12 Ways to Use Google Trends for SEO Part 2 Ep. 533

Huh? Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners here at EWR Digital. And my name is Matt Bertram. I'm the lead strategist here at EWR Digital with a little technical difficulties right now. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is actually podcast number 533. We're doing something a little different today, mostly because we had, we'll call it technical difficulties with our own brains, maybe, because we did like part one, two episodes ago, and then forgot we needed to do part two, and then found and covered, well, I think it was your article, one of your articles. And then now we're getting back to part two. And this is part two of Google, what is it, 12 ways to use Google Trends for SEO. So that's just, we've never had Well, we had an intermission. We had an intermission. Yeah. And it was a good intermission because it was intermissed by an article by you. So make sure you go check out that article. It was, what was it? Enterprise SEO and WordPress, like good stuff there. Yeah. The next one's, I'm doing some technical stuff now for SEJ. So this other one that's coming out here is going to be, yeah. So anyways, all right, let's go. Cool. Well, first we do have a review and the review is from Maddie. So Patif to Maddie, great podcast. This podcast is an incredible resource for anyone looking to level up their online business and grow their brand. Have you had a conversation with her? I know level up was something you were talking about. Chris and Matt are great hosts and provide valuable information and advice in every episode. This is from Maddie at podcasting you. That's Y-O-U. So Patif to Maddie, thank you for that. We've got to do a quick podcast today. So I'm first going to talk about our sponsor ever so briefly. We are sponsored by Kohosta. Kohosta is a company really Matt spun out of

the company that I had built. And then he and I are continuing to build together. And he decided to spin off a hosting company. And I actually had the hosting company built into the company from the beginning because I recognized very early on that hosting was something that we needed to have control of. We would continually end up in situations where our customers would have their hosting company saying that there was a problem, that the problem was the website. And we actually knew what we were doing. We're like, no, it's a problem with the hosting company. And in order to just make sure we never had that, uh, he said, she said situation, uh, really the hosting company and, and the digital marketing agency, the one responsible for the website are, are one in the same. And then Matt took that and really took it to the next level. Um, cause realize that so many people don't actually have a webmaster. And if you're just going to get through on a day to day basis, you really do need a webmaster. Your website should always be changing even at some level. So even if you're not going to hire EWR digital to take care of your SEO and your PPC campaigns and website redesign or whatever it is that you want, but you actually do need to be making changes to your website, uh, best to hand that off to an expert. And that is available over at cohost. I don't know if you want to say anything else about cohost, Matt, uh, cohost.com. I pulled it up here for the people watching on YouTube and Facebook, but what I wanted to say about cohost was that, um, webmasters, incredibly important securities, incredibly important speeds, incredibly important. And if you're a freelancer or another agency out there, you probably dealt with a lot of, um, headaches, uh, with other hosting companies and being able to get people that really know what they're talking about, working on your account. Um, and really what we did is

as our team has grown, uh, it made a lot of sense to spin it out and keep it separate when requests are coming in for webmaster related stuff versus marketing related stuff. And as we did that, we decided to build a front end to let other freelancers or smaller agencies, uh, or larger agencies, whatever, uh, have a hosting solution that is at their fingertips that they can go to that they know experts are working with. Um, because a lot of the solutions out there just are not a good fit. Um, we are building a page that's specific to, um, like advanced users, right? So this is really designed for like SMB businesses right now. Uh, while we have a lot of capabilities for other freelancers and agencies, again, it's just an alternative out there. Uh, and it's a way for you to access, uh, our technical team and have them be able to, um, do some heavy lifting on speed settings, uh, with your website as well as host it. And, uh, I think it's really a great solution well needed in the marketplace. So if that's something that you've dealt with, I would encourage you to check it out. So, and I can share one feature that's pretty neat. I've been on the receiving end for one of my businesses, um, is a notification that a particular, so even though, uh, for that particular website, EWR wasn't doing anything, co-hosts have sent me a noticing, Hey, one of your, uh, plugins, your WordPress, WordPress plugins is, uh, not only is it out of date, but it's dangerous. You need to go update it immediately. Um, that is great news because you don't always log into your WordPress interface. And certainly there was a message there to kind of confirm that, but to be notified proactively that I needed to take care of a plugin was, is just phenomenal. Yeah. And from a, from a webmaster standpoint, we do have an add-on service that if you don't have a dedicated webmaster, um, we offer that

as a solution on top of the hosting. Uh, so Chris, it sounds like, uh, you needed to upgrade. Uh, so we would just take care of that for you. Maybe. All right. Well, let's jump into this article. We're going to, this, I think we've got a short kind of short time timeframe for this. Uh, again, this is 12 ways to use Google trends for SEO. Go back and listen to podcast number five 31. Uh, if you want to kind of follow this, I'm going to read the first six, uh, here real quickly. Uh, again, this is inside of Google trends. Uh, article was written by Chuck price, uh, patiff to Chuck. Uh, and here we go. Number one was keyword research. So using Google trends for keyword research. Number two, finding related keywords. Number three, discover related topics. Number four, start big and whittle down. Uh, and that would be like a big phrase and then start cutting down into category and search types to make very specific decisions about the keywords you're going to go after. Number five was context, context, context, certainly as important as location in real estate. And then number six was use specific search options. Again, go back and listen to podcast 531, uh, to catch up to that. So now number seven is target by location. The most cursory use of Google trends will focus exclusively on keywords for the best results. You'll also need to incorporate location into the mix. Location filtering allows you to hone in on the geographic areas with the highest demand for your products or services. Just as an example, and this is continuing the example from the previous podcast and, and the previous points in the article, uh, Caribbean cruise, right? People who are already in Florida, potentially Floridians or just vacationers are the most interested in Caribbean cruises. That's not going to be a surprise, but if you click on Florida, you'll find that the Orlando Daytona beach, Melbourne Metro area region is, has the highest search form, the search volume, uh,

and an upward trend. So that can help you figure out exactly who do you want to be speaking to when you're going after a phrase like Caribbean cruise. Number eight. I don't know if you have anything to add to that, Matt. Are we good? Location is incredibly important. It's becoming more and more important on Google. Uh, that could be a whole podcast in itself, but, um, yeah. Locations impact on SEO. There's like too much to say specifically like how important location is, but yes. All right. Number eight is trend predictions. Here's the reality. In order to hop on the latest trends before no one else does, you need to keep a finger on the pulse of seasonal and local trends at all times. The practice of newsjacking is a sure way to capitalize on current hot stories. Newsjacking. You want to define newsjacking, Matt? Uh, I mean, there's, there's a lot of things like related to it. Um, but basically putting tags in, uh, what you're doing to catch like ongoing trends to try to get picked up in the news cycle. Um, there's a lot of different ways to do it. I know people that like, I know conferences is coming back. People are Twitter jacking handles as well, like at conferences, uh, to get their stuff to, to show up. Um, but it's a, it's a way to, um, get, get visibility based upon, uh, current, current news trends. And you gotta be really, uh, tactical, um, and, and flexible when you're doing that sort of thing. But how news cycles work is it works two ways. One, either a big, um, site publishes something and then smaller sites pick it up, or it could go to the other way. Smaller sites would pick it up and then it works its way up to the bigger sites. Right. And so, um, you know, PR and newsjacking are absolutely like strategies, um, that are effective. Yeah. Yeah. And there are a few ways to do this with Google trends. So one is identify trends

with filtering by specific categories or countries. Today's top health story might not make major headlines in Google trends, but it can help you to identify topics to watch. And also today's top headline, it may not be a top headline globally, but it might be top in, I don't know, some large metropolitan area or even a smaller one. And if you're following some of these trends, you're able to get on that early. Also. Yeah, go ahead. Well, two, two, two things that are interesting to me is, um, tick tock, uh, has more searches now than Google or Facebook. Okay. So it's just now taking the number one spot. Also NFTs are more popular than crypto or Bitcoin or ether. So NFTs. So, uh, looking at Google trends, um, really does help you stay ahead. And so those were two of the big trends that at least impact me and our business. Um, so yeah, so I'm just, you're reading to the choir, I guess. So, yeah. Follow the, like, be aware of the trend because it can help you make good decisions. Uh, and then the next one is like compare two keyword phrases and a single trend and try and understand what's causing them because there might be some opportunities in there. Um, and that brings us to number nine. Again, this is 12 ways to use Google trends for SEO. Number nine is use long tail key phrases to inspire content. Let's say you're writing a music blog and you want to leverage an upcoming event, say the Grammys award, Grammy award. So you do a search for Grammys, but you want to go deeper and find content. That's truly insightful. Try using tip number three. You're going to have to go back to podcast number five 31 to do this, to figure out what that is, to find the associated queries that are also making Google trends and then cross-reference those queries with each other. That's a tip number two, to get a proper context and find out what the core, uh, what

is at the core of the customer's curiosity. So I would just say long tail key phrases. I think 75% of all searches in Google now are first-time searches that, um, that's why machine learning is so important to deliver the right results. Um, but knowing that and going after really small volume, long tail key phrases, uh, you have to measure going after the, the main, uh, keywords, right. Or the seed keywords versus these long tail key phrases, because a lot of times the buying intent is a lot higher, um, for these longer tail key phrases. So even if there's less search volume, but you're ranked higher, uh, and you're generating leads off of people that are in the customer journey where they're pulling the trigger of contacting you or something like that, or your content gets found in that area can be a lot more effective than, uh, not like focusing on maybe those seed or core keywords. And then if you bundle that with upcoming trends and you know, what's happening, you can really get in front of a lot of stuff and catch the wave. Um, and so, yeah, combining some of these strategies is quite powerful. It, it, it, and that usually is the case, right? When you take the strategy from heater, apply it over there. Like you, you, it's, it's why it's good to have the skillset both in SEO and PPC and web design and development and the backend and the hosting and like, like all of that together is really important to deliver a business. So I think, uh, I was at a presentation yesterday and I thought there's, they were using a formula, uh, and really there was like, I think five components to the formula and, and I could have this wrong, but essentially if you increased five components by 10%, you get a 61% increase, right? So like all these little incremental increases, um, when you, when you multiply them together, they're greater than if you individually had them. Right. And so making improvements in different

areas or in different strategies, uh, where you get a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, it certainly compounds the benefits you would see. So. Yep. Absolutely. All right. Number 10, use data for video optimization. So let's say you posted a video on how to get discounts on Caribbean cruises. Um, you enter that search term, you switch from web search to YouTube search and you check out related queries and related topics and you sort by top or rising topics. Uh, and you'll find that people who search cruises also search shipping classes, right? So this may not be intuitively obvious to the casual observer, but once you know that people are also searching for shipping classes, then you might actually put together a video and know what to put in that video's relevant titles and descriptions talking about the shipping classes of a Caribbean cruise. And I think the one thing to remember and why Google trends is so important is I think a lot of times we base our marketing decisions based on what we want and our understanding of it and not like taking the data as a whole. Cause me personally, I would have never made that connection. Right. And if I was building a marketing strategy without looking at the data, uh, I wouldn't have included that. And I think people take their own bias a lot of times when they're applying it to marketing and the reality is like the data always tells you what to do. Uh, and you should follow the data. And that's why in my opinion, um, digital marketing is certainly a lot stronger than traditional marketing because you have access to more data. You can pivot faster. Um, there's also, you know, for anything you do traditional, there's usually like a digital, uh, counterpart. Right. And so, um, yeah, I mean, data is just so incredibly important, uh, on the front end on like while you run the campaign on the backend with analysis to make the right decision and not having

that bias, I think is, uh, a pro tip. Yeah. What I, what I, what we often share kind of throughout the company is we, we love to have ideas and we'd love to defend them passionately until the data says otherwise. Right. I mean, this is a, this example is interesting because it might've even been in the case that you would be in a client meeting and the client would say, I think maybe we should do videos on the, you know, the cruise line classes. And you were like, no one searches like no one cares about that. Like who would care about that? And then you'd go look at the data and go like, okay, you're right. Like that's, that's all that matters. Yeah. I mean, a lot of times when we're talking to clients to figure out what keywords to target, um, you know, sometimes the clients think that certain keywords because to them are more valuable, uh, than like what the data says, or, you know, a lot of times we find who they think are their competitors online are not really their competitors. Maybe they're their competitors in person, but not online. And so again, the data tells different story. Um, certainly, um, we've looked at data sometimes and said, you know, it might be better to run an SEO campaign on that, or it might be better to run a PPC campaign on that based on the volume, based on the cost per click. Um, and so again, all these things you got to take into consideration, uh, when making a decision. So absolutely. All right. Number 11, use cyclical trends for brand positioning. So let's say you're optimizing for wedding boutique, uh, a simple search for wedding over the past five years reveals that, uh, in interest in weddings slipped from mid in mid 2020, right? COVID, uh, but it has rebounded. So historically the interest in weddings is pretty even year, year round from this. You can glean that wedding plans are back on track. So this, this would be

a great way. Let's say you're, you've got your wedding boutique website and you've seen a decrease in traffic. You're like, well, I think it's just cause you know, of COVID nobody's searching for weddings anymore. And then you go to Google twins, uh, Google trends, and you look up wedding and you see, well, wait, all the search trends are back now. So maybe I've lost SEO position. Maybe my PPC campaign has been paused. Like you have to start digging into other data and Google trends can put you, uh, in the right place to make sure, uh, that you're making good decisions. Look at this, like, look at this shoot right here. For those of you watching, there's this huge like uptick of like weddings. I'm wondering, uh, why people wanted to really get married at this point. Uh, right here. That's in, uh, like September of 2018. That's kind of interesting. Um, yeah, I mean, right now, uh, we're seeing a lot of interest in Valentine's day, uh, campaigns and, uh, planning out seasonal campaigns is quite important, uh, on a quarterly basis to make sure you, you have the time to catch the demand when it's there. Right. So, um, yeah, seasonal trends are important. Yep. All right. Number 10, 12, identify blind spots and don't misread the twin, the trends. I don't know. I keep saying twins. Uh, don't ever trust a single snapshot. Always get a broader view of a timeline to see what else is happening. Uh, is an increased trend in one key phrase still dwarfed by more important ones. Always look for context, researching weddings for number eight. So this is kind of interesting. I encountered a drastic increase in YouTube trends for weddings during the summer of 2017, far greater than in previous summers. In fact, it quadrupled, uh, further research couldn't identify a specific keyword except to show a drastic increase in wedding interest in South Asia. I'm a little disappointed you didn't dig in and kind of figure that out, but you can, you can again, understand

these trends and understand if it's something you need to be concerned about or not, because you're aware of your blind spots like that. Take that time to understand where your potential blind spots spots are and your competition may not be aware of their blind spots. You can delve deeper into the search results for more sophisticated data to inform your SEO strategy. So yeah, correction, summer 2017, I was looking at a chart. Maybe it wasn't, uh, to scale or as hard to see, but yeah, that was that spike that I was showing you. And it was massive. It was like, yeah, it was like, I don't know. I don't know what that is. 500% increase for like one month. Um, I don't know. Probably there's like a law changing, I bet, or something. It's like, you have to be married or X, Y, Z happens from the government. I don't know. So it looks more because it doesn't have zero on that graph. So you're looking at like 25 points up to a hundred. So it's a four X, like you mentioned. Yeah. Four X, five X. Yeah. Yeah. See, yeah. Don't judge what I'm saying. Exactly. I would think that it's a, like my thought is like, okay, it didn't hold. Um, it doesn't look like the trend even held for any period of time. So maybe it's a, you know, just bad data or maybe some Royal something got married in South Asia or something like that happened. And yeah, I mean, that's the fun thing about data is, um, they kind of tell a story and you can dig into it and figure out what's going on, especially with your website. Uh, that's why I love SEO so much as you can, you can really open it up and look at different swaths of data from different angles and understand maybe what's happening and how Google's treating your site. Um, from a trend standpoint, it's really important with the trends or momentum or what's happening to understand what's going to be happening. And

I think we've talked about that previously. You want to see those, uh, what are they called? Like where it explodes, what are they called? They're, they're exponential rises in Google trends, kind of be looking for those before they really make the news, um, and get in front of some of that stuff. If you're agile enough, I think it's really, really powerful. So. Very cool. And in summary, Google trends data is more important and valuable than ever. There are unique insights to be gleaned for those willing to go beyond a basic search. And that's the point of like dig in, uh, the key is sticking with your queries until you find the insights, even if they aren't always obvious. And also, even if they aren't what you thought they would be, those are probably the best ones yet because it puts you in the, in the right direction. So very stuff, Patif to, uh, to Chuck, uh, how to use Google trends for SEO really enjoyed that article. Uh, and we'll be looking for more articles from Chuck. And do you have anything to wrap up the podcast? Um, Nope. I, uh, just have a hard stop that were passed and I have to absolutely run, but hopefully people start using Google trends in their data analysis. I think that that's something that sometimes gets overlooked. I think keyword research is something that a lot more time needs to be spent. Sometimes I think people are moving too quickly and figuring out what those keywords are for those target pages, uh, helps to better understand, uh, the data organization or the data architecture of what you're trying to build. And also when you're putting out content, understanding what, where those gaps are and where you want to take it and take your business and understanding where the trends are is, is completely important with the cycles and everything else that we discussed. So hopefully people take away from this, that they will start using Google trends when they're doing keyword research. So. Excellent. Hey, if you

got value out of this podcast or any of our podcasts, we're just going to ask you to do us two small favors. One of them is share it with three people that, you know, uh, the other one is to leave us a review and you can do that by going to EWR digital.com forward slash review. That's a great place to do it. You could also find us on Facebook, uh, look for EWR digital on Facebook and leave us a review there. We will, uh, very much appreciate it. And if, if, if you would like to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, the internet call EWR digital for increased revenue in your business, our phone number is 713-592-6724. You can get a custom profit plan. Yes, that's a plan so that you can get profit. Uh, you can find that at best SEO podcast.com. And we really appreciate you doing that for us until the next podcast. My name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now for now.