Google Trends is more than a keyword research tool. It can help you make important business decisions.
It’s no secret Google collects a lot of data. But did you know you can use some of this data to make informed business decisions? Google actually offers search trend data through its tool, Google Trends.
Through the Google Trends tool you can conduct in-depth market research to understand trends within your industry, check out your competition, research the viability of a new product, track market growth, and more. It can even give you all of this data by the specific location or market you’re targeting.
And the best part is all of this data is available to you for free.
In this article we’ll demonstrate a few ways to use Google Trends to help you make informed business decisions. We’ll look at how to:
- Track trend seasonality
- Research new products and compare product categories
- Conduct competitive research
- Research trends within your industry
Using Google Trends to track seasonality
Google Trends is a useful tool to track seasonal peaks within your industry by showing if a search term’s popularity is cyclical.
Category: Luggage
In the chart below we pulled interest in “luggage” from the beginning of 2017 to present. You can see that searches for luggage peak every year in June and November from 2017 through the end of 2019. And, of course, interest in luggage plummeted in March of 2020 with the rise of COVID-19. This tells us that if we were in the travel industry or in the business of making luggage we would want to put resources behind promoting luggage in June and November every year.
Using Google Trends to research new products
Are you launching a new product or developing your product pipeline? Use Google Trends to stay on top of product trends and get insight into whether a trend is increasing or decreasing in popularity.
Category: Hair Accessories
When we compare two hair accessory trends, scrunchies and hair claws, we can see that scrunchies reached the peak of their popularity in September 2019 and have been on the decline since. However, searches for hair claws are currently on the rise and only increasing in popularity. If we were a retailer, this information could tell us it’s time to start pivoting our hair accessory product pipeline from scrunchies to hair claws.
Using Google Trends to track competitors
Do you ever wonder how your competitors are trending? Or which of your competitors may be on the rise? You can use Google Trends to track your competitors’ popularity.
Category: Water Bottles
When we compare these three water bottle brands, Hydro Flask, Nalgene, and Blender Bottle, we can see that Hydro Flask hit a peak in September 2019 and is still seeing some positive effects from that peak.
We can also see additional terms that are often associated with the three brands. This can help us understand what’s driving search volume and popularity for each brand.
Below you can see limited edition colors and the VSCO girl trend are driving most of the search volume for Hydro Flask. Blender Bottle is also garnering some search traffic from limited edition designs and its partnerships with Harry Potter and Star Wars. Whereas Nalgene’s search volume is primarily driven by product questions.
This tells us limited editions, new colors, and leaning into current trends work in the world of water bottles. Perhaps Nalgene and Blender Bottle could use Google Trends insights to help develop their product pipeline.
Using Google Trends for industry research
What’s next for your industry? You can stay on top of emerging industry trends with the help of Google Trends data.
Category: Carpet Cleaning
If we look at the overall interest in carpet cleaning over time it has stayed steady throughout the past few years and is increasing in recent months. If we were a carpet cleaning company, this could be good news for our industry.
However, when we look more closely into Google Trends’ related topics and related queries, we can see the rise in interest is for DIY carpet cleaning solutions, not professional carpet cleaning. In addition, we can see there’s a significant rise in interest around professional area rug cleaning and sofa cleaning.
If we were a carpet cleaning company we may want to pivot our primary service messaging to area rug cleaning and sofa cleaning, as opposed to carpet cleaning or figure out a way to take advantage of the DIY carpet cleaning trend.
In short, take advantage of Google Trends’ data
There are numerous ways to use Google Trends to your advantage. Whether you need a starting point for keyword research or are looking to make major shifts in your business and marketing strategy, Google Trends should be in your business tool set. And if you have questions while you’re exploring Google Trends or questions about setting up a Google Trends dashboard, Adept is here to help.