Understand SEO Trends using cold, hard data

When you are investing all your time and energy into your startup business, it is sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees. Deciding which direction to take your company in or which products to sell can be a tough call. Making these crucial decisions can be daunting, but we say look at the statistics and let the data be your guide.

Carrying out market research and predicting consumer trends is not a viable option for small to medium business owners. Thankfully, Google have created a useful and little known free tool called Google Trends, which allows you to analyse the various merits and popularity of keywords and search terms over a period of time.

Data Driven Decisions

We were talking to one of our clients today who wanted advice about their product range. They wanted to see if they could gain any insight from their website statistics as they were seeing a decline in sales on one of their leading products. We showed them that their site hits were steadily increasing, which was good news, but did not solve the mystery.

So we moved over to Google Trends, and saw that the popularity of their product had drastically reduced over the past 2 years. They had presumed that it was the websites rankings that had effected sales, rather than what they were actually stocking. So we came up with a plan, and provided them with data for other potential products that were increasing in google search volumes in recent times. They are now using this information to reformat their product range and expect to see an increase in sales in the near future.

Press Release vs Social Media

How to use Google Trends

Simply go over to Google Trends, add a search term, and see how it has performed over a period of time. You can then add more terms to compare them and gain useful insights into your consumers trending behaviour. Another useful tool on the page can be found under “Related Searches”. Toggle from “Top” to “Rising” to get suggestions on what is going to be the next big thing. In the example below we were comparing smartphones and smartwatches and found the following useful keyword and SEO content.

Sharks vs Nazis

This is an incredibly useful and insightful Google tool, but we would advise you don’t do what we did and end up waisting time looking for interesting “Google Fights”

Google Zeitgeist

Every year Google put together a great compilation video highlighting the search trends of the year. 2013 seems like a long time ago now…