4 Ways to Use Google Trends to Grow Online
Its commonly accepted that data is precious. What if I told you that there is a mine of data available for you to access for free? Yes, I am talking about Google Trends ( Did the title give it away? ). In one of my previous posts, 3 Tips to Start a Shopify Store, I spoke about Google Trends. Today, I wanted to show you some great ways of how you can get valuable data to make business decisions. With Google Trends, you can answer questions about the demand for your product, your target location, and what your customers are looking for online.
If you are a small business that is trying to grow online, Google Trends should be your best tool. There are many ways you can use Google Trends, you can search for your SEO Keywords, search for related products/services, and find what the best in your industry are doing. Here are 4 ways I use Google Trends for my own businesses, and I hope they help you.
1: Product Validity & Demand
Google Trends is a great tool to check if there is a demand for your product. A simple search of your product will give you so much information. A key thing to check for any product or service is the demand for it online. With Google Trends, you can get the number of times your product/service was searched with many date filters, starting from 2004 to real-time searches.
Looking at the graph, you can predict when the demand was high for your products. For example, in my business, The House Slippes, there is a surge in search for house slippers from December to March.
2: Demand Location
When you search for your product on Google Trends, there are many filters you can apply to your search. The most helpful one after the timeframe is the location filter. With the location filter, you can search based on city, province, country and more.
Let us now move our focus from the filter and on to the data. The data from the location filter is excellent for Search Engine Optimization, Facebook Ads and Google Ads. If finding your target location is tough for you, then you can use the data from Google Trends. You can add the top areas your product was searched as your target location on your ads.
3: Compare Product
Do you have two products in mind that you want to sell online, but you are not sure which one to pursue? Then let data answer that question for you. You can search for up to five separate products on google trends and compare which one has a higher demand.
By seeing the demand for each product clearly highlighted, you could predict which one will sell more. It is imperative to see that the demand is not only increasing because of a fad.
4: Customer Demographics
Okay, this one requires a bit of work. But the data in Google Trends will save you a lot of time and work. When you search for your product/service, use the location filter and change it to the city. This will give you the top cities that are looking for your product online. With the data, you can now go to open data to get some demographics and census of the people in the region.
Every time I wanted to learn more about a product/service in the past, I have heavily relied on data from Google Trends. One of my favourite features is the ability to compare up to 5 search terms at once. Google Trends has helped me predict trends and understand how things have changed over the years. I would like to add that, to accurate and focused results, you need to spend more time and capital on the right tools. But as humans, we tend to forget the ones that come free to us. Google Trends is a great tool to get started while growing online. It gives a basic understanding of where your business stands and what your customers looking for.