical in Canada, and he was super helpful. Man, well done. Like, that's all you. It is a little older, so I don't know if that sounds familiar to you or if you knew that was floating out there, I actually didn't know. We need to do a better job of, you know, accumulating, tracking everything. There's really a lot going on right now, so I'm, you know, I'm just trying to hold on. Well, if out there you listen to our podcast and you get some value from this podcast, do please make sure you go review us. It's really easy to do. Just go to ewrdigital.com forward slash review. A little screen will pop up. You can leave us a review there. Hopefully, you'll

make that review five stars. It's harder to syncopate that. Yeah. Well, Chris, on a positive note, we have quite almost finished the podcast studio. Oh, yes. So we've converted our office since a lot of us are just staying remote, right? So people can go back into office and work. I know, you know, COVID's up and down, but basically we've got a finished office because we had to kind of move a little bit. So that kind of worked out, but we still, and then we've converted that office and repainting new furniture, everything, everything, everything. And we have this baller podcast studio that we're going to start doing a podcast out of and videography and photography in a green room. It's going to be awesome. So I think if people are interested and they're in the Houston area, or if they just want to fly in, that would be cool. This space might be available to you. Just reach out to us and we'll, we're doing a lot of, we're doing a lot of custom content as far as like graphics, video commercials, you know, infographics, whatever. Right. So just like create, we're doing a lot of creative work. And so we needed a place to do a lot of that kind of stuff. And I think it'll be fun to get back together. And let me turn my volume down if you're getting feedback. No, no feedback. You're good. I'm hearing it though. On my end. Well, ignore it. Cause it's not coming through on my end. It's still your fault. As I went, tails you loose. By the way, if you are checking us out on YouTube, do make sure that you subscribe, follow, and click that notification bell. Are you, you ready to jump into this article? Yeah, let's get in there. All right. How to use Google trends for SEO, right? And, uh, we're, there's 12 ways that you can use Google trends for SEO. We're going to cover six in this particular podcast. And, and there is, I'm going to throw up

a massive disclaimer, um, that Google trends has information that's interesting and potentially unrelated to the work that you are currently doing. And so they're far potentially distracting. So as I was kind of preparing for this podcast, I was on Google trends, confirming all the stuff that they've done. Uh, I found an article that I knew would be interesting to my brother. I sent it to him, found an article for my wife. So the thing that's most hilarious for everybody that's watching or listening is you said, Hey, what article are we going to do? And I said, go use Google trends. And then literally you go find an article about using Google trends. Yes. Yeah. Ironically. Like I was like, find something on Google trends, but you found a article about Google is perfect and awesome at all the same time, but very literal. Uh, and also I did find lots of stuff on Google trends that was useful and, and I passed it on to family. So, uh, that is the warning. This has the potential of being distracted, maybe put on your undistractable, uh, glasses before you head into Google trends. Uh, you can of course find that at trend.google.com. Actually, I think it's trends.google.com and, uh, and let's jump into this. In this article, you're going to learn everything you need to know. By the way, we did find this on search engine journal, everything you need to know about Google trends, plus 12 ways to use Google trends for SEO. Who's the author? You might. Oh, look, it's Matt. He's a, he's in another world. No, I put on my, you said put on my glasses. Oh yeah. My undistractable glasses so that you can no longer be distracted. I'm like in another world. What is Google trends? Google trends is a free tool that provides data and graphs on the popularity of specific search terms used on Google and YouTube. Uh, it was originally introduced in 2006. Latest version came out in 2018. Uh, and you can use Google trends to

find out what's recently trending surprise, uh, identify trending topics or subtopics within an industry or overarching theme, discover geographic search trends local to your area. And I love this example. For example, things that you could learn from Google trends, the first U S presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump started at 9 PM Eastern on September 29th. Coincidentally, uh, in the United States, the seven day Google trend for moving to Canada peaked at 10 PM that same day. Yeah. So, so, so this is an article by Chuck price. So we want to give a shout out to Chuck price. Yeah. But if Chuck price, well done. Um, and we're going to cover you two times cause we're going to do your first six points on this one. All right. So here are the, well, six tips on this one. Uh, number one, keyword research. You can conduct free keyword research on Google trends by entering a specific search term and the search box on the homepage. By default, this runs a search for Google's most popular keywords, but you can also change it to scour YouTube search data instead, right? A lot of value in YouTube. Um, looking at the past two or three years of data versus only the most recent year of data can help you distinguish between fads and true 10 trends. Uh, you want to avoid keywords that are becoming less popular over time and focus on things that are coming more popular over time. And this allows you to kind of focus on those. No, I think, uh, SEO news, SEO is something we could talk about later. Um, I also think, you know, keyword research, man, I'll just tell you, there's so many tribal views on like how to do certain things. Uh, that's really quite interesting. So we were having a debate. We brought on some new people. There's a lot of different, uh, uh, viewpoints on how to do, uh, keyword research and what it's meant for. And yeah, I think that that's a whole nother

podcast as well. Uh, but I think that really keyword research and what you're going after, whether it's long tail key phrases, where's the broad terms, like what the intent is, is incredibly important when you're using keyword research and knowing that like whatever, 75% of all searches are new to Google, there's really some opportunities to, uh, really zero in and pinpoint, um, somebody at the right decision point to show them the right piece of information on the customer journey. And I think keyword research absolutely helps you do that. So keyword research, number one, for sure. Yeah. And, and it's, uh, it's something that you do have to do have like a broad thematic, uh, overview on and also get granular, right? Because just the addition of one word, you know, from buy to sell right in a search phrase changes your interest in that customer entirely. Um, I mean, I know that's a big switch, but it's subtle things that can cause, uh, really good keywords to, you know, no longer any value. The intent is so incredibly important and really trying to get into the head of the prospect or customer or whatever, whoever you're targeting to understand what are they looking for? What are they trying to solve for? And, uh, you're trying to be that solution. And so there's so much strategy and thought that goes into the planning piece of it that, uh, makes everything else work. And so, um, yeah, intent is incredibly important. And I think I've seen a lot of people just focus on certain keywords and volume and kind of spin their wheels a little bit in, in that area. And so, um, really understanding what you're trying to do and what that target is and what the goal of, uh, either the pages, uh, and the target keywords are, and then how that fits together, uh, upper funnel, lower funnel, um, is what's going to get you to the promise land. So customers and leads. All right. Number two, finding related keywords. What makes Google trends unique

is its ability to recommend it related keywords that are currently growing in popularity. Uh, trends returns a list of keywords. It considers as closely related to your search. Google trends shows keywords in order of popularity and will even provide you the exact percentage search volume increase for each one of the keywords. Sometimes it will replace that percentage search increase with the word breakout. That sounds exciting because it is. That means that the keyword has increased by over 5,000% breakout 5,000%. These are trends that, that, uh, the author has found to be some of the most important to hop on. Now you gotta be careful. The downside is building a strategy on breakout keywords. They can turn into fads. If they're fads instead of actual trends, then all the content that you wrote for them may just eventually go stale. Hmm. Yeah, no, it's kind of, you know, you're, you're chasing, you're chasing breakouts. Um, and I think understanding how to define a trend versus, um, something that, I mean, with the 24 hour news cycle, it's incredibly, um, you know, difficult to, to, to understand. Yeah. To, to understand. And so you got to look at those kind of deeper trends. You know, that's why we've been really looking at the web three space. Right. And so, um, I believe that's a underlying trend, kind of like the internet is an underlying trend. So you're saying that, that, uh, crypto is not a breakout is an actual trend or it's both a breakout and a trend at times. It's certainly a breakout, but I believe it's a trend. And for those that believe it's a fad, uh, let's talk in a couple of years and you're going to wish you invested. All right. Number three, discovery related topics. The last one was keywords. This is topic. So when you're looking on the result page for trends left of the related queries, there's another table called related topics. Uh, this table provides you with insight into broader topics that people are searching for. These recommendations can

help you find new and trending ideas for future content. So again, looking at, Hey, wow, I never thought that this particular topic was related to my subject, but if I dig into it and look at the keywords associated with that topic, now I can have some understanding of keywords that I might want to target. Yeah. I think the thing to remember here is Google is Google is trying to organize all information in the most, uh, compact and efficient way possible. And, uh, it's looking for associations, right? And this is another example of an algorithm that's connecting together similar keywords and related topics and seeing how they all fit together based on, well, uh, your analytics of what you might like to look at and click. And certainly they did a good job with you, Chris. Uh, and so, um, that that's the power of, um, machine learning right there. So, all right. I do have somebody literally blowing leaves at five 30, almost in the dark outside my window. I don't know if you can hear that or you're just a little bit, a little bit. It's not too bad. It's good to have a directional mic. That's actually good. And they've moved past now. Uh, so next is start big and whittle down, enter a big time keyword for your topic, something that you really wish you had position one for and kind of know you're never going to get, and then click the button. Now from here, Google trends invites you to drill down in a number of ways worldwide. You can actually drill down into regional locations where this trend, where that topic and or keyword is, is trending. Use multiple to, so you can select times, use multiple time selections to get an idea of law, again, long-term trends versus short-term trends. And that could be trends up or down, right? If it's a long-term trend up, Hey, that's something you want to write some content on. If it's a long trend down, trend down, then you want to think about,

okay, well, how much longer is this going to last? Is this something that maybe is going to be a little asymptotic and continue to have good volume and it is worth continuing to create content for, or maybe it's just going to fade off into oblivion. Uh, and you want to stop spending time on it. You can also, yeah, go ahead. No, no. I was just going to quiz you really quickly. Okay. What, what did internet marketing, digital marketing used to be called that's trending down? Uh, internet marketing, digital marketing. What was it prior before that? It may have M, uh, M not just market, uh, MM, MM. Oh, modern marketing, modern. Really? Yeah. Modern marketing. That's what people used to call it. Modern marketing. And that would, I would like some of, some of that, that modern marketing, please. Yeah. Are you sure you weren't just searching Texas? I would like some of that modern marketing, please. All right. Next filter by categories is essential. So again, you can boil down the categories. You can look at those categories, look at the actual keywords that are associated with those categories, find out if those are important to you. And then finally a web search type. So you can look at web images, news, Google shopping, and YouTube. So that's all very important. Well, YouTube might be the most important of those. Well, they are really making lots of noise right outside my window. All right. Next, this is number five, context, context, context. It sounds kind of like location, location, location from real estate. Um, note the results of today aren't compared to the overall popularity of all trends, but rather the previous heights of the keywords you entered. So you entered a phrase like modern marketing, and you're going to see this chart, which is zero to a hundred. And it's going to show you based on all time, where is it in terms of percentage of the highest point of interest? And that'll give you an idea that that's what that's looking at.

So be careful. Don't think that that's actually searches. Don't think it's actually clicks. It's actually a percentage of the maximum traffic. We are getting a little feedback now. Um, as an example, take the phrase Caribbean cruise pre COVID-19, uh, you can imagine what it was doing and that it had a trend and that trend was in the upward direction. You can also imagine that it plummeted off of the face of the search, uh, right around COVID-19 lockdown, uh, and has continued to stay very low, uh, uh, on, on, on an ongoing basis. Let me do a share screen for those that are watching. Cause this is pretty awesome. Pretty dramatic, right? Yeah. Yeah. There we go. It peaked right before. I wonder what that's about. That's, that's weird, right? Oh no, that's not. That's weird. Why did it peak up right before it locked down? People trying to get out of Dodge. Yeah. Maybe people are like one last trip to, to, to the Caribbean before we get locked down. All right. One takeaway from here is never ignore context, right? That's why this header is called context, context, context, context. Try to get rid of your own blind spots. Other ways of adding context include using the compare tool to add new keywords. So compare it to different keywords. It's a nice feature of, uh, of Google trends filter by country or category. Uh, and then also look at web searches versus YouTube searches versus whatever searches as I dance around the screen. Um, number six, get more advanced with specific search options. Using related queries and other specific search options can help you find new keyword ideas and even steal business from your competitors. That just sounds good to say, right? Like steal business from your competitors. Um, you'll notice that there are five options under this. Uh, really he only clicks, only talks about one when you're looking at the result and you're looking at related topics. There's a dropdown called rising by clicking rising. You can also have the option to

view top overall keywords. Uh, dig into this data is, is the, is the point that he's making is the point that Chuck is making. Don't be afraid to dig down into the cat queries. Uh, there's a good chance that you can hop on a new trend before it becomes a breakout trend. And that's the first six items. Do you have something to add there? You know, it's kind of like, uh, I guess by low, sell high, sort of like the breakout, like really can get in front of the trend. You can capitalize on it when it happens. Um, I mean, if you look at maybe podcasts like Joe Rogan, he certainly rides the trends and he's been very successful at it. There's certainly a lot of other components and he's very good with guests and all those sorts of things, but he certainly, uh, you know, brings people on that are part of the national conversation. And I looked at a data point showing that I think he had more share a voice than all the other news networks combined or equal to or something like that. Like it's, it's massive. Right. And I think that he's talking, he's not talking from talking points. He's talking about what people are interested in. And then he's bringing people on to further, like flush out the subject, whatever's going on. And so I think that's a really, uh, successful, um, strategy that I think a lot of people should take note from, and that's what we're talking about. The power of Google trends and the data that they share is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And it's so awesome that there's six more points that we're going to cover in the next podcast. So, uh, Patif to you, Chuck price, uh, search engine journal, great article on how to use Google trends for SEO. And we'll continue that discussion on the next podcast. As we wrap up, I'm just going to ask you to do a couple of things, right? One of them is share this podcast with people

you think will find it interesting, whether they're marketers or business owners or, um, CMOs, uh, chief marketing officers, uh, let them hear this podcast and know, uh, about marketing in a nice, easy to consume format. I haven't asked. Yeah. Oh yeah. Ask, ask away. I haven't asked. So we've launched a new hosting brand called cohosta and we've been really talking to a number of agencies and freelancers to offer a competitive offering to what's out there. I think really security's been a big issue and proving the speed of sites, the CRO, the SEO hosting. Um, and I think the most important thing and feedback we're getting, which we certainly have in spades or even diamonds or like a full out flush, maybe, I don't know if that is even a term, but, um, talking to somebody that knows what they're talking about on the other end. Right. And this has been something that's been a ongoing issue for us. Um, and a lot of times clients will call in and, you know, we do their marketing. Well, fix my website. Like, well, we're not, you're not hosted with us. Right. And so contact the hosting company or we do it for them. And it's certainly like an issue or pain point for a lot of people. And we have tried to make that as easy as possible. It's something we've internally done and we've spun out. And so I would just say, uh, if you've had issues with hosting, you want to talk to somebody that knows what they're doing. You want somebody that's going to optimize for CRO for SEO. Um, you know, if you're concerned about security, I would say a lot of people have e-com sites. Okay. There's a lot of people that are running e-com sites. And if you're not on like a Shopify where you're doing your own hosting or you're hosting somewhere, you're responsible from a security standpoint. And we've seen two websites that have come to us recently that they were hosted somewhere else, but they weren't being maintained

had credit card skimmers on the sites, on the back end of the site, on the back end of the site. So your customer's data, uh, could be being sold on a market and you could be liable, uh, for that. So, and how much would that cost? Right. Like if, if you're, it'll destroy your business. Yeah. I mean, it'll just, it'll destroy your business. It'll destroy your trust. Um, that's something you probably want to outsource. That's something that you probably want to put in your terms of use, right. Um, you know, use it, your own risk, I guess, or whatever. But I can tell you, there's some issues out there that we are trying to solve for. And we have some of the best experts, people out of Google, people out of GoDaddy in the security field, uh, addressing some of these issues because, well, uh, we want to offer the best service possible. We want to spend that on offer to you. So if this is resonating with you, we can set up a free 15 minute call, uh, to have you discuss what your issues are to see if we can help. We are doing some parody pricing in certain areas, uh, free migrations. Um, we are ramping this up, but we are wanting to become a alternative to what's currently out there. And we know that there are. So, uh, just wanted to put that out there. That's something of interest. You can contact us directly at EWR digital and we can hook you up with the right people, but cohosted.com. It is startup, uh, opportunity. I think we have, what is it? 350, 400 clients somewhere in that range right now. And, um, we're growing. So I just want to put that out there for people because that was certainly a pain point. And as a digital marketer, you can't always do everything. And so to be able to have a good source for some of those things for a webmaster is something that I just wanted to put out there for

people. So, yeah, no, I think, uh, I think that's a good ask. Go check. And, and you can also, I think it was about four, maybe five podcasts ago, uh, that we interviewed really the chief CTO of that company, uh, William. And it's a, you know, go back to that podcast and, and find out. He does a lot of question answer, right? It was really just a free flow conversation. We're probably going to do another one, uh, that, that has a little bit more structure, but it was just really answering questions that, that people had and, uh, trying to, uh, share and solve problems and add value. So, yep. Excellent. Thank you again. Please leave us a review, uh, EWR digital.com forward slash review. And, uh, and we're going to wrap it up with there until the next podcast. My name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.