How to Use Google Trends for Comparing Industry Traffic

Knowing the latest industry trend and your competitors are probably the most important step if you want to create a new marketing plan for your business. By learning what is the latest trend in your place, how your competitors are performing and the different strategies they are applying, you can further improve your strategies in order to win a bigger market share. This guide will show you how to use Google Trends for better understanding your industry and competitors.

What Is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a free service which is offered by the search engine giant. Primarily, it deals with analytics regarding searches and keywords and the latest trends for SEO and content purposes. However, Google Trends is not only limited to improving SEO and content marketing. This service can also help you monitor your brand and check on your competitors.

How to Use Google Trends for Competitive Analysis

Google Trends is really a great tool for marketing purposes. Although it needs more detective work the Google Analytics, it is very easy to use and a free option for basic research.

Moreover, the results that you encounter on Google Trends can justify deeper research into a particular area. You can use Google Trends in order to discover basic data about your business’ brand, your market share, your competition and your industry.

How to Use Google Trends To Understand Your Competitors

The freedom provided by Google Trends allows you to monitor both your own brands and your competitors. You can even compare multiple sites to yours and learn a lot from your competitor’s graph. If they are doing really well, then you can do research on how their peaks are created. Otherwise, you can understand their mistakes and simply avoid the strategies they create and use that as a basis to create a successful one.

You can compare more than one site with Google Trends by using coma between them. You can check site1.com, site2.com, site3.com and see the trend from all 3 sites and compare.

When comparing multiple sites, make sure that you select matching traffic for comparison. If not the scale will be different and small details will not be visible.

Pay Attention To Shifts In The Industry

Google Trends also offers you the chance to see the smallest details as well as industry data from as far as back in the year 2004. All of this information gives you an exceptional opportunity on where to pay attention and respond to shifts in your industry.

You begin by analyzing the lulls and peaks of each graph. You need to investigate deeper into every event and find the underlying cause of every change in the graph. In case you find out that your industry has shown a steady decline, then try to investigate more. Google Trends is not always a reflection of a specific industry or business; however, it can show a particular amount of vitality.

When exploring shifts in your industry, you need to make sure that you search related keywords and industries as well. This is because the language might have sifted and you might need to fine-tune your keywords in order to regain popularity for trending searches.

Checking, Monitoring And Comparing Your Brand

Google Trends gives you the opportunity to look into your brand market shares and monitor your brand. You can get a better picture of where your brand stands against competitors if you make a comparison. The only thing you need to do is to enter your own brand in the search term and add some of your competition’s brand.

You can break down data when you view the annual interest and trends in each brand. Moreover, you can view regional or local interest for the industry. You can also use forecast features and news headlines when viewing market share. Remember that peaks in a certain brand’s search term is not always positive and can be driven by scandal or bad press instead.

Identify Consumer Demand

How to use Google Trends to understand your customers demands? You can use Google Trends to determine which features or brands have a greater consumer demand.For instance, if you are an electronics retailer, you can enter “LED TV” and “Smart TV” in Google Trends and you will find out which is more popular at the moment and by region.

In addition, Google Trends can be used to compare different brand, Sony TV vs. Samsung TV, for instance, in order to see which brand is more popular. With this information, you can make safer and more sound business decisions.

Determine What Consumers are Searching in Competing Brands

If you wish to check out what items makes your competitors successful or what services they generate more sales with, then Google Trends can help you there and show you data of what their consumers are searching for.

Determine What Consumers are Looking For in Competing Brands

It’s quite simple really. Just enter your competitor’s name in the “Topic” box and Google Trends will show you search queries that are related to that brand.

For instance, if you are a local coffee shop, then you can enter Blenz Coffee or Starbucks on the “Topic” box. From there, Google Trends will show trending searches from their consumers.

Let’s say you notice shoppers searching for keywords like “Starbucks calories” or “Starbucks nutrition”, you can highlight calories and nutritional facts of your beverages on the menu, website or pamphlet to make your business ahead of your competitors.

How to Use Google Trends To Identify Keyword Trends

Similar to Google Insights for Search, Google Trends allows you to find the right Google keyword trends which you can use for creating contents and promotional articles. After you research and created a list of keywords using Google Insights for Search, Webmaster Tools,and Google Analytics and refined it with Google AdWords, Google Trends will be the final stop for you to confirm your keyword choices— and possibly find new ones.

You can compare up to 5 terms or Google keyword trends at a time. By comparing chosen keywords, Google Trends can show which keyword is the clear winner in a given region or time.

For instance, comparing the terms “lifting weights”, “strength training”, and “weight lifting” for data from the US only, Google Trend will show you that “weight lifting” is on top. But that does not stop there. Google Trends also suggests additional keywords which you might want to add to your comparisons.

How to Use Google Trends To Provide Website Keyword Checkup

Google Trends can prove useful if you wish to have a periodic check up for key phrases and keyword that your website has been optimized for. Just enter your keywords at Google Trends and see if any are trending downward. If it is, then you have the opportunity to change it up and be competitive again.

Conclusion

They say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. And this also applies to any kind of business. By regularly conducting industry traffic and competitors check with help from Google Trend you can formulate proper SEO strategies for your next marketing campaign.