Use Google Trends to Create a Smarter Content Marketing Strategy

When you look for SEO tips for your small business, what do you find? Let me guess: lots of buzzwords about CONTENT. Relevant content! Engaging content! Content strategies! Is this helpful? Unless you have the tools to figure out what relevant and engaging content might be for your customers, it probably isn’t!

If you have a blog on your website, or just want to amp up your landing pages, Google has a newly spiffed-up tool to help you discover fresh ideas for relevant content.

Google Trends Adds Subscriptions

The Google Trends tool lets you enter search terms and see how popular they are currently, how popular they have been, and in what parts of the world they have the highest search volume. While Trends has been around for a while, it now has a “subscribe” option so you can get email alerts on your saved search terms, as well as the “Hot Searches” in any country.

This new subscription feature can help you keep track of search terms relevant to your business. For instance, if you install, say, marble countertops, and you subscribe to get email notifications when “marble countertops” is trending, you might find out that they have become all the rage because they were part of a storyline on an episode of Real Housewives. And then you can write a blog post about the benefits of marble countertops, or optimize your countertop installation page to catch the attention of all your potential customers who now want to rip out their laminate and upgrade to Carrara.

Timely Topics Make for Smart SEO

Google Trends can also help you come up with content topic hooks, or starting points. For instance, guess what trends really high in March and April?

That’s right. Energy tax credits. If you’re a remodeler or a door and window dealer, you are probably an authority on energy-efficient products. A tax-time blog post about energy-efficient windows might help increase visits to your website. Even though the Residential Energy Property Credit expired at the end of 2013, “energy tax credits” will likely be a popular term every April—a term you can use as a hook. Your blog post could push the money savings possible for homeowners when they install energy-efficient replacement windows—even without the tax credit.

Other Ways to Use Google Trends for SEO

You can check out Google’s “Hot Searches” to see what the top search terms are for the current day or the past 30 days. While the hot search terms are usually celebrities and big news events, there’s always a chance you’ll find something you can use. Maybe you want to have a sale to celebrate the Final Four, or the new season of The Walking Dead? Perhaps you have information or products that could help people prepare for catastrophic weather events. Sometimes the Hot Searches will spark an idea, sometimes they won’t. But the feature is worth checking out.

The Smartest Content Strategy

At Blue Corona, we like to say that the best content marketing strategy is to anticipate your customers’ questions and objections, and address them both. Combining this idea with Google Trends can help you keep your content fresh and relevant.

Blue Corona’s content marketing specialists live to spot trends—as a matter of fact, I know a couple of hotshots who have weather alerts set up on their phones to alert them when a storm is approaching a restoration clients’ service area. Yeah, we’re dedicated. And maybe a little obsessive.