Google Trends for SEO

-Hi, I'm Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate at Google.
-And I'm Hadas Jacobi, Google Trends Engineer,
and welcome to another Google Trends Tutorials episode.
-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.
-For example, we'll go over techniques like keyword research, content optimization,
and content planning.
If you missed previous episodes and need a refresher of Google Trends,
make sure you watch them.
Google Trends
-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.
[gasps]
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've 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,
linked in the description, to learn more about it.
-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, watch the video until the end.
Let's go into each of them in detail.
STAYING UP-TO-DATE WITH RISING TRENDS
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 start to rise.
If you cover sports for a news company,
you might want to know when important athletes are in the media.
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 and 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.
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 takes you to the page without triggering a search term.
This means you'll see the trends based on the filters you chose.
PERFORMING SEO KEYWORD RESEARCH
-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.
You'd like to know what people are searching related to it.
The first thing you can do is 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 on 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.
CREATING A CONTENT CALENDAR
-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/queries you find 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 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 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 priorities,
you should make sure you optimize 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 UK,
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.
VIDEO SEO
-Since you watched so patiently until 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.
-I hope the suggestions in this video 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.
-Don't forget to subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube channel
to be the first to watch our upcoming videos.
Stay tuned!
GOOGLE TRENDS