Small Business SEO - Part 3, Research with Google Trends

If I’m honest this should really be an addition to Part 1 when we looked at several tools that are freely available for keyword research. Whether you target national searches or better local SEO results, the tool we’re about to tell you about can really help!

When we run face to face seminars, I ask the delegates who has heard of this tool and hardly anyone has, in fact on the last course no one had heard of it!

What that tells you, is that most of your competition don’t use it.

This means you can get a competitive advantage straight away!

The tool we’re talking about is Google Trends!

Google Trends used to be called Google Insights and as you can probably tell by the name, it gives you an idea of how trends for the keywords you’re interested in are emerging.

For example, let’s say you own a furniture shop and one of your main lines was pine furniture. The Google keyword tool gives you a search figure for the number of times a particular search query was used, it’s like a snapshot in time, what it doesn’t do is give you an idea of how that changes over time. Imagine how powerful that it – how much would you pay a traditional market research company for that? Now you can use the way people search to do your market research!

Look at the screenshot below from Google Trends for the term “Pine Furniture”

Do you see how you get a view over time about how popular this term is, do you also notice you can tailor the geography you’re interested in?

Comparing several keywords

Now imagine you stocked oak furniture as well and wanted to know how to spread your marketing budget, with this tool you can do that as well! Simply add a comma and type the other term or terms you’re interested in and you’ll get  a comparison – imagine how powerful that is!

‘Hot’ or emerging searches

Do you see the tab near the bottom on the right hand side of the screenshot, the one called “Rising”? This gives you an idea of what related search terms are gaining momentum and are worth you checking out, another valuable source of keyword suggestion.

This tool is one you should definitely check out, remember, it helps you identify changes over time which is incredibly valuable and not just for new projects, if you’ve been optimising your website for some time, take a step back and make sure you’re targeting a growing sector of the market now hanging on with grim death to something that is losing its appeal!

I hope you’ve found this useful.

For more help or advice please contact us. For Part one of the Small Business SEO guide, click on the link.