No matter what industry you find yourself in, knowing and understanding the current state of your market is absolutely vital to success, and that isn’t always particularly easy. For international businesses, your finger needs to be on the pulse of so many different intertwining factors, trends and shifts in the market that by the time you’ve understood the state of things, the state has often already changed. Meanwhile, for local businesses with a very centralised product or service, data on your particular niche in your particular area can be so sparse that gathering anything meaningful is nearly impossible.
Luckily, for those who are attempting the Herculean task of basic independent market research, there are options for you, and not all of them come with a hefty price tag. Today, we are going to look at one such option, Google Trends, which will allow you a glimpse into what’s going on online, and when used in tandem with other tools, can be quite a powerful force.
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends is a free tool provided by Google themselves which allows you to observe and compare trends in searches for particular keywords over time. Data can be broken down by various factors such as time and location demographics to give you a relatively accurate insight into how many people were searching for a particular phrase at a particular time.
This may seem like a simple piece of information to be able to glean, but when used correctly, it can give you a full historical look into the ways in which your target demographics are searching online. So, let’s take a look at how this can be used to your advantage as a business looking to grow their understanding of the market.
How Google Trends Is Used For Market Research
There are many different angles that can be used for navigating Google Trends, and not all of them will be covered in this blog. However, the below examples will give you a starting point for how this tool can be used to broaden your understanding of the market, both past and present.
Example 1: Keyword Comparison For Product Trends
Let’s say you were a clothing designer looking to develop a new line of products, but you weren’t sure what direction to go in regarding the overall aesthetic. You’ve seen several different styles consistently on the rise over the past few years, but you aren’t sure which has the staying power that you’re looking for, especially given that it will take time for your new products to hit the market.
You whittle your list of design styles down to five options:
- Y2K Clothing
- Designer Vintage Clothing
- Minimalist Clothing
- Egirl Clothing
- Goth Clothing
Once you’ve got your list together, you move things to Google Trends, and put in these five different clothing styles as search terms:
As you can see, each keyword chosen has been designated a colour automatically so that you can differentiate them on a graph. Below this, you will also be given four dropdown menus to refine your search results to your needs:
Menu 1: Location
This will allow you to refine your results to searches from a particular country or search global trends. As you can see, for the purposes of this example, I’ve chosen Worldwide, so the system will include all available searches over the selected time period.
Menu 2: Time Period
This will dictate the time period from which Google Trends will pull data. As Google Trends displays graphs, the longer the time period, the less specific your data will be for particular days or weeks. However, choosing longer periods of time will naturally provide you with a larger picture of a particular search’s longevity within the cultural zeitgeist.
Menu 3: Categories
Google offers a wide selection of categories for you to choose from in order to ensure that your results are as accurate as possible. This will be more important for terms that could mean multiple things. For example, if your keyword is “salmon”, you may want to specify whether you’re looking for information on salmon as a type of fish or salmon as a type of food.
Menu 4: Type of Search
Whilst for most market research purposes, you will be looking at Web Search results, there is the option to search other areas of Google, including Image Search, News Search, Youtube Search, and Google Shopping.
Once your parameters are in place, you can then look at your newly created graph:
This is where the designated colours from earlier come into practice, with each line colour representing the trends over your selected time period for your particular keywords. As you can see, each of these terms has been relatively stable over the past few months. However, there are two lines that are clearly above the others, with the breakdown showing Y2K Clothing and Goth Clothing to be the two most searched, and Goth Clothing being the clear winner of the two.
From here, you could then search different styles within your particular niche, in this case, different varieties of goth style, and below the graph shown above, you can find a breakdown of each by country:
Using this one free tool, Google Trends has now given you an outline of how popular particular trends in clothing are compared to one another, and which subsections of those top styles are most popular broken down by region. However, there’s still quite a bit more that can be done, depending on your business goals.
Example 2: Choosing Your Sale Times
Trends aren’t always going to be widespread changes in the cultural zeitgeist that need to be tracked as erratic shifts in the market. Quite the contrary, trends are often seasonal, providing a consistent pattern that can be tracked yearly and used to plan future goals and events.
For this example, we will use the case of umbrellas and when they are most likely to be searched for by people interested in buying them. In this case, rather than looking up several different items or trends, we will instead be looking up variants of the same keyword:
As you can see, whilst I’m still looking at global trends, I’ve moved from a 12-month view in my previous example to a 5-year view. This will allow us a better look at how patterns repeat.
In this case, global search trends for each of these different umbrella shopping terms drastically rise each year between June and July, with “shop umbrella” (Green) and “buy umbrella” (Red) being the top terms most years. If you were an international umbrella seller, consider increasing your advertising around these periods to get the best return on your investment.
Another interesting trend is that you can see each spike getting a little bit smaller over the years, with a peak in 2022, followed by diminishing numbers in 2023 and 2024, respectively. This shift is more pronounced when looking at specific countries, such as the United States:
Whilst Google Trends won’t provide specifics as to why a trend has changed, it is an important and invaluable data point that you can then match with your own sales data. If, for example, you’ve noticed in recent years that umbrella sales are down, this data would show that this is a larger market shift rather than an individual failing of the business.
This same data can also be used to figure out which products fare better during seasonal events, such as EOFY sales, and Christmas sales. So, if there are trends lasting several years, you can feel more confident in planning ahead for these periods.
Google Trends & SEMRush: A Match Made in Heaven
SEMRush is one of the primary tools in any SEO specialist’s arsenal and has earned a reputation for the invaluable insights it can provide about the market and specifics regarding your domain.
By using SEMRush in tandem with your Google Trends data, you can not only get insights about your industry but you can functionally track how well you’re optimising for those particular terms.
In the example below, I’ve looked up global trends comparing the Apple Watch to the broader smartwatch trends:
Surprisingly, the Apple Watch fares better than Smart Watch, generally speaking. So, if I were a website specifically trying to rank for the highest volume term, I would want to choose Apple Watch as the product I was targeting out of the two. It’s important to note that in a real situation, it would be important to spend time breaking down the comparison between other major smartwatch varieties, but since this is a demonstration, we can use this as our launching point.
Once I have that information, I can then shift over to SEMRush’s Organic Research tool, and look up my website to see how I rank for Apple Watch-related terms. For our example, I’ve looked at the JB HIFI website:
Based on our search for Apple Watch terms in SEMRush for the JB HIFI domain, we can see that they are ranking number 1 for the vast majority of terms associated with the Apple Watch, meaning that they are going to be the top competitor in the space for the chosen country, which is Australia in this case.
We can also see the amount of traffic this site is likely getting from these terms in the final column labelled “Volume”, which is a good benchmark metric for how valuable a particular term would be to rank for.
With all of this information in mind, you can make more informed decisions regarding your plans for these particular keywords. Additionally, you can gain a better understanding of your competitors and what it will likely take to outgrow their presence for these terms.
Work With an SEO Specialist
If you’ve gathered data on your industry and you’re interested in improving your digital presence for a set of key terms, it might be time to look into a digital marketing agency focused on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This will allow you to improve your site’s rankings for these terms and topics, while growing relevant traffic where you need it most.
At WebOracle, we’ve worked with hundreds of businesses providing comprehensive SEO, web development, SEM, content marketing, and more. So, if you’re ready to take the next step with your online presence, speak with our team today.
