USING GOOGLE TRENDS FOR SEO INSIGHTS

See Geographical Trends and Seasonal Trends

Google Trends unlocks SEO opportunities, and this episode shows you how to tap into its power! Discover seasonal trends, geographical trends, and brand search trends to keep your business ahead. Create content for peak seasons, target high-interest regions, and track brand growth to boost rankings. Compare trending topics to focus on popular services, ensuring your website stays relevant. This free tool empowers marketers and owners to make data-driven decisions using topic data, without complexity. Visit trends.google.com to explore search trends to craft smarter SEO strategies and watch your visibility soar in search results!

EPISODE NOTES & RESOURCES:

• Free SEO Audit Tool: Evaluate your website’s SEO performance with our free tool
• Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/

Episode Transcript – Using Google Trends For SEO Insights

Jesse Dolan (00:19)
Welcome back to Luminate Local. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan. Today we’re going to be talking about an SEO tool that maybe isn’t as flashy or as new as a lot of the things that we’re using here in today’s marketing world, leveraging a lot of AI tools, right? A lot of pretty sophisticated and new fun toys in the SEO toolbox. But what we want to talk about here today is something that’s been around for a while, and a lot of clients that we deal with and that I engage with really don’t use this or haven’t heard of it, haven’t explored it, haven’t leveraged it at all in their business.

So I wanted to take a little bit of time here today to talk about Google Trends. It’s not new. It’s maybe not as exciting as AI, but it can be a valuable SEO tool and have an impact on your business. And like I said, it often gets overlooked. So we’re going to dive in here today, learn how diving into Google Trends can improve your SEO, increase your online visibility, and maybe get some opportunities in front of you that you were maybe a little bit blind to previously.

So if you’re a marketing manager, business owner, web designer, aspiring SEO, whatever your position is there, go on out to Google Trends. It’s Google—what do we got here? Trends.google.com or just do a Google search for Google Trends. And I’m going to do some screen sharing here today. So for those of you that are listening on the podcast version, I’ll talk through it. No big deal. But if you want to check this out later on YouTube to follow along or maybe see how some of this looks, just be aware that that’ll be happening here in today’s episode.

So you’re sitting there, you want better SEO, online visibility, right? We want to drive more traffic to our website. We want to capture more revenue and get more clients, get more leads. And the problem that we can have is maybe our website isn’t ranking well, right? Missing out on potential customers. Maybe you felt like you’re usually late to a topic, right? Or to the game, or maybe if there’s something seasonal, you know, you’re always trying to launch or create that content or get it out there right before the busy season, instead of getting ahead of the curve and being ready for your website to have that content and be found in Google when it is the busy season.

There’s definitely some different use cases here that we want to talk about on how to use Google Trends and how it can benefit your SEO efforts. And really help you, let’s say, feel less confused, maybe less overwhelmed by what’s happening out there in SEO with some of these terms. And yeah, let’s dive in here.

So really at the end of the day, the more you know, particularly about SEO, about the topics you want to be found for and what’s happening with your business, the stronger you’re going to be, right? The more authoritative you’re going to be, the better chance you’re going to have of putting yourself in front of the people that are searching for your products and services. And looking to patronize somebody, right? We want to rank high so we can get the opportunity for that click and then the opportunity for that business, whether you’re doing your SEO yourself, implementing it, or you’re hiring a provider or a contractor or an agency or a firm to do it for you.

Using Google Trends is something that you can do and gain some knowledge about what’s happening out there in the landscape for, again, the products and services that you want to be found for. So I’ve been in your shoes. I’ve been on the business side of running a business. I’ve been on the marketing side of running a business. And I can tell you that it does feel like a little black box sometimes, right? With all the secrets and the magic of SEO hidden from us, but it really doesn’t have to. Tools like Google Trends can really give you a lot of direct insights and understanding of what’s happening and help arm you with the knowledge that you need to make sure you’re in that position, right? To get found and get those opportunities.

So first, we have to understand what Google Trends is. There are several tools put out—well, there’s a lot of tools put out by everybody, but just by Google itself. There are several tools that you may be familiar with in the marketing and SEO realm. We have Google Analytics, and that’s going to be telling us what happens to the traffic on our website, right? The behaviors, you know, how long people are on pages, things like that. You have Google Search Console, which tells you information about how you’re presented and then engaged with on Google search, right? So if somebody is doing a Google search and your business is showing in the results or your business gets a click off of that page, that stuff is going to be shown through Google Search Console.

Now Google Trends, which is what we’re talking about here today, is its own product. It’s a standalone app, if you will, or service put out by Google. And this is going to help us understand what people are searching for and how popular these search terms are against each other. It’s not going to give us exact search volume. This is not a keyword volume tool, right? Or any kind of a research tool like that. It is going to show us how popular the search is over time and compared to other topics and in different geographical regions, things like that.

Really think about this. It’s not going to show us volume for how many hundreds or thousands of people are searching, but it is going to show us on a scale of one to 100, how popular this topic is again, over time. And compared to other topics. And what do I mean by that? So over time, if you have something that is maybe very seasonal, maybe it’s only searched and consumed or utilized in the summer. If the peak interest, the peak number of searches happens in July, that will be 100, right? And if the low point is let’s say February, that’s going to be maybe one or five, relatively speaking, how many searches it is. You know, it’s not going to be zero. But it’s just going to show us over time, right? Is this the peak of the interest in that topic or are we in the valley on that?

So before I get any further here, I actually want to pause and read this review that we received through Google from Erica Williams. Erica says, “Jesse Dolan is very knowledgeable. Thank you for the amazing content concerning local SEO. Jesse has an exceptional way of delivering insight concerning business growth. I applaud his professionalism with intent to share his services.” Thanks, Erica.

And I am sharing this review with everybody else because we would love to get a review from you. Going out to luminatelocal.com, click on the button for reviews. And there we have buttons for you. If you want to click on the one for Google, the one for Apple Podcasts, Facebook, whatever it is, we would love to hear from you that this show and this content is helping you out like it did for Erica. And that lets us know we’re doing the right thing. That also lets us know that we are reaching you and you appreciate it. And it’s just great feedback for us. And of course we’ll read them on the show.

So if you’ve been tuning in for a while, if you like these episodes, the interviews we do, the content, what we’re sharing and kind of what our mission is. We would love to get a review from you and go on to luminatelocal.com, click on the button for reviews and please share your thoughts. We would absolutely love that.

So back to the show here, let’s start. Let me share my screen and let’s just look a little bit at Google Trends and go through some examples, how we can use it, what type of information we can gather from it and kind of break that down into you as the business owner, marketing manager, whatever your role is, how you could actually leverage this and use it in your business.

So here’s what we see on the screen right now. This is Google Trends. Again, go on to trends.google.com or just do a search for Google Trends and you’re gonna get to a spot that looks just like this. And let’s just talk first about the seasonality of things. So let me just type in retaining wall.

And here’s something that you need to see when you type in your term. It’s going to pull up some things that are related to it here at the very, very top. What we can see is retaining wall and then it says search term and then right underneath that it says retaining wall topic. So generally speaking, we’re going to want to pick topic. The retaining wall topic is what I’m going to click on here instead of retaining wall search term because what we’re looking for is not the trends for the search term of retaining wall in this case, for at least what I’m going to try to illustrate here.

What we want to see is the trends for the topic of retaining wall. And why is that important? Because maybe somebody is typing in hire a contractor for a retaining wall or landscapers that make retaining walls, right? The topic of retaining walls. We want to see how popular that is and try to parse out some, you know, some details and some ways to leverage that. In general, we don’t want to look just for people typing in the word retaining wall, right? So that’s what the difference for looking at the trends for the search term versus the topic is. Hopefully that makes sense. We’ll dive into that a little bit more here in a second, just to kind of break that down.

But in general, the topics are going to be for most cases here, the topics are going to be more reliable. Again, they pull in all the phraseology, the misspellings, acronyms. It also has the ability for multiple languages, right? So if maybe somebody’s typing in retaining wall, but in Spanish, if I’m typing in the English version here, Google is going to know that people are searching for that even in a different language and still bring me the information on the trends for this topic. Whereas the search term is just much more exacting on that, right? So we’ll pick the topic retaining wall.

And we can see here the first graph that we’re presented with is interest over time and the date range is pretty narrow, just a couple of days. So let’s just look at the past 12 months here, for example. Actually, let’s zoom out. Just do the past five years. And what we can see with something like this, this is retaining wall, right? This is related to landscaping, fairly seasonal. I’m up in the Minnesota area, northern part of the USA. So of course we’re not going to be building retaining walls in the middle of winter.

And the rest of the country too, even if you’re down in Florida where you can maybe build them all year long, right? We can see that very seasonal as far as the terms go. And there’s a definite pattern here as we get into April, May, June, every year, a big spike in the topic of retaining walls within Google. Again, we talk about the metrics here we’re looking at from one to 100. So we can see here the peak for this topic over the last five years was actually back in 2021, kind of the spring of COVID here for both 2020 and 2021. That was the peak level of interest. And actually it looks like this year we’re back up to 100 as well.

So go back a couple of years, a couple of few years ago, this was a little bit more popular of a topic than it was in 2023, 2024, but then back up again this year. And we can see as we get into the winter months, right, as a topic in general, not as much action going on in Google, not as many people searching for these topics, things related to it.

So why does that matter for us? Well, you need to understand again, if you have a topic that you’re trying to be found for and it’s seasonal, maybe you haven’t created this content yet, or maybe you want to refresh it. You definitely need to know when people are looking for and talking about this topic online to make sure that your SEO has a chance to be updated and then indexed, digested if you will by Google, and then served up. If you know that looking at this, that come around, you know, March, April, May, June of every year is when this topic really starts to heat up online. You need to be making sure that you’re updating your website, December, January, February, right? To give it a chance to have that information be out there, have it get digested by Google, every other bot or AI agent, and then showing up when it’s a popular term, right? So I hope that makes sense.

A couple other things here that we can look at is the interest by country, or I should say by region. So here, if I scroll down, this is already defaulted into just showing us the United States. But again, you could zoom out, go globally, and then pick your country. And then we can see here by looking at the United States, we can also drill down to a state level. And if we look on this here for the geographic representation, it’s also going to be giving us a score of 100 to one. So the states that are a darker shade here, like Nebraska seems to be the most popular.

I shouldn’t say that. The most searches are happening in Nebraska here for the popularity of this topic. That’s at 100, for example, right? So it’s not telling us how many people in Nebraska, right? Just like it doesn’t tell us how many people over time, but this does show us that in Nebraska, it’s a very popular topic. So let’s just click Texas. I’m just going to click that for a random one. And now we’re drilling down and just looking at this data through Texas, right? So the interest over time, instead of just being all the United States, and showing us the graph of when people are searching and when is it popular when it’s not as a topic that is just for Texas and then now if I scroll down and see the map for the geographic information now we’re looking at the counties within Texas. If I click on one here for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I’m sorry this is not counties. This is by metro area. If we look over here at the drop down you can pick metro area or city. And depending on what geographic area you’re looking at, right?

You can toggle between those options. So let’s just click on the Dallas-Fort Worth. Again, now we’re drilling down even further. All the data we’re going to be looking at is just for the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. And now we can see here the interest by city just within that Metroplex, right? So for example, it’s like Rockwall is at a hundred. Carleton 85 and Grapevine 87. So popular in all three of those cities that it’s identified, but we can see Rockwall is the most popular, ironically enough. We’re searching for retaining walls too. So, okay.

So that’s some pretty good information, right? Just mainly on the timeline of the popularity, again, the geographic drill down of the popularity. And then we can see here, I’m still in this Dallas-Fort Worth kind of filter, but if I wasn’t, if we were more zoomed out to the whole United States or the entire state, things like that, you can see here further down the page, there’s also some very valuable insights like related queries and related topics.

So the related queries, and you can just hover over this question mark to get help there. I should take a pause here. Google has a ton of great information out there on how to use Google Trends, what these functions mean, maybe even taking some what I’m talking about here and taking it a step further for you. So their help articles and their resources for Google Trends is pretty fantastic. So if you hover over these question marks and click, you can get help. It’ll talk even further about what these are, but basically the related queries are more again, like the search term. It’s the actual phraseology, the actual queries or the actual searches that people are putting in.

Whereas the related topics are going to be broader, right? Things about retaining wall, retaining wall design, cinder blocks, right? Which is going to be cinder blocks for retaining wall. So it’s taking more of these high level concepts and topics here on that side. And if you click into these, let’s just click on retaining wall design as a topic. You see again, we’re still carrying this data forward, looking at Dallas-Fort Worth over the last five years. Well, actually this is interesting. So in this case here, some of the overtime in geographic data didn’t have enough data. Wasn’t enough, you know, total searches, if you will, to show us that which can happen. I’ll talk about that in a second. And then we see even more information here we can drill down into. So pretty slick, pretty useful.

And if you just think about using this for your business, right? I’m just using retaining wall as a quick example here, but just think about the different topics, right? The different areas of your business that maybe you want to find out if it is popular, if there are some seasonality quirks to it, if it’s something that’s trending up or trending down overall, you know, when we look at the timeline here that I’m speaking of in the example, we were just looking at the trying to parse out the seasonality, but maybe there’s a product or a service that you’ve represented for years now and maybe your sales are dwindling, but you’re not sure if that’s because of your positioning or how you’re marketing or is it the market in general and the demand for people out there?

Broadly, Google Trends is great to know that no, this is still a popular product, something people are searching for. And that can help you say, do I want to double down my efforts for SEO and our digital marketing here to get that found? Or is it something that we need to move on from? Inversely, if you’ve got a hot new topic that you feel like in your industry, you’re just seeing all over the place, right? It’s in all your algorithms, you’re seeing on Facebook, everywhere else. Go to Google Trends and you can find out, is this something truly that people are searching for out there, right? Or is it just something that’s being put out with propaganda and things like that? Are the people out there in the mass public actually interested in doing searches or are we just getting pushed on us for that particular product or service. It’s a great tool for that as well to kind of cut through the fog and do some quick and easy analysis on your own.

Now, when you’re doing this again, I talked earlier, I was going to circle back to the topic of the queries or searches or keywords, if you will, versus the topic. So let’s talk about that a little bit because how you use this for picking that topic or picking that keyword that you’re going to check the trends for and then how you’re doing the different search operators within Google Trends. This can make a big difference on the data that you’re going to see, right?

So a couple of different things here. We’ve talked about looking at the example for retaining walls and I’m actually going to just go back to the beginning here so I can show some of this as I’m talking. We talked about doing retaining walls. And if we just type that in as its own search. If I can actually type here, we’re going to get a certain set of data. But if we were to type that in with quotes around it. So retaining wall encapsulated in quotes.

Now we are talking about that exact phrase retaining walls, right? Whereas if we don’t put any quotes around it, if it’s just in there as retaining walls, which is two words that can bring us results on any version of that. So retaining walls or walls retaining, if you will. Whereas if we put quotes around it, we’re looking for that exact match and only looking for data and information based off of that topic or that search term retaining walls.

Now there’s two other ways that we can manipulate the search operator. One is to do a minus, right? Which is like a negative keyword, if you will, or to strike that from there. So maybe you’ve been doing some searches and you want to kind of drill it down, but you want to exclude something. So if we did retaining walls, but we did retaining minus walls, then we’d be looking for information based off of anything to do with retaining that did not mention walls, right?

So you think about in your business, maybe there’s a product add-on or a version of this, maybe a previous model, maybe a later model, whatever it is. There’s definitely some use cases here for using that exclusion to kind of limit the results to not show that phraseology. Then there’s the inverse, which is a plus. So if you did retaining plus walls, now… Whereas, originally we talked about just doing retaining walls as in putting them together, but a space between them. And that would show you retaining walls or walls retaining where if we do a plus retaining plus walls, now we’re taking those two words independently and we want to see all results that have those. You know what I mean? So that’s going to be very broad and show you a lot of results compared to the other ones.

Now, what should you use for what you’re searching to find the trends for your business, the products, the services, whatever it is that you’re doing some research here on? Just start with the regular retaining walls. If you find that those results aren’t giving you what you need or you want to drill down further, then you can use these search operators to refine your search and just get a little bit more. A bit more nuanced data. So I hope that makes sense. That’s kind of the rough overview on what Google Trends is, how to use it.

I wanna talk here a little bit about maybe some more advanced ways to view it or just some different things you can do with that. So one of the cool things that you can do with Google Trends is compare multiple keywords or multiple topics if you will, right? So if we’re looking at retaining walls, if we also want to look at maybe stamped concrete sidewalk, right? For example, we can put multiple queries up to five of them into Google Trends and compare these against each other over that time.

So if you have a product or service, you know, that is waning and another one that is growing again, you can plug them into Google Trends to see is that just what’s happening to your business? Does that match the public sentiment out there at large? Are people, you know, less interested in product A, more interested in product B now? Well, you can use Google Trends to compare up to five different topics or keywords and see how they are trending again over time. And that’s in your geographic area and parse out some data like that. That happened simultaneously on the same graph on the same screen. And so you can really identify which ones are more relevant to your audience. It’s a great tool for that.

In the same way, you can do that with geographic regions, testing these keywords, looking at the search trends and finding out what areas these are more popular in. If you’re a local business, you know, if there are certain cities that maybe are more attractive for you, maybe there’s something happening that you want to take advantage of, something happened in that local market that makes your product or service more desirable or more in demand. That’s a great way to find that.

And then also exploring the different types of search, finding the different trends for images, news, shopping, products, YouTube, things like that. You can select the type of search. I didn’t show that when I was doing the example on the screen there, but you can do just within YouTube or just within Google shopping or just within Google images, right? To discover these trends. So very broad within Google search and all of these things together. But then maybe there’s some nuance on what’s happening in YouTube. Maybe that’s what you’re trying to market in yourself and get found in YouTube with how-to or explainer videos, things like that. You could restrict it just to that as well.

So that kind of brings me to the end of maybe how to use that tool from a research standpoint. I kind of gave it a quick overview. It’s really not a complicated tool. You can go out yourself and use it again, just search for Google Trends or trends.google.com. And check out their tutorials, whether it be the basic or the more advanced techniques on how to use Google Trends.

And then at the end of the day, why are we doing this? Well, we want to put content on our website or shore up our own marketing and excuse me. We want to modify or add new pages based on those trending search terms. Or like I said earlier, if it’s something you’re putting in your content calendar for the off season, or maybe you want to have something ready by the time this thing is in demand or will be in demand based off of the cycle that you’ve seen in the past, this will help you get the timing of it right in addition to the content.

So if you want to modify or add new pages to your website based on those trends and what you’re finding in the search trends to try to improve your rankings and get your visibility increased. You want to craft the content that solves these problems, provides these answers, or otherwise just provides more value to those looking for the topic, right? This isn’t something just like any other keyword research. This isn’t something where you can just take these keywords, say, this is a popular topic. This is trending up. I just want to crank out, you know, some crappy spam content based around this. That’s not going to do anything.

Definitely make sure you’re adding value and you’re answering the question. You’re providing insight. You’re showing how to do a thing, whatever it is, make sure you’re providing value and having some real good content there. Or, you know, it still won’t matter just because it’s popular. It doesn’t mean you’re going to somehow get instantly ranked for it. We want to match up the intent and the desires kind of behind those searches with the content that we’re putting out there as marketers. So definitely keep that in mind. I want to remind everybody of that. This is also a great tool for monitoring trends over time. You can check back regularly. Again, this is totally free. You can use this whenever you want. It’s very easy to use, costs nothing.

And you can compare, you know, any of these things we’re talking about, but also a pretty cool use case. And I should pause here. Sometimes you’ll get results that have no data just because there wasn’t enough search volume. Google Trends is not going to show you like low key, low volume keywords. If only a few people are searching, it’s also not going to show you. Maybe if there’s a small number of people searching, but they’re doing a ton of searches, right? They have some filtering to kind of give us a broad snapshot of what truly is popular out there.

And so within that one use case, that’s pretty cool to use is your brand. Whether it be just straight up Google search nowadays or AI search and what we’re finding and discovering there, your brand is very important. And the more your brand is searched for, the more your product and service keywords are going to elevate, right? Just imagine if Google knows, you know, that you sell retaining walls. Well, if your brand and maybe your, whatever your ranked seventh for retaining walls in your area, as an example, and as your brand becomes more popular for whatever the reason is, maybe you’re doing local marketing, maybe you’re active in the community, you know, maybe your trucks are flashing and just getting noticed around town.

Whatever the reason, if your brand searches start to elevate, if more people are searching for your brand by name in Google, whether it’s with or without some product or service attached to that search, the more popular your brand becomes in Google search, then your product and services are also gonna get a bump because Google’s understanding that you’re authoritative, you’re trusted, right? You’re a credible brand, people like you, and it’s gonna give some priority, if you will—might not be the right word for it—but you’re gonna get a bump in your products and service keywords and related rankings as well.

So using Google Trends to see if your brand is starting to become something that’s popular, people are searching for, be it over time, by region, seasonality, whatever. It’s a very useful tool and a very good example of something that you would want to come back and check, maybe quarterly, maybe biannually, whatever it is. Hey, is it working? Is our name getting out there? Is our brand more popular? Is our brand starting to trend in our area? Great sign for you, right, as a business or a marketer if that’s the case and just one of the cool things that you can also do with it in addition to kind of the typical stuff we think of for the seasonality or whatever the hot topic is, you know, that’s coming up.

I think that’s pretty good. Again, I’ll mention again, just refer to Google’s resources on this too. I’m giving a pretty good, I think, overview for everybody, especially if you’re unfamiliar with it for why you should use it and maybe some good reasons on how to use it. But Google has some great resources even further that dive into how to use this and to train and show you the best ways to do that. So you can get the maximum value out of your time.

All right. So if you’re looking for even more help with your SEO, I definitely want to mention our free SEO audit tool, going out to luminatelocal.com click on the yellow button. It’s our free SEO audit tool. Takes seconds to run. You just type in your webpage, type in the keyword you’re trying to optimize or score that page for, and it’s going to give you a PDF with all kinds of insights, general scores on that page for SEO, a punch list of things to fix, recommendations, kind of the stoplight, right? Is it red, critical, yellow, kind of cautionary, green, you’re good to go, things like that.

And just gives you a great punch list of things to do on your website. And then also highlighting the things that you’re doing really, really good on your website as well. Check it out, free to use, as many times as you want. Check out your page. You can check competitors’ pages. If you want to do some CSI reverse engineering, whatever it is, luminatelocal.com click the yellow button for the free SEO audit. You’ll be off to the races.

So if you decide you don’t want to take advantage of Google Trends, that’s okay. Like I said, pretty much everybody we talked to is unaware of this. Haven’t used it for any research or, you know, kind of fact finding for their business. You won’t be alone, but I can tell you that if you do tap into it, and if you do start to look at these trends for your business, for your product service keywords, and just kind of the market in general, you’re gonna have a little bit better idea on what’s going on.

And I think those thoughts will help creep in and impact your marketing calendar, your content calendar, right? Your strategy, where you’re going, what you’re doing, and just arm you with a little bit better information as a business owner or marketer, particularly within Google search and what seems to be popular. So don’t sleep on it. It’s free. It’s easy to do.

All right. I think that wraps it up for this episode. Everybody hope you enjoyed this and got some value and we’ll catch you the next one. Take care.

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